White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan on Monday spoke openly -- and at great length -- about what has long been one of the government’s most controversial official secrets:  the use of remotely piloted drones to kill suspected terrorists.

In doing so, he became the first U.S. government official to acknowledge that the drone strikes sometimes kill innocent people, though he characterized such deaths as  “exceedingly rare.” But a new analysis by an independent Washington think tank estimates that more than 300 civilians have been killed by drones since President Barack Obama took office.

In a major speech on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death during a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by U.S. Navy SEALs, Brennan proclaimed that al-Qaida is now "on the path to its destruction."  But the headline was what he had to say about the drone program — long a forbidden subject for senior U.S. officials  — and how the U.S. government uses it.

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“The United States conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones,” said Brennan, in his speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington, D.C., foreign policy think tank.  

While it has been openly reported in the press for years, the use by the CIA of pilotless drones to kill members of al-Qaida has long been officially classified,  prompting government officials to talk obliquely about “lethal operations” and “removal” of terrorists. They have done so even as Obama has dramatically escalated the number of such attacks and made them the central component of the administration’s counterterrorism efforts.

One U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told NBC News that the speech represents “a pretty big sea change for us” in terms of what officials will now be permitted to talk about. But the official said that while Brennan’s speech had been carefully vetted throughout the U.S. intelligence and national security community, there had been no formal declassification of the drone program. “The president can declassify anything he wants,” said the official, adding that Brennan – as the representative of the president — can speak about anything his boss wants him to discuss.   

Under Obama, there have been an estimated 250 drone strikes in northwest Pakistan that have killed as many as 2,345 people, according to an analysis by the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank that closely tracks the program. Such strikes have generated a storm of protest in Pakistan and stepped up demands by the Pakistani government to halt them.   

In what he described as an effort to be more open with the American people, Brennan on Monday described an elaborate process under which senior government officials select targets for drone strikes. They must first determine whether a prospective target is a bona fide member of al-Qaida or “associated forces” and poses a “significant threat” to U.S. interests.  The “lethal action” strikes are not used for “punishing terrorists for past crimes” or “seeking vengeance.” Instead, they are used to “stop plots” and “prevent future attacks,” citing as one example, targeting individuals  who possess “unique operational skills.”

Read more reporting by Michael Isikoff in 'The Isikoff Files'

Brennan  said the use of drones gives U.S. intelligence agencies the ability to use “laser-like” precision against the terrorists. But he acknowledged that "innocent civilians have been killed in these strikes." He said such instances have been "exceedingly rare, but it has happened.

“When it does, it pains us and we regret it deeply, as we do any time innocents are killed in war," he added. 

That passage of his speech alone was significant. In June 2011, Brennan said that in the previous year of operations in the government’s then-unspecified program to eliminate al-Qaida members, “There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”   

Brennan later changed that statement in response to questions by the New York Times, spurred in part by  reports about a May 6 strike in Pakistan that  hit a religious school, an adjourning restaurant and a house, killing 18 people. Although 12 militants were allegedly killed, British and Pakistani journalists on the scene reported that six civilians also died in the strike.

In Brennan’s adjusted statement last year, he said, “Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq.”

Brennan did not give any details on Monday about how rare civilian deaths have been. But according to the analysis by the New America Foundation, which relies heavily on local media and other reports from observers in Pakistan, about 17 percent of those who have been killed by drones since the program effectively began in 2004 were “non-militants.”  The foundation estimated that the  “non-military fatality rate” has since dropped to about 13 percent under Obama – as drone strikes have become more frequent and more precise.

Those numbers translate to 471 civilian deaths, including 309 under Obama.

Human rights groups — who have challenged the administration to be more open about its drone program — were not satisfied with the new details provided by Brennan’s speech.

“It is not enough that care is taken to avoid harm to innocent civilians,” said Raha Wala, an official with Human Rights First. “Brennan's assertion that any 'member' of al-Qaida or 'associated forces' is legally targetable is wrong. Under the laws of armed conflict, only members of the enemy's armed forces, or those directly participating in hostilities or who perform a continuous combat function, may be targeted.”

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ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan -- A year after Osama bin Laden was found and killed in Pakistan, one key question has yet to be answered: how did the world's most wanted man manage to move and live, undetected, in this country for so long?

Journalists, analysts, and others have been working to fill in the narrative holes over the last 12 months. Leaked and strategically released nuggets of information have helped to paint a vague picture of what life was like inside the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden spent his final years, living with three of his wives, and several children and grandchildren. We've learned of the austere conditions inside the home, the restricted lifestyle led by all inside, and the discipline with which the head of al-Qaida communicated with a trusted few. But the crucial questions -- how he got to that compound in the first place and who helped him to do so -- remain unanswered.

Kamran Bokhari, vice-president for Middle Eastern and South Asian Affairs at Stratfor, a global intelligence company, believes the idea that bin Laden moved around without a network of individuals organizing his transportation and logistics is simply not possible.

"If you're a six-foot-five Arab, and the most wanted man on the planet, you can't just walk into a place like Pakistan without support," Bokhari said. "So what's the nature of that support?"

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U.S. officials publicly state they have no evidence that any Pakistani institutional leaders had any knowledge of bin Laden's presence here, nor played any role in helping to move him. Privately, however, some admit that the deep mistrust between the two nations has led to strong, lingering suspicions within many in the U.S. that Pakistan's premier intelligence agency -- Inter-Services Intelligence, or the ISI -- must have known, at some level.

"There are deep suspicions on both sides," says retired General Mahmud Ali Durrani, a former national security advisor and ambassador to the United States. "I think the biggest concern in the U.S., if I put it in a phrase, is that Pakistan is hunting with the hounds and running with the hares. That is the perception."

Panetta recalls nail-biting moments of bin Laden raid

That perception has not been helped by what seem to be Pakistan's action priorities over the last year. The prevailing public dialogue among military and government officials in the immediate raid aftermath focused on how the U.S. had managed to breach Pakistan's borders, not how bin Laden had. The Pakistani doctor who ran a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad for the CIA in an effort to secure DNA samples from inside the bin Laden compound was swiftly tracked down, arrested, and remains in detention, possibly to stand trial for treason. Authorities quietly began work after dark to demolish the compound in February, keeping press behind a security cordon half a mile away, and after a year in custody, the widows and their families were shuttled out of their house in the dead of night and deported to Saudi Arabia.

Pakistan did immediately launch a formal commission with wide-reaching powers soon after the raid, pledging to investigate both the U.S. border breach and bin Laden's presence here. The Abbottabad Commission, as it's come to be known here, has enjoyed unparalleled access to anyone and everyone associated directly or peripherally with either issue, interviewing over 100 witnesses over the last year, including bin Laden's widows, the detained doctor who worked for the CIA, and high-level Pakistani officials.  But there is no working deadline and expectations vary as to how blunt and definitive an account commission members will be able to put forth.

"Given how previous commissions in Pakistan have behaved, I'm not really hopeful that much will come out of this," Bokhari said. "This is not like the 9/11 Commission or anything similar elsewhere in other countries where there's a process and transparency and rule of law."

'Embarrassment'
Durrani, who's been in touch with members of the commission, says the length of time it's taken for them to compile findings speaks to their determination to fulfill their mandate to the best of their ability.

"If the report comes out tomorrow and it's a whitewash, then people will ask -- what have you done?" Durrani said. "They [the commission members] are keen to get to the bottom of this, to find out what happened, why it happened, who's at fault, and what needs to be done so we don't have such embarrassment and such issues in the future."

Driving the investigators' query is a widely-held belief here in Pakistan that bin Laden was never here at all -- that the entire raid was an effort by the U.S. to defame and destabilize Pakistan's security establishment. Residents of Abbottabad with whom NBC News spoke reiterated that skepticism, saying they don't believe the U.S. claim that bin Laden was living in their midst, particularly in the absence of any evidence of his death.

Low expectations
Commission members have been reluctant to speak with the media until their findings are complete, but the head of the commission, retired Supreme Court Judge Javed Iqbal, confirmed to NBC News that one of the key issues his team is investigating is whether bin Laden was ever really here at all.

PhotoBlog: Abbottabad -- One year after Osama bin Laden raid

Despite low expectations for the pending report, Bokhari admits the commission is tasked with an enormously difficult job, one that will have repercussions for generations to come in the form of Pakistan's official narrative of this historic event.

"This is the biggest event in recent history since the fall of the Soviet Union -- 9/11 and its impact, the killing of Osama bin Laden -- so I'm not surprised it's taken them this long to come up with a report," Bokhari said. "It may take decades before anybody can actually come up with a comprehensive view of what was really happening."

 

The few specifics that have emerged from Pakistan in the last year in effect lead to more questions officials here must attempt to answer, through the commission or otherwise.

The U.S. moved quickly on the message-control front after the Abbottabad raid, releasing selective video clips and pieces of information from the "treasure trove" of evidence seized from bin Laden's compound. An NBC News team was given an exclusive briefing by a senior U.S. counterterrorism official on currently classified intelligence from the raid, including details of the role bin Laden played in al-Qaida from his hideout in Pakistan, who he was in touch with, and more on the life he lived within that compound. Those details will air on Discovery Channel on Tuesday as part of a one-hour special on the anniversary of the U.S. raid.

But the details from within Pakistan have been few and far between. A rare piece of evidence -- a confidential interrogation report of bin Laden's youngest wife, Amal, obtained by NBC News -- did reveal some surprising details about the family's life on the run after the attacks of September 11.

According to the report, Amal told investigators that the family scattered after 9/11, bouncing from house to house and place to place in Pakistan. In her complicated timeline, she moved across multiple residences in the southern mega-city of Karachi, then moved on to Peshawar to link up with her husband. From there, the family moved to Swat, then to Haripur, and finally settled in the Abbottabad home for about six years until the U.S. raid that killed her husband.

"These people are fanatics. They're ideological but keep in mind that they are also very professional at what they do," Bokhari explained. "They're in a business where if you make a small error in judgment it can easily translate to death for many people. There are people waiting for you to make a mistake. You have to be highly disciplined."

Co-conspirators?
But the pace of movement believed to have been followed by bin Laden and his family -- traversing entire provinces in Pakistan, and including rural, tribal, settled, and urban areas while remaining completely undetected -- would be difficult without some sort of network of support. Current and former Pakistani officials and analysts have offered up the possibility of "rogue or retired" elements from within Pakistan's military or intelligence establishment as possible facilitators or co-conspirators helping to hide bin Laden.

The nature of Pakistan's retired uniformed corps, many of whom stay involved with the work of the agencies long after they leave as the new leadership continues to make use of their experience and contacts, albeit in unofficial capacities and with limited authority. As the largest employer in Pakistan, it follows that the Pakistan army also has the largest pool of retirees, some of whom spent significant time working closely with and gaining the trust of jihadi groups in the 1980s and 1990s.

"If it's a retired network of people, what I call the 'Pakistani Blackwater,' that's not that bad. It's bad, but not that bad," Bokhari said. "But if it's someone who's serving, or more than one person, then [Pakistan's leaders] have a leak in [their] system and that's terrifying. Anyone who's a very nationalistic, Pakistani leader who doesn't want al-Qaida or the CIA to be able to get into their house will want to get to the bottom of that."

Bin Laden's widow's condition worsens, brother says

As potentially worrying or damaging as some of the information in the commission's report may be for Pakistan's institutions, it is also widely believed that the organizations cannot survive without taking a hard look at their own potential faults, and admitting mistakes where they did occur. The military and intelligence establishments were already raked over the coals by the government and media after last year's raid in Abbottabad, and are now under the highest level of scrutiny in the country's history.

A failure, at this point, to produce a credible, official version of events will only damage Pakistan, according to Durrani.

"Pakistan wants to move forwards not backwards. They have to get to the bottom of this, in their own interest," he says. "If they don't, it will be another major issue buried in the sands of history. And people will forever be looking for answers."

NBC's Fakhar Rehman contributed to this report from Abbottabad.

By Myron Levin, Lilly Fowler and Stuart Silverstein
FairWarning.org

Robert J. Barnhart was a crew chief for a billboard company, and a soldier in a war on trees.

Trees were the enemy if they spoiled the view of a billboard. On days of an attack, Barnhart, 27, would arrive by dawn at Lamar Advertising Co. in Tallahassee, Fla. After removing the magnetic Lamar logo from a company truck, he would set forth with a machete, a hospital mask and a container of what he described as a "pretty gnarly" herbicide.

It was all about being fast: Hack into the roots or base of the tree, douse the wound with herbicide, and get out of there. The Lamar executive who gave the orders, said Barnhart, called it "a hit and run."

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Barnhart’s account, detailed in court papers and in statements to investigators, is the focus of a criminal investigation. It also is the basis for a whistleblower suit in which Barnhart, who through his lawyer declined to be interviewed, maintains that he was fired because he would not keep poisoning trees. His claims are supported by sworn testimony from Barnhart’s former supervisor, Chris Oaks, who admitted that he, too, had illegally poisoned trees before Barnhart took over in 2009 as poisoner-in-chief.

As long as there have been billboards, trees have been getting in the way. And billboard companies have been removing them — sometimes legally, sometimes not. News archives are replete with accounts of mysterious tree disappearances near billboard sites. Usually, no one gets caught, due to lack of evidence or to officials failing to aggressively pursue those responsible.

Fewer trees means more viewing time for motorists, and more money for billboard operators. A 500- foot clearance in front of a sign creates more than five seconds of viewing time for a motorist going 60 mph.

It’s uncertain if the Tallahassee tree-poisonings were isolated, or reflect a pattern at Lamar. The Baton Rouge, La., company has nearly 150,000 billboards, more than any other U.S. outdoor advertising firm.

Barnhart and Oaks said they acted under orders from Lamar’s former regional manager, Myron A. "Chip" LaBorde, who ran company operations in Florida and Georgia and was past president of the Florida Outdoor Advertising Association LaBorde died of pancreatic cancer last summer.

Hal Kilshaw, a Lamar vice president and chief spokesman, declined to discuss the criminal investigation, but said "cutting of trees or poisoning of trees without the required permits would be contrary to company policy."

Charges in the tree-poisoning case could be filed soon. Meanwhile, another tree-killing binge in the Florida panhandle has also drawn attention. In that episode, billboard operator Bill Salter Outdoor Advertising cleared more than 2,000 trees from public rights of way to enhance views of its signs.

Florida transportation officials acted "in flagrant violation of the law" in issuing permits for the cutting, a grand jury found in January, because, among other things, they did not require Salter to compensate the state for the loss of the trees, valued at $1 million to $4 million. The permits were issued to Salter after a state legislator, Greg Evers, intervened by making calls to the state Department of Transportation. The agency is currently negotiating with Salter for repayment.

Tree pruning also happens routinely, and legally, by arrangement between billboard operators and private landowners. The industry has lobbied for state laws to allow tree-cutting along public highways under certain conditions. According to the Outdoor Advertising Assn. of America, the industry trade group, 29 states, including Florida, have "reasonable" regulations on clearing vegetation that blocks views of signs. The group says on its website: "The OAAA discourages vegetation control that is not in compliance with state and local laws and regulations."

However, environmental groups have criticized these laws, asking why publicly owned trees that provide beauty and shade should be removed to accommodate advertising signs. Though billboard companies pay for the cutting, critics say permit fees and compensation for destroyed trees do not meet the real cost to taxpayers. Moreover, they note, in states that permit vegetation removal, illegal cutting still takes place.

Lamar’s Kilshaw said his company’s record is good. "We have over 150 offices, we have thousands of employees, we’ve been in business over 100 years," he said. The record shows Lamar is "doing the right thing almost all the time, almost everywhere."

'An honest, legitimate mistake'
In 2008, Lamar was sued by the state of Connecticut after the company and a tree service trespassed on state land and removed 83 trees along Interstate 84, including oak, spruce, maple and birch trees up to 37 inches in diameter. They "swept a swath of destruction," said then-Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, "obliterating a vital environmental buffer protecting homeowners from noxious noise and views."

The problem was that Lamar had a permit to trim — not cut down — trees. It also felled trees outside the permitted area.

It was "an honest, legitimate mistake," Kilshaw said, adding that a state transportation official had observed the work without raising objections. But a judge found Lamar liable in October, 2010. In lieu of paying damages, Lamar agreed to fund a replanting program for an estimated $181,000.

In 2009, Lamar was forced to pay about $182,000 to an irate Ohio couple for illegally felling 34 trees on their property to improve views of a sign.

The dispute began in the late 1990s when, according to John Blust, he and his wife rebuffed Lamar’s offer to plant a sign on land they owned in the Dayton suburb of Beavercreek.

A neighbor proved more obliging, and the billboard went up there. But it turned out that the Blusts’ trees were in the way. They lived a few miles from the property, and did not learn of the destruction of their woodland until alerted by a cousin.

Blust told FairWarning that he sought compensation, and "If they had sent me $3,000, it would have been all over." But a Lamar executive "laughed at me over the phone from Baton Rouge, Louisiana," said Blust, who then decided to sue.

A jury awarded the Blusts more than $2.2 million in punitive damages. Appeals dragged the marathon case into 2009, when an appeals court ruling led to Lamar paying damages and attorney fees.

"In that case, our contractor made a mistake," Kilshaw said, "and simply went across a property line, and we ultimately paid on that."

For his part, Blust, 76, said he was "satisfied that I caused them pain. Did we make a lasting impression on the management of Lamar? If they’re still cutting down trees, I guess we didn’t."

What is unusual about these episodes is that someone got caught. More often, over the years, the culprits remained unknown or were not aggressively pursued by authorities.

For example, a 1985 report by the General Accounting Office cited dozens of incidents in Georgia of illegal tree cutters acting with impunity, including a case in which about 500 trees were poisoned near three signs along interstate highways.

In Louisiana, said the GAO, "over 2,000 feet of vegetation and trees were cut and cleared to enhance the visibility of two signs. We counted over 900 stumps from destroyed trees at this site."

In a 1996 deposition, a former billboard company tree trimmer testified that he had cut down and poisoned trees in the Los Angeles area for many years, usually without the owners’ consent. The former employee, Fred Jackson, worked until the late 1980s for two large billboard companies, Foster & Kleiser and Patrick Media, that eventually merged and were absorbed by Clear Channel Outdoor.

Jackson said he occasionally was confronted about what he was doing, and would make up a lie. It might be "‘I’m working for the Edison Company,’" Jackson testified. "That was a great one."

More recently, illegal tree clearing near billboards and "supergraphics’’ — giant ads draped on buildings — has been a problem in Southern California, said Dan Freeman, an official with the state Department of Transportation, or Caltrans.

"The billboard industry — well, my impression of them is they’re kind of lawless," said Freeman, Caltrans’ deputy director of maintenance for Los Angeles and Ventura counties. "They pretty much do whatever they want."

"We’ve been victim a number of times to people who come in the middle of the night, with a chainsaw, and just kind of clear cut the area immediately in front of one of these supergraphics or a large billboard," Freeman told FairWarning.

"And, of course, we call them," Freeman said, referring to the sign company, "and they say, ‘We have no idea who could have done it. My, what a terrible thing.’ They don’t own up to it. We have had a very, very difficult time in getting traction on prosecuting them."

The right to be seen
Billboard companies have sometimes claimed an inherent right to have unimpaired views of their signs. If revenues go down because of public trees, they have argued, public agencies should pay damages. This has been a hard sell.

For example, a Tennessee appeals court rejected an industry lawsuit against the state department of transportation over its failure to maintain unrestricted views of roadside signs.

"It is true that wild vegetation, as well as that planted by the State, has and will have a normal tendency to grow taller," said the 1979 ruling. "Plaintiffs seem to insist that the licensing of a billboard confers some special right of visibility or imposes some special duty upon the State to maintain visibility of the licensed billboard. No authority has been cited or found to sustain this novel theory."

In 2006, the California Supreme Court rejected claims of billboard operator Regency Outdoor, which had sued the city of Los Angeles, claiming it lowered the value of its signs by planting palm trees for a beautification project.

"The right to be seen from a public way…simply does not exist," the Supreme Court ruled. "Regency cannot claim unfair surprise from the plantings. Local governments have long planted trees along roads for aesthetic reasons, to lessen the burdens of climate, and for other salubrious purposes."

So the industry has turned to state legislatures to establish the right to be seen. Under laws or regulations of most states, billboard operators can legally cut back trees and other vegetation along state and federal highways. Typically, they must pay for a permit, file a work plan, and either replant or pay for lost trees.

The Outdoor Advertising Assn. of America failed to respond to interview requests, but in an email described vegetation control as "a common, longstanding practice along roadways for the sake of safety and visibility."

Once state rules are in place, billboard companies often lobby state legislatures to relax restrictions and expand the freedom to cut. In the past year, for example, the industry pushed through such changes in Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

In Georgia billboard companies won more freedom to clear trees, though the new law is tied up in a court challenge. The industry’s legislative success followed years of cultivating lawmakers. From 2001 through 2010, billboard owners and the Outdoor Advertising Association of Georgia contributed at least $467,522 to candidates for state office, according to a report by the advocacy group Scenic Georgia.

The Outdoor Advertising Association also did some wining and dining, last year hosting 34 Georgia legislators and two board members of the state Department of Transportation at a golf outing at the Reynolds Plantation resort, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

A Georgia Department of Transportation spokeswoman said that in the past five years, the agency has completed investigations into 20 complaints of illegal tree cutting, and collected about $203,000 in compensation.

In North Carolina, the industry-backed law passed last July expanded the cutting area to up to 380 feet on each side of billboards — up from 250 feet before. This translates into extra viewing time of 1.5 seconds for motorists approaching billboards at 60 mph. State transportation officials estimated that up to 200,000 trees could be removed in the next five years as a result.

From 2005 through June, 2011, billboard interests donated at least $206,000 to state legislative and gubernatorial candidates in North Carolina, according to a report by the nonprofit group Democracy North Carolina, and research by FairWarning.

"They’ve got a lot of money, and it’s amazing how cheaply legislators can be bought," said North Carolina resident Charles Floyd, a retired University of Georgia business professor who has written extensively about the billboard industry and is critical of the new law.

Even in states such as North Carolina that provide a legal means to enhance billboard views, incidents of illegal cutting and poisoning still occur. In some respects, loosening restrictions is the path of least resistance, reducing the number of violations and need for enforcement.

"If you legalize vandalism,’’ Floyd complained, "that helps out a lot.’’

Since July, 2006, the North Carolina Department of Transportation recorded 88 incidents of illegal tree removal near billboards, according to agency data reviewed by FairWarning.

The cost to the state was $923,000 under a formula based on the size of lost trees. Of that amount, records show, the state was able to collect only about $39,000. Without admitting liability, Lamar paid $18,487.50 to settle one of the cases.

Criminal probe in Florida
Soon after Barnhart filed his whistleblower suit, he led state agriculture officials to an oak tree he claimed he had poisoned next to a CVS pharmacy in Tallahassee. When the lab results came back in October, they revealed a herbicide, Triclopyr, in soil and vegetation samples.

He told officials it was one of seven to 10 trees he had illegally poisoned since 2009. Sometimes, he said, he used a machete before pouring in the poison, other times drilled holes in a tree, and on still other occasions he simply cut them.

Barnhart has been granted immunity by the state attorney in Tallahassee. Asked to comment on the criminal probe, State Attorney William Meggs said his office is continuing to gather information.

In a deposition taken in the whistleblower case, Chris Oaks, Barnhart’s supervisor, confirmed Barnhart’s account. Oaks admitted to poisoning trees himself under orders from his boss, LaBorde.

Oaks, 35, claimed he initially balked, saying he thought Lamar must first get permits.

"And he told me, he said to just jump over the fence and do what needs to be done and kick a little dirt over it," Oaks testified, referring to LaBorde, "and if you don’t know how to do that, I’ll take out my gun and I’ll shoot you in the head."

Oaks said he figured LaBorde was joking. But "I felt then that I needed to do what the man was telling me for fear — not for death, I didn’t really think he would kill me, but I did feel like it was threatening to my job," Oaks said.

"I just want to get it clear that none of this was me," Oaks said. "I did not want to do any of this."

Barnhart said fear of getting caught on a surveillance camera and, according to his lawyer, pressure from his wife led him to come forward. Barnhart said that after suffering a back injury and going on light duty, he told managers that he would no longer poison trees when he came back. In August, he says, he was fired.

Lamar contends it never fired Barnhart. The company’s response is less clear cut on the other alleged violations, such as criminal mischief and illegal handling of poisons.

"Any act or omission by Lamar was done in good faith," the company said in court papers. "To the extent that the actions of any Lamar employee were, in fact, in violation…, those actions directly violated Lamar’s corporate policies and procedures and were, thus, beyond the course and scope of their employment."

FairWarning is a nonprofit, online investigative news organization focused on public health and safety issues.

Support for this story came from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

North Korea could carry out an underground test of a nuclear weapon as early as Tuesday night as the North's reclusive leadership dramatically tries to up the stakes with the U.S. and the West, U.S. officials told NBC News.

U.S. officials say North Korea may already have an arsenal between 12 and a "few dozen" far more advanced weapons, many more than generally believed.

The officials couldn't be specific on a date for the test, but they told NBC News they were "100 percent" certain there would be a nuclear test within the next two weeks or "at any time."

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Tensions between North and South Korea increased this week when Pyongyang threatened to turn Seoul into "ashes." While the North regularly issues such threats, the South seemed to be taking this round of threats more seriously by increasing its security.

U.S. and South Korean intelligence agencies have been monitoring test preparations at P'unggye-yok, the North Korean test site near the Chinese border, for the past several weeks. As new evidence of tunneling emerged, officials began to see Army Day celebrations scheduled for Wednesday (Tuesday night in the U.S.) as a possible date for the test.

It will be the first time the country's 29-year-old leader, Kim Jong Un, will get a chance to address the Korean People's Army as commander.

At the high end of the range, U.S. officials and other researchers said, North Korea may already have up to "a few dozen" nuclear weapons that could be fitted atop its vast fleet of ballistic missiles. Currently, North Korean missiles are limited to an intermediate range, capable of hitting cities in Japan or South Korea but not the United States. What the new test could reveal is an improvement in the type of weapons North Korea has.

For the past several years, the U.S. has been monitoring North Korean research into thermonuclear weapons, hydrogen bombs and bombs known as boosted fission weapons, in which plutonium and uranium are combined.

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, or ISIS, a nonpartisan nuclear arms research group, said Tuesday that the tests may also be about ensuring the reliability of North Korea's current weapons design.

"Once you get beyond a dozen, it makes sense to test type and reliability of your weapons," he said.

Watch the most-viewed videos on msnbc.com

Albright said that his group's estimate of North Korea's weapons stockpile is a bit less than those provided by the U.S. officials but that ISIS, too, believes Pyongyang has "missile-deliverable weapons."

North Korea successfully tested nuclear weapons in 2006 and 2009. In both cases, the first word came in statements from the North Korean Foreign Ministry hours before the tests were carried out. No such statement has been issued yet, but a U.S. official said it's possible that this time North Korea wouldn't follow the same protocol.

Watch the Top Videos on msnbc.com

Ten days ago, North Korea failed in its attempt to launch an observation satellite, a test the U.S. believed was a cover for test of intercontinental missile technology. In response, the U.S. canceled an agreement that would have provided 241,000 tons of nutritional aid, while the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to "strongly condemn" the failed launch and said it would tighten sanctions against Pyongyang's government.

Albright added that North Korea might not want to test its weapons to their full yield in order to avoid another embarrassment, noting that the geology around the test site is fragile and that a large test could aggravate that issue.

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More Secret Service agents allegedly involved in last week’s prostitution scandal in Colombia are expected to resign amid the continuing investigation of the incident in advance of President Barack Obama’s visit to the Latin American country, a congressional source with knowledge of the case tells NBC News. 

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the exact number of resignations that would be announced as early as Thursday afternoon was not clear. 

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Word that more resignations are pending comes a day after Secret Service spokesman Paul Morrissey announced that three of the 11 employees suspended in connection with the scandal were leaving the agency -- a supervisory employee who was allowed to retire, a second supervisory employee who was listed for "removal for cause" and a non-supervisory employee who resigned. Eight other agency employees remain on administrative leave without their security clearances, Morrissey said.

CBS News reported Thursday that one of those three is planning a lawsuit after being forced to leave the agency, quoting an unidentified congressional source briefed on the matter.

Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan has told lawmakers that the 11 agents and 10 U.S. military personnel also implicated in the scandal have given conflicting stories about the incident, in which they were accused of partying with as many as 20 prostitutes at a legal brothel in Cartagena least week. The incident, which reportedly ended with at least some of them bringing prostitutes back to their hotel, became public only after one of the prostitutes complained that one of the agents refused to pay her the agreed-upon amount.

The special agents and uniformed officers of the Secret Service and other military personnel were in Colombia in advance of Obama's arrival for the Summit of the Americas.

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An American citizen who alleges that he was detained and tortured overseas at the behest of the U.S. government — and is now marooned as a result of the U.S. no-fly list — has filed for political asylum in Sweden, he announced with his lawyers on Wednesday.

Yonas Fikre, 33, says he spent more than three months in a Dubai detention center in 2011. In a lengthy Skype interview with msnbc.com, he described sleeping on the concrete floor of a frigid jail cell, and enduring regular interrogation, beatings and stress positions that caused him to collapse or black out.

He was released in September, he says, but is just now going public with his story.

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Fikre’s ordeal took place outside the United States — far from his home in Portland, Ore. — but he and his American lawyer say they believe it was orchestrated by the FBI in connection with an investigation in Portland. And they maintain that Fikre’s inclusion on the no-fly list — which bars him from boarding U.S.-bound flights — has been used as a tool to coerce information, not because he presents a risk to U.S. flights.

"There is a practice and policy by the FBI to gratuitously deny the rights of American Muslims, particularly naturalized immigrant Muslims when they want to get more information," said Thomas Nelson, a Portland attorney representing Fikre. "In the case of Mr. Fikre …  we believe and will allege that they also engaged in torture by proxy. This is shocking. This is a dark day for America."

Limited scope of no-fly list
The government, citing security reasons, will not say why any individual is on the no-fly list or even confirm that they are included. However, the names are rigorously screened and regularly reviewed, according to a spokesman at the Terrorist Screening Center, a division of the FBI that maintains watch lists.

The Department of Justice reviewed Fikre’s case in response to a complaint from Nelson on behalf of Fikre and two others clients on the no-fly list, and said that it did not find cause for action.

"Based on our review, we have concluded that no action by this Office is warranted," said a letter from the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility dated March 28. “We are referring your correspondence to the FBI’s inspection division for whatever action it deems appropriate."

Security experts say the intent of the no-fly list is quite limited — to protect U.S. aviation from attack.

"Its principal purpose is to keep certain people who have been identified off of U.S. airlines. …  It doesn’t involve arresting people," said Brian Michael Jenkins, senior adviser to the president of the Rand Corp., a security think tank, and former member of the White House commission on aviation safety and security. "It is not a fugitive list."

He said it would not be surprising if law enforcers used getting off the no-fly list as an inducement for recruiting informants, but it would be considered an abuse if they were included on the list in order to pressure them.

The FBI office in Portland said it could not discuss specifics of the case, due to protections provided to Americans by the U.S. Privacy Act.

"I can tell you that the FBI trains its agents very specifically and very thoroughly about what is acceptable under U.S. law," said Beth Anne Steele, spokeswoman for the FBI Portland field office. "To do anything counter to that training is counterproductive — we risk legal liability and potentially losing a criminal case in court."

The problem for Fikre and others is that there is no way to dispute the information that put them on the list in the first place.

Nelson says Fikre’s ordeal fits a pattern among Muslim Americans, including several clients, who discover they are on the no-fly list while they are out of the United States — and are then  asked to submit to questioning, with no access to legal counsel, in return for their travel rights.

Related reporting from msnbc.com

• No-fly Americans split up for return home
• Bittersweet homecoming for American caught in no-fly limbo
• No-fly Muslim takes case to court of public opinion

Far-flung FBI encounter
In April 2010 Fikre was in Sudan, where he arrived several months earlier to set up a trading company. He was summoned to the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, he says, ostensibly to attend a luncheon with other Americans to be briefed on security amid election-related turmoil in the country. But when he arrived Fikre was instead met with a grilling by two men who identified themselves as FBI agents from Portland, according to his account.

In a session lasting three to four hours, Fikre says, the two men questioned him about people and activities at As-Saber Mosque,  where he prays back in Portland. They asked about the imam and people who attend the mosque, the content of sermons and meetings and even details about the layout of the building.

Fikre says they made it clear that they wanted him to go back to Portland as an FBI informant in an unspecified investigation.

Fikre says  that when he told the men he didn’t want to work for the FBI, they countered by asking, "Don't you love your family? Don't you want to make real money?"  They also indicated that if he worked for them, they could help him get off of the "no fly" list — which he says was a surprise because this meeting was the first he had heard that his name was on the no-fly list.

The details of this conversation could not be verified. However, Fikre has an email that he says came from one of the men, David Noordeloos, after Fikre refused a second meeting: "Thanks for meeting with us last week in Sudan,” it says. “While we hope to get your side of issues we keep hearing about, the choice is yours to make. The time to help yourself is now." Fikre said he considered this communication a threat.

Fikre says he chose Sudan as a business destination because his family had lived there when he was a child, after fleeing civil war in Eritrea. In 1991 his immediate family immigrated to the United States and later became citizens, but he still has relatives in Sudan. He says the agents told him couldn’t do business in Sudan due to U.S. sanctions, so he made his way to the United Arab Emirates, where he had a friend, and started over.

Lost to the world
But on June 1, 2011, in Abu Dhabi, Fikre was arrested by non-uniformed secret police, blindfolded and taken to a secret state security prison with no explanation, according to Fikre’s account.

Day after day under detention in the UAE city, he said, he was interrogated about events and people in Portland, especially those in the As-Saber mosque and its imam — answering many of the very same questions posed by the FBI agents a year earlier, he says, but in even greater detail.

He says  that in a particularly brutal session, the prison interrogators prodded him to talk about a new case that was unfolding in Portland — that of Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, who had been arrested in late 2010 by the Portland FBI in a sting operation for an attempted bombing at a crowded Christmas tree lighting ceremony.  

Fikre  says he told his questioners he didn’t know Mohamud but recognized the younger man in news reports as a member of As-Saber Mosque. He says he knew nothing of Mohamud’s ideology or plans.

For about 10 weeks, Fikre says, he felt he was lost to the world.

He was in held in solitary confinement in a frigid cell without bedding, he says, subjected to bright lights, stress positions, sleep deprivation and beatings around his head, chest, soles of his feet and hands, and threatened with strangulation.

Fikre's captors urged him to work for the FBI and told him that if he agreed to do so he would be freed, according to his account. When Fikre suggested that the UAE interrogators were working for the FBI, they beat him more severely, he says.

Consular visit
Three weeks after Fikre went missing, Nelson, the Portland attorney, launched a search on behalf of worried relatives, contacting officials in the UAE and the U.S. State Department. On July 27, the U.S. Embassy located Fikre and said he was being detained by the UAE State Security Department, email records show.

The next day, a U.S. Embassy staffer was allowed to meet with Fikre.

But Fikre says that the UAE prison officials who also attended the meeting had warned him in advance not to discuss his poor treatment or face further punishment. They also promised that if he cooperated, he would be released within days.

During the meeting Fikre says he tried to subtly signal that he was in trouble, according to his account. But he says the U.S. representative, a woman named Marwa, did not appear to pick up on those signals.

"Mr. Fikre was reported to be in good spirits and did not report any issues of maltreatment," according to an email message from a communications officer at the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi to the office of Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon congressman who had aided Nelson’s inquiries about the case.  The message, obtained by msnbc.com noted that the embassy understood Fikre was not charged with any crime and should be released soon.

Fikre’s incarceration, questioning and abuse continued for nearly seven weeks after that meeting, he says. There were no more visits from the consulate.

He was finally released on Sept. 14, and — because he could not board a flight to the United States – he went to Sweden, where he is staying with a relative while Swedish officials review his request  for asylum.

"I used to take great pride in being an American," Fikre said. "I believed that I have a very powerful country that will take care of me no matter where I am. … (Now) I feel like a second-class citizen or not even a citizen. I didn’t get any help from my government."

Fikre and Nelson say they believe the Sudan meeting and the detention were arranged by the FBI to bolster its investigation and prosecution of Mohamud, the would-be Christmas tree bomber.

How names get put on the no-fly list

The FBI had been tracking Mohamud since he was about 16, because of email communications that officials say expressed his desire to pursue violent jihad, according to an affidavit for his arrest.

Sting operation
An undercover FBI agent first made contact with Mohamud in June 2010 in the sting operation that led to his arrest in November.

On Nov. 26, 2010, apparently believing he had connected with Islamic extremists, Mohamud allegedly drove a car he believed contained explosives to a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland and then attempted to detonate it with a cellphone. The explosives and the detonator were fakes supplied by the FBI, which then swept in and arrested him.

Mohamud's trial, scheduled to begin in October, is expected to be a battle over entrapment — whether the sting operation averted a deadly attack or provoked action on the part of a disillusioned young man.

Fikre is one of several Portland Muslims —all of whom sometimes pray at As-Saber Mosque –  stranded overseas in recent months by the no-fly list. Jamal Tarhuni, 55, and Mustafa Elogbi, 60, both longtime U.S. citizens, were able to return home from trips to Libya only with the intervention of lawyers. They too say they were pursued by Portland FBI agents for questioning while in North Africa.

The men were reunited with their families in Portland but remain on the no-fly list. In Tarhuni’s case, the designation means he cannot complete aid projects he was working on in Libya with the nonprofit Medical Teams International, and he takes trains to meetings across the country.

Video: Waiting for husband to come home

These men, and others named on the no-fly list must be "considered a threat to aircraft, or be operationally capable of carrying out a terrorist attack, and using air travel to get somewhere for the purpose of conducting a terrorist attack, or be a threat to U.S. installations or troops worldwide," said the spokesman for the Terrorist Screening Center.

Tarhuni, Elogbi and Fikre are likely to file a lawsuit against the Department of Justice to challenge that claim and recover their travel rights, said Nelson.

But Fikre, unlike the other two, is not eager to return to the United States. He said that whatever action he takes will be from the relative security of Sweden, which he hopes will grant him a permanent haven.

"The most important thing for me is to find out why they did to me what they did, Fikri said, speaking from a relative’s home in Sweden. “It’s always in the back of your mind, you know, you wonder why this happened to me.  And if you get the answer to that question, you could move on, you know.  But something like this happened to you, you always are going to wonder — I wonder why this happened and who was really involved, who was really running the show behind the scenes."

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Follow Kari Huus on Facebook

 

Some of the Secret Service agents under investigation in the Colombian prostitution scandal have agreed to take polygraph tests, a U.S. official told NBC News on Wednesday.

Eleven Secret Service agents were recalled from Colombia last week and have been stripped of their security clearances after reports emerged alleging that some of them had taken prostitutes to their hotel rooms before President Barack Obama arrived for the Latin American summit.

The U.S. official said the agents had been "offered" the opportunity to submit to polygraph tests and that some had accepted. The official didn't say how many had agreed.

---

Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the Secret Service, wouldn't confirm the information, saying only that the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility was using every investigative tool at its disposal.

NBC News: Prostitute's $50 fee for two agents triggered Secret Service scandal

Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan has told lawmakers that the 11 agents and 10 U.S. military personnel also implicated in the scandal are giving investigators conflicting stories, making it difficult to pin down the truth, several lawmakers told NBC News.

The Colombian government is separately investigating whether underage girls were part of the arrangements, but Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told NBC News that Sullivan believes the youngest woman involved was about 20 or 21 years old.

NBC News reported this week that some of the agents had copies of the president's schedule in their rooms, raising the possibility of a security breach. But Sullivan said none of the prostitutes ever had access to secure information, according to Grassley.

"I think that he feels that protocol was followed," Grassley told NBC News.

Grassley said Judiciary Committee staff members would meet with agency representatives later this week for a more complete briefing. He said the committee would conduct its own investigation only if members concluded that the Secret Service inquiry "was not doing the job."

Regardless, Grassley said, "I think you'll find their heads are going to roll." He added that he was worried that there could be a culture of misbehavior at the Secret Service, a concern that was echoed by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who has also been briefed on the case.

Collins told NBC News that her "instinct" is that this wasn't an isolated incident. She said that she pressed Sullivan and that he had told her the agency was "scrubbing the files" for possible previous incidents.

The Defense Department is separately investigating the 10 military members who have been implicated. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that "we let the boss down" in Colombia.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is expected to brief leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee in the next couple of days, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told NBC News on Wednesday.

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The war on drugs has gone digital; but is it also a war on cellphone users?

That’s just one of the questions raised by an msnbc.com investigation into use of cellphone tracking data by local police departments across the nation. Msnbc.com built a database of thousands of invoices issued by cellphone network providers to cities after cops asked for caller location and other personal information between 2009-2011. The invoices were first obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and released to the public earlier this month.

The database offers perhaps the first blow-by-blow accounting of several cities’ use of cellphone tracking as a crime-fighting tool and the potential blow to civil liberties that the requests represent.

While 200 cities responded to the ACLU, three cities -- Tacoma, Wash., Oklahoma City, and Raleigh N.C. – provided enough detail to paint a picture of how cellphone tracking data is being used in mid-sized police departments around the nation. Categorizing the thousands of pages of invoices supplied by the three municipalities provided some insight into why cops use cellphone locations and call records to investigate crimes and how much the carriers earn responding to these requests.

The tension between the war on drugs and privacy is most readily apparent in Tacoma, Wash., where the most frequent reason that police requested cellphone data over a two-year period was to investigate drug dealing, the analysis indicates.

In Tacoma, while many of the 139 requests for cellphone data from Jan. 1, 2009 through June 30, 2011 involved serious crimes –  including 37 murder investigations –  the most frequent charge listed as the reason for the request is “UDCS,”  or unlawful distribution of a controlled substance.  No additional details about those 51 requests, or the crimes behind them, were available. Police officials from Tacoma did not respond to requests for comment.

The bills run up by local detectives requesting cellphone data aren’t small. Tacoma spent $17,496 checking cellphone records during that time span or nearly $1 for every 10 residents. Police in Oklahoma City spent $9,033 on cellphone records checks during one three-month stretch last year, according to the data compiled by msnbc.com.  In Raleigh, officials made an average of one location “ping” request from just one carrier -- Sprint -- every three days during the second half of 2011. 

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“Location data for cops is like a kid in a candy store,” said Mark Rasch, former head of the Justice Department’s Computer Crime Unit.  “It’s a wonderful investigative tool which is highly intrusive of personal liberty and our rules on privacy, and rules governing access to this are not only antiquated but confusing and conflicting.  Add to that a profit motive by carriers, and lack of sufficient oversight on law enforcement access to the records, and you have a prescription for, at a minimum, violations of civil liberties.” Rasch is now a consultant with Virginia-based cyber security firm CSC.

The ACLU notes that much of the cellphone location data is obtained without a warrant, meaning no probable cause hearing before a judge is required.  Many cops counter that subpoenas are always issued – and sometimes refer to these as court orders -- but Rasch said that’s a misnomer. They are often little more than a request form.

“Cops can have a pile of blank subpoenas in their desk drawer,” he said. Carriers normally consent to subpoena requests, but legally they don’t have to. If they refuse, a law enforcement agency is then required get a judge’s order to enforce the subpoena, a step that’s rarely taken, he said.

Tacoma officials deserve credit: Of the 200 cities that responded to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act requests, Tacoma’s documents provided the most detail and included an easy-to-read summary page. Research on other cities was far more laborious, and required sampling, which is why this report is limited to three months of Oklahoma City’s invoices from April to June of 2011, and six months of Raleigh’s invoices from July 1-Dec. 31, 2010.  For consistency, the date used for all records indicates the date the invoice was filed, not the date of the crime or the date that police requested the data.

The study involves only local cops; federal authorities file their own cellphone location requests and wiretaps, which were not considered in this report.

It’s important to note that many invoices did not include an amount. In Tacoma, about half the amount entries for the 139 requests were left blank. It’s unclear if that means the request was filled for free or if the data entry was incomplete. That means the dollar totals published here could be far lower than the actual amount paid by the city.

If Tacoma’s experience is typical  – which isn’t clear – cellphone companies are earning millions of dollars fulfilling local law enforcement’s cellphone records requests. If Tacoma’s rate of nearly $1 per 10 citizens were extrapolated nationwide, cellphone companies would have billed local cops roughly $30 million from mid-2009 to mid-2011.

There are about 25,000 municipalities in the United States. Most have their own police force, and that total wouldn’t include county and state law enforcement agencies. If each one averaged $1,000 in requests – far less than Tacoma’s $17,496 –  that would total $25 million. Cellphone companies, as we’ll see below, have real expenses associated with data lookups, and they often fulfill life-or-death requests for free. Still, with $2,500 invoices being sent to towns across the country, it’s clear there is real money being made.

“I think that this data confirms that cellphone trapping is a routine law enforcement practice, not only for serious crimes but for more routine crimes ,” said Catherine Crump, the ACLU lawyer who ran its investigation. “It is integrated into the law enforcement’s everyday arsenal, and that makes understanding what data law enforcement uses, and making sure that this complies with the Constitution, all the more important. … This is first look we have to see how pervasive  this practice is.”

Raleigh, Oklahoma City details
Raleigh and Oklahoma City offered less complete data, but enough information to provide a glimpse of the kind of requests being made.

In Raleigh, we narrowed the study to one carrier – Sprint – for the last six months of 2010. Here’s what we found: Police made 59 requests, or about one every three days, and spent $2,300 over the six-month period, according to the data. Activity was most intense in the summer, with 17 requests in July costing $660. The vast majority of these requests were simple location “pings,” that cost $30 each, but there were some requests for voice mail and “picture mail” retrieval, which also cost $30.  The Raleigh invoices included scant detail, with only one bill including a hand-written note that said, “att. Murder.” 

“Other than noting that our investigative procedures comply with all applicable statutes, I don’t believe there’s anything I can add,” said Jim Sughrue, a spokesman for the Raleigh Police Department.

Oklahoma City police took the opposite approach, spending a lot on only a few requests. From April to June, 2011, the city received $9,033 in bills for data requests that went far beyond Raleigh’s location pings. One bill Oklahoma City received from Cox Communication totaled $2,500 for 60 days of “pen register/trap and trace” activity, which would ordinarily indicate police learned call details (but not call content) for every call placed to or from a target phone. That invoice, by the way, indicates a full wiretap costs $3,500 from Cox.

During this three-month span, the city made nine other requests for 24 days or longer of pen register/trap and trace data, including four additional requests for 60 days of data. Verizon billed the city $2,446 for five separate invoices dated May 13.

Capt. Dexter Nelson, spokesperson for Oklahoma City, said his department had gone to court and obtained permission for every cellphone records request invoice viewed by msnbc.com.

“In each of the cases in that document those were criminal investigation in which someone went before either a state or a federal judge to explain that case and the need to obtain that information … (and) to provide probable cause or reasonable suspicion,” he said.

The invoices indicate they are for subpoena compliance, but Nelson said carriers require a judge’s order to perform the more invasive pen register/trap and trace operation.

Nelson said he did not know if the invoices related to a single police investigation, or multiple investigations.

“Typically those are narcotics  cases, or it could be robbery, or it could be homicide. It could be any number of different types of investigations,” he said.

One back-and-forth e-mail discussion found within the city’s invoices between T-Mobile and police officials over pricing for the records requests offers insight into the kind of negotiations that occur between cops and carriers over data cost.

“The fees set are $100 per day for this tracking tool, capped at 10 days charge, or $1,000 per month. This is substantially less that our competition charges for their ‘per-ping’ GPS-base system, and again, there is no charge for non-criminaI/E-911 emergency support,” Michael McAdoo, T-Mobile’s director of law enforcement relations, wrote to city officials on June 6, 2008.

When city officials complained that some emergency requests – such as a life-or-death request to find a lost hiker or a missing child – and other communications should be free, then city Communications Technology Manager Lucien Jones made his case with sarcasm in a June 8, 2009, email.

“Let me see if I understand this: If a guy has an argument with his wife, pushes her down and runs off with her cellphone, we can track that phone free,” he wrote. “But if an armed robber kills his victim and takes their cellphone, and continues to commit a string a robberies, then the attempt by dispatchers and patrol officers to correlate 911 data of the next robbery with cellphone location data constitutes an "investigation," and we gotta pay $100 bucks a day .... Oh, but if the killer develops shame and depression and threatens suicide, then it’s free.”

McAdoo of T-Mobile offered this retort on June 10.

“In the first scenario with the guy who pushes his wife and takes her cellphone, we would only assist in tracking this person if served with a valid … ‘reasonable and articulate facts’-type court order to do so,” he wrote. “We would have no "reasonable belief of a threat to life or serious bodily injury" to allow us to legally locate this person as an emergency exception. In your court order, the judge would likely order reasonable compensation and our charge would be $100/day.  In the second scenario, we would immediately respond without an order as we would have a belief that, if left unchecked, this series of crimes might escalate into another killing, and yes we would charge $100/day for that response. In the third scenario--or in any suicide-prevention call from a  PSAP -- we would (and do many times each night) attempt to locate the person immediately and do so free of charge. And in any other lost hiker/missing motorist/missing juvenile/wandering Alzheimer's/Iost medivac helicopter/capsized boater/stranded mountain climber/etc. event, we would immediately assist at no charge (and do so probably hundreds of times each week), unlike some other national carriers which charge $100 per ‘ping.’”

Request by carrier, other data from Tacoma
The clearest picture of what goes on in medium-sized U.S. cities comes from Tacoma, however.

While there are a couple of big-ticket requests, many are for around $30. For example, in 2010, 10 of the 38 requests were for quick-hit, single $30 location "pings."

AT&T fulfilled the most requests – 45 – while Sprint and T-Mobile each filled 36, and Verizon 15.  There were also single requests filled by Facebook and MySpace.

After drug crimes and murders, there were 16 assault-related requests, seven robbery-related requests, five rape-related requests, four involving an endangered child and two related to finding a material witness.

There was also one invoice filed regarding a crime labeled “theft of a city laptop.” No additional information was available.  

Other information in the Tacoma data:

There is $850 bill from AT&T for a robbery/rape investigation in late 2009.  That's $100 for "location activation" and 30 days of daily tracking at $25 each. Just like consumers, law enforcement agencies get hit with setup fees.

The biggest single bill in Tacoma is for $1,300: 13 days of “E911 locator” at a flat $100 per day in mid-2010. The listed crime is UDCS, or "unauthorized distribution of a controlled substance."

Rasch said he wasn’t surprised by the volume of requests. If anything, he thought the numbers were low.

“I can’t imagine any case where location data wouldn't be important. The temptation to use and overuse this data is very strong,” he said.

He also said he’s not opposed to its use.

“It's not that (I) don't want them to have the data. In some cases, we want them to have it faster,” he said. “But we want it to be accountable. We want legal standards, procedural standards, and we want more openness about what they are doing.”

Both Rasch and Crump, the ACLU attorney, expressed  mixed feelings about the carriers’ earnings from law enforcement request, which are clearly substantial but might not be profitable. Both said they wouldn’t want carriers to charge any less, because the fees act as a natural barrier to abusive data gathering.

“The amounts give a good sense of how massive (the carriers’) facilities are for processing and handing over this customer data,” Crump said. “But it is good that carriers charge. If this were free, there would be a lot more of it.”

Rasch pointed out that U.S. officials and citizens haven’t yet settled on the debate about whether location data is private or public information, further confounding the constitutional issues raised by police cellphone tracing requests.

“FourSquare is doing this 50,000 times a day,” he said. “This data just involves cellphone carriers – there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other people know where you are – EZ Pass, Google, and so on. There are plenty of other ways for authorities to find you.”

He favors a system that would require cellphone carriers to inform customers – even after the fact – that law enforcement has obtained their location or cellphone call data.  And while he’s in favor of its use for investigating serious crimes, he said routine use of cellphone data to enforce the law could lead down a slippery path.

“Once you say that criminals have no rights, where do you stop?” he said. “For example: You claim your car as a deduction on your federal taxes. Would it be OK for the IRS to subpoena cellphone records to see if you are correctly logging your miles?”

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NEW YORK — The jewelry collection of Huguette M. Clark, the mysterious heiress to a copper fortune, was sold at auction Tuesday afternoon at Christie's New York, fetching $18.3 million, far above the pre-sale estimate of $8.5 million to $12 million.

The jewels had been recovered from the bank vault of the reclusive heiress, who lived the last 20 years of her life in Manhattan hospitals and who had rarely been seen since the 1930s.

The last surviving child of U.S. Sen. William Andrews Clark (1839-1925), who made his fortune in mining, railroads and other ventures, Huguette Clark has been the subject of a series of reports on msnbc.com about her vacant properties and the management of her fortune. Born in Paris in June 1906, she died in May 2011 at age 104.

Hundreds of people filed through Christie's at Rockefeller Center to see her jewels over the weekend.

The highlight was a rare 9-carat purplish-pink diamond ring, with a pre-sale estimate of $6 million to $8 million.

"Four million dollars," started the elegant auctioneer, Rahul Kadakia.

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"Seven point five million dollars?" Kadakia added, hearing a bid. "All right, why waste time."

It was hammered home at $14 million, plus commission, for a total outlay of $15,762,500.

The buyer of the "Clark pink" was identified as Brett Stettner of Stettner Investment Diamonds.

The pace was set with the first two items, onyx photo frames estimated at about $6,000. They each sold for $60,000.

A pair of art deco bracelets sold for $90,000 and $480,000.

The total for all Clark items, with commissions, was $20.8 million.

See the accompanying slideshow for details on the Clark jewels and their final sale prices.

"It was like chasing a rainbow and you had this big pot of gold at the end. It was fantastic," auctioneer Kadakia, head of jewelry for Christie's, said on the TODAY TV show about opening the Clark vault. (See the accompanying video.) "They were all in this original boxes, in this bank vault, since the 1940s."

In addition to bidders at Christie's at Rockefeller Center in New York, bidders were online and on the telephone in Texas, Bahrain, Japan. They were alerted that parties with a potential financial interest were bidding on several of the less-expensive items. Possibly these were Clark relatives.

Many non-Clark items in the jewelry auction also sold well above their estimates, including a 24.68-carat diamond that sold for $420,000, or more than twice its high estimate.

An apartment already sold
One of her three mysterious apartments on New York's Fifth Avenue found a buyer soon after they hit the market in March. The top-floor apartment, listed at $24 million, sold in less than a month for an undisclosed price. The two others remain on the market, at $19 million and $12 million. Each apartment has about 5,000 square feet of space. Also on the market: her country home in New Canaan, Conn., at $19.8 million.

How can anything be sold now?
Proceeds from the properties and jewelry will be used to pay estate expenses, with the rest held for the eventual winner of the legal battle over her $400 million fortune. On one side are members of the Clark family, grandchildren of her father from his first marriage, whom she included in one will and then cut out of her last. On the other side are her attorney, accountant and nurse, all named in the last will, which left nothing to her relatives.

Her oceanfront home in Santa Barbara, Calif., with an estimated value of $100 million, is not on the market, because her second will designates it as a public museum and home for her art collection. The fate of that property is tied up in the legal battle. The largest chunk of the estate is left to that museum in the second will.

Also not for sale: her doll collection, with an estimated value of $4 million, which the second will leaves to her nurse.

The full story
More on the Huguette Clark mystery is at http://clark.msnbc.com/.

Do you have information on the Clark family?
Reporter Bill Dedman is writing a nonfiction book about the Clark family. If you have information, you can reach him at bill.dedman@msnbc.com.

The Colombian prostitute who triggered the scandal that has rocked the Secret Service got angry with two agents who refused to pay her full price for servicing the two of them, leading to a financial dispute over between $40 and $60, according to a government source who has been briefed on the investigation.

Two agents from the service's elite Counter Assault Team, in Cartagena, Colombia, in advance of President Barack Obama's arrival for the Summit of the Americas over the weekend, had procured the women's services at a local strip club called the Pley Club on the evening of April 11. All the Secret Service agents and officers implicated in the scandal are believed to have gone to the club that evening and brought back women, a U.S. official told NBC News.

---

The controversy arose after one of the women went back to a hotel room with two agents. The woman wanted to be paid for serving both agents, the source who has been briefed on the probe told NBC News. Instead, the agents would only agree to split her price, prompting the woman to complain to local police who were stationed in the lobby of the Hotel Caribe, the source said.

The police then went up to the agents' room and began banging on the door, which the agents at first refused to open, the source said. There are conflicting reports over how the payment dispute was resolved. But two government sources told NBC News the police contacted the U.S. Embassy over the dispute and Embassy officials then arrived at the scene.

All those with booked rooms at the hotel had to pay a fee of $25 for bringing any guests to their  rooms -- and the guests were required to leave some form of identification at the front desk. A quick scan of the hotel register by a U.S. Embassy official established that 11 Secret Service agents had brought back women to their rooms that evening. When Embassy officials notified Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, he immediately ordered all the agents to fly home, the sources said.

The Secret Service members -- including agents and uniformed officers -- were stripped of their security clearances on Monday.

Included in that group were two high-level Secret Service supervisors, three counter assault officers whose job is to repel attacks and three sniper-team members, who take to rooftops to secure areas where the president might visit, NBC News reported.

U.S. officials have described the agents' conduct as a potential security breach especially because all the agents involved had access to the president's day-by-day, minute-by-minute schedule. But one official familiar with the security arrangements said that there were no specific security threats during the president's trip. Although agents upon arrival were briefed about current activities by leftist FARC guerrillas and local drug cartels, they were told neither had made any specific threats to the president.

The only specific security concern mentioned was that agents and officers were told to bar a left-wing journalist from events at the summit and were given a flier with the journalist's photograph to keep him out, the law enforcement source said.

The Secret Service sent agents to Colombia to interview the prostitutes who hooked up with the Americans to figure out if the women are under age, involved with terrorism or trafficking in illegal drugs, a lawmaker told NBC News' Luke Russert on Tuesday.

 “They have all their IDs and are conducting an extensive background check to make sure they aren't affiliated with any narcotrafficking or terrorist group or that they could be minors,” Homeland Security chairman Rep. Peter King told Russert. “So far there is no security breach."

King, who was briefed on the Colombia investigation by Sullivan, confirmed that there were 11 agents and 11 women.

"The investigation could take a while simply because of the amount of women involved,” King said. “Some are saying they were prostitutes and others say they weren't."

U.S. military officials told NBC News on Tuesday that 10 American servicemen also were under investigation. According to the officials that includes five Army soldiers, two Navy sailors, two Marines and one Air Force airman.

One military official says it appears that at least two of the service members were found with prostitutes in their hotel rooms, the same Hotel Caribe where the Secret Service detail stayed.

It's not clear whether any of the military members were in any way connected to the allegations involving members of the Secret Service at a Cartagena strip club.

It's also not yet clear whether any of the 10 will face criminal charges.

House and Senate lawmakers are also looking into the allegations. King told The Associated Press that his committee is devoting four investigators to the probe.

Meanwhile, one former Secret Service agent, Dan Bongino who is a Republican candidate for Congress in Maryland, told NBC News that in his 12 years at the agency he never saw anything like what is alleged to have taken place in Colombia.

“I’m not saying it’s never happened, but I never saw it.” Bongino said. He denied there was a culture of partying inside the agency.

Top US military officer: 'We let the boss down' over prostitute scandal

A decade ago, however, U.S. News and World Report published an investigative report detailing criminal activity and extreme partying as well as oversight problems. In one reported incident, members of Vice President Dick Cheney’s security detail got into a brawl outside a bar on a trip to the San Diego area.

As the agency sought to rebuild its image, other high-profile incidents with presidential protection brought more scrutiny.

In 2008, an Iraqi journalist threw shoes at President George W. Bush during a Baghdad visit.

And in November 2009 three people crashed a White House state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Michaele and Tareq Salahi and Carlos Allen were able to get past Secret Security agents at the door and enter the party.

The Salahis even met Obama and had their picture taken with Vice President Joe Biden. In a January 2010 congressional hearing on the matter, the Salahis, who have since divorced, refused to testify, invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The prostitution scandal, however, has brought far more intense focus on the Secret Service and behavior by its agents and officers.

"This really is the biggest scandal in the history of the Secret Service," Ron Kessler, author of "In the President's Secret Service," told NBC News earlier this week. He said the agency's problems are deeply rooted.

"There's a culture in the Secret Service that's fostered by the management of just nodding, winking, favoritism," he said. "What the agency needs is an outside director who can come in, clean house, change the standards." 

Michael Isikoff is NBC News' national investigative correspondent; Jim Miklaszewski is NBC News' chief Pentagon correspondent. NBC News Correspondent Luke Russert and msnbc.com reporter Jeff Black also contributed to this report.

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Follow US News on msnbc.com on Twitter and Facebook

One afternoon early last year, I punched in my credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course.

After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an exam on the institute's web site, answering 100 multiple choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets.

As soon as I finished the test, a screen popped up saying that I had passed, earning me an impressive-sounding credential that could help establish my qualifications to be an expert witness in criminal and civil trials.

For another $50, ACFEI mailed me a white lab coat after sending my certificate.

---

For the last two years, ProPublica and PBS "Frontline," in concert with other news organizations, have looked in-depth at death investigation in America, finding a pervasive lack of national standards that begins in the autopsy room and ends in court.

Expert witnesses routinely sway trial verdicts with testimony about fingerprints, ballistics, hair and fiber analysis and more, but there are no national standards to measure their competency or ensure that what they say is valid. A landmark 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences called this lack of standards one of the most pressing problems facing the criminal justice system.

Over the last two decades, ACFEI has emerged as one of the largest forensic credentialing organizations in the country.

Among its members are top names in science and law, from Dr. Henry Lee, the renowned criminalist and pathologist, to John Douglas, the former FBI profiler and bestselling author. Dr. Cyril Wecht, a prominent forensic pathologist and frequent TV commentator on high-profile crimes, chairs the group's executive advisory board.

But ACFEI also has given its stamp of approval to far less celebrated characters. It welcomed Seymour Schlager, whose credentials were mailed to the prison where he was incarcerated for attempted murder. Zoe D. Katz – the name of a house cat enrolled by her owner in 2002 to show how easy it was to become certified by ACFEI -- was issued credentials, too. More recently, Dr. Steven Hayne, a Mississippi pathologist whose testimony helped to convict two innocent men of murder, has used his ACFEI credential to bolster his status as an expert witness.

Several former ACFEI employees call the group a mill designed to churn out and sell as many certificates as possible. They say applicants receive cursory, if any, background checks and that virtually everyone passes the group's certification exams as long as their payments clear.

Some forensic professionals say the organization's willingness to hand out credentials diminishes the integrity of the field.

"I am insulted by it," said Dr. Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist for Maryland's chief medical examiner office and the vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. "They seem like an organization that's all about the money."

Robert O'Block, ACFEI's founder, vigilantly defends the group's work, saying it has helped make forensics more accessible. He told ProPublica and PBS "Frontline" that the ACFEI credentials are not designed to qualify experts in court and emphasized only a judge can make that determination.

O'Block also said he's been unfairly criticized by other professional groups that compete with ACFEI in certain regards, including the AAFS, Weedn's group.

"I have been fighting for 20 years for an open educational certification and accreditation in forensic examination," O'Block wrote in an email. "But they have painted me as the bad guy."

* * *

The judges who must determine whether to qualify a witness as an expert face an alphabet's soup of organizations with differing standards. Some, like the American Board of Criminalistics, vet members extensively, requiring them to pass intensive board exams to demonstrate their skills. Others, as noted in the NAS report, are far less stringent.

Experts in the field worry that inconsistent standards and training for forensic examiners can lead to miscarriages of justice — to the guilty walking free and the innocent being locked up or worse.

"There are a lot of people practicing, but there's no assurance that they have the requisite training and board certification to see if they do have the skills to do the practical (work)," said Dr. Marcella Fierro, one of the NAS report's authors and the former chief medical examiner of Virginia.

Under state and federal rules of evidence, judges decide whether prospective expert witnesses can testify, but they sometimes rely heavily on the titles and letters around someone's name.

"Credentials are often appealing shortcuts," Michigan circuit court judge Donald Shelton said. Fancy titles can have a disproportionate effect on juries, he added. "Jurors have no way of knowing that this certifying body, whether it's this one or any other one, exacts scientific standards or is just a diploma mill." 

O'Block, 60, founded the organization that grew into ACFEI in Branson, Mo., in 1992, after being rejected for membership by a credentialing organization for forensic handwriting experts.

As chronicled in "United for Truth," ACFEI's self-published history, his goal was to create an alternative group open to those with all levels of experience. "It didn't matter that he, himself, was not then one of the anointed handwriting experts," the book says, "because he already knew that he was an expert at making things happen."

O'Block launched his first credentialing programs while teaching criminal justice at the College of the Ozarks. Initially, the fledgling operation offered correspondence certifications in forensic document examination and behavior profiling for $100 apiece.

Over time, the organization expanded its offerings, adding dozens of courses to certify applicants in various aspects of forensics, from counseling to nursing to accounting. Applicants must become members of ACFEI to become certified; on top of my course fee, I paid $165 in membership dues.

O'Block also founded related associations that offer credentials in other fields, including psychotherapy and integrative medicine. One, the American Board for Certification in Homeland Security, attracted a powerful new client: the Defense Department. Since 2008, the U.S. Navy has paid more than $8.5 million for sailors to obtain credentials in such specialties as "Disaster Preparedness" and "Sensitive Security Information" through a program separate from the one for forensics.

Today, there are two entities that go by the ACFEI acronym — the original, which is a nonprofit, and a related for-profit company called the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute of Forensic Science. O'Block is president of both and, according to tax filings, received total compensation of more than $430,000 in 2010.

ACFEI and its related entities have continued to expand under O'Block's leadership, growing to about 20,000 members combined, despite periodic controversies.

In 1998, when ACFEI proposed offering an online doctorate in forensic science, dozens of forensics professionals and educators wrote to the Missouri Board of Higher Education to protest the plan. "The questions are suitable for a grade school child," wrote one. ACFEI dropped its application.

Then, in 2002, the story broke about the cat. O'Block remains vexed by what he calls a "stunt" orchestrated by a member of a competing professional organization.

"First of all, ACFEI did not certify a cat…(It) certified a human being who used fraudulent credentials and called himself Dr. Katz," O'Block wrote in an email.

Since then, O'Block said, ACFEI has changed its verification process, requiring applicants to submit multiple professional references and be placed on provisional status while their application is pending.

Two days after I passed the Certified Forensic Consultant exam, I received an email from ACFEI asking me for additional materials. I emailed the group my references, a resume and a scanned copy of my college diploma. Less than an hour later, I received an email saying I could start using my forensic consultant designation.

None of my references was contacted by the group.

According to a statement provided by ACFEI's attorney, that step was deemed unnecessary in my case.

"Professional references are requested in the event questions arise concerning an applicant's eligibility for the credentialing program in which they are applying," the statement said. "Since applicant clearly met the requirements for the Certified Forensic Consultant program, professional references were not contacted."

* * *

Among forensic professionals, there continues to be fierce debate over the quality of ACFEI's courses -- and what being certified by the group actually signifies.

ACFEI advertises itself as an educational institution and markets its certificates as building up holders' value as witnesses in court. Expert witnesses are typically paid for their testimony.

The page on its website for the certification I obtained — Certified Forensic Consultant — says, "The CFC credential contributes to the weight of an individual's testimony relating to qualifications, knowledge of the scope of the issues, the validity of the evidence presented, application of specialized knowledge to the facts in the case, and the relevance of the evidence to the issues in the case."

But both O'Block and Wecht, the group's official spokesman, stressed that ACFEI certificates alone don't make you an expert.

"It's designed to make somebody feel good, to make them feel they've accomplished something, and I would hope they have," Wecht said in an interview. "Does it really qualify them to be the expert in a particular field? No." 

 Wecht also dismissed the notion that the group's use of "college" in its name could be misleading. "That's a play on words," he said. "Nobody believes for one moment that it is a real college."

In an interview and an email, O'Block defended ACFEI's credentialing programs by saying the group held seven outside "accreditations and approvals."

But ACFEI is not recognized as an accredited institution of higher learning by Missouri, where it is incorporated, or by the U.S. Department of Education, which maintains a registry of accredited schools.

A number of organizations, such as the California Board of Registered Nursing and the American Psychological Association, recognize ACFEI as a provider of continuing education. But that's not the same as institution-wide accreditation, said Leroy Wade, the Assistant Commissioner of the Missouri Board of Higher Education.

"There's really no oversight that regulates the CE providers in general, at least not in this state," Wade said. "You can't put any stock in the fact that an organization states it's a continuing education provider."

Several former ACFEI staffers say they came to question how the group writes and administers its exams.

John Bridges was hired as ACFEI's president and chief executive in 2010 after decades in government, most recently as an administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He left ACFEI after just nine months, frustrated, he says, by the group's practices.

"Based on my perception of what went on related to standards and quality, it operated like a certification mill," he said.

Though ACFEI offers both basic courses and more advanced, specialized certificates, Bridges said, its exams are designed so that anyone can pass. He put the failure rate at less than 1 percent.

"If you want to be validated by somebody," Bridges said, "this organization will validate you."

O'Block initially said that ACFEI did not keep pass/fail rates for its exams. Later, the group's attorney said it did keep such statistics, but he did not provide them upon request.

Other former employees said it was routine for low-level staffers to write exams for ACFEI and its related organizations based on textbooks in subject areas in which they had no expertise.

Tania Miller worked for six months as chief association officer for the American Psychotherapy Association, an ACFEI sister group, beginning in fall 2010. A few weeks into her job, she said, she was asked to author an exam to certify forensic counselors. Miller's background was in marketing and graphic design. She said she declined to write the exam. ACFEI did not respond to questions about Miller.

The Forensic Consultant test I took focused primarily on rules of evidence and courtroom procedure. Some questions required specialized knowledge (i.e., Which rule is known as the "Admissibility of Expert Testimony" rule in the Federal Rules of Evidence? Answer: 702), but ACFEI's study packets helped me fill in the blanks, making it basically an open-book exam. The rest of the questions relied largely on common sense (i.e., When providing testimony, which of the following should you NOT do? Answer: Cross your arms and joke with the jury.)

ACFEI did not answer questions about what level of expertise it requires of those who write its exams. According to its catalog, some of the exams are authored by prominent specialists, including Wecht.

O'Block vehemently denies that ACFEI is a diploma mill, saying the group has thousands of satisfied members. He has filed five lawsuits in the last year against individuals — mostly bloggers — who have posted statements O'Block claims are defamatory about his organizations. One is pending. The others have been dismissed by courts or at the parties' request after bloggers agreed to take down posts.

Wecht, whose signature appears on some ACFEI certificates (including mine), said he didn't know how applicants did on the group's tests, but emphasized that the group's program is mostly about fostering enthusiasm for the field.

"The purpose of the organization is to encourage people who are interested in forensic science to learn more, to study more," he said.

* * *

To critics, the greatest concern about ACFEI is the potential that the organization is giving legitimacy to expert witnesses who don't warrant it. 

Among the thousands of people that ACFEI has certified is one particularly controversial expert in forensic pathology: Dr. Steven Hayne.

Hayne, the longtime pathologist for the state of Mississippi, performed the autopsies in two shocking 1990s cases in which three-year-old girls were abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered.

In both cases, Hayne testified he had observed bite marks on the young girls. He said he had called in a forensic dentist who confirmed that the marks were human and matched them to dental impressions from the defendants in each case. These findings aided in the convictions of Levon Brooks for the first murder and of Kennedy Brewer for the second. Brooks was sentenced to life in prison. Brewer was sentenced to death.

After the men spent more than 30 years combined incarcerated, the Innocence Project recovered DNA evidence that led investigators to the real killer. He confessed to both crimes, but denied biting the victims.

Hayne no longer conducts autopsies for the state, but continues to give testimony as an expert witness. Testifying in March 2010 in Lamar County Circuit Court, Hayne was asked what board certifications he held. "I'm board certified in anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, forensic pathology and forensic medicine," he replied.

Hayne has credentials in anatomic and clinical pathology from the American Board of Pathology, considered the gold standard, but not in forensic pathology, the branch of medicine focused on the mechanics of death. For that, he cites his Certified Forensic Physician credential from ACFEI and certification in forensic pathology from the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic Surgeons.

When attorneys for the Innocence Project submitted a wide-ranging complaint about Hayne to the Mississippi board of licensure, they cited Hayne's reliance on these organizations to allege he had misrepresented his credentials.

"Certification by these organizations is not at all what the medical community and public understand when a doctor claims to be 'board certified,'" the complaint said, referring to ACFEI and the other group.

Citing ongoing litigation, Hayne declined to be interviewed by ProPublica and PBS "Frontline" beyond confirming that he is certified by ACFEI. He has sued the Innocence Project for defamation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.

Wecht acknowledged he knew of Hayne by reputation, but told ProPublica and PBS "Frontline" that he had not known Hayne was certified by ACFEI.

* * *

In its 2009 report, the National Academy of Sciences called for several measures to address systemic flaws involving forensic examiners and expert testimony.

Certification should be mandatory for forensics professionals and should be overseen by a centralized credentialing agency, the report said.

One of the report's primary authors, Harry T. Edwards -- a federal appeals court judge for the District of Columbia – said these changes were critical to imposing rigorous standards on the field. 

"There are certifiers, but it's not what you and I are talking about -- that is, real certification programs that train, give serious tests and will revoke your license and affect your job and ability to testify in the event that you do something wrong or fail," Edwards said in an interview. "That doesn't exist now."

Despite the controversies that dog it, ACFEI may aspire to fill that role. In a promotional video filmed after the NAS report's release, Wecht said its findings presented the group with a unique opportunity.

"We can play a role, the challenge has been issued," he said. "The NAS report can be a blessing to our organization."

I've never tested whether my $495 forensic consultant credential from ACFEI would carry any weight on the witness stand.

Asked about my certification, O'Block responded this way:

"Congratulate Leah for passing the CFC," he wrote in an August 2011 email. "That course was designed as entry level to educate professionals about the justice system."

Wecht said he doubted that having the certificate on my resume would be enough to persuade a court to allow me to give expert testimony. Any decent lawyer, he said, could easily cast doubt upon my qualifications.

"A kid right out of law school would say, ‘Ma'am, just exactly what is your training?'" Wecht said. "The point I'm making, you see, is that that piece of paper doesn't mean that much."

Leah Bartos graduated from UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in May 2011. Since then, she's been a reporter-in-residence at the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley.

This story was co-published with PBS Frontline. Andrés Cediel, the producer of PBS Frontline's "The Real CSI" and Lowell Bergman, the film's correspondent, contributed to this report.

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Four staffers at the Associated Press shared a 2012 Pulitzer Prize on Monday for exposing the New York Police Department's clandestine spying that monitored daily life of Muslim communities. The Pulitzer board at Columbia University in New York said the AP series resulted in "congressional calls for a federal investigation, and a debate over the proper role of domestic intelligence gathering." The journalists are Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley. The AP is a non-profit news cooperative owned by U.S. newspapers.

The Seattle Times also was honored in the investigative reporting category for articles showing "how a little-known governmental body in Washington State moved vulnerable patients from safer pain-control medication to methadone, a cheaper but more dangerous drug, coverage that prompted statewide health warnings." The journalists are Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong. You can read that series here.

Highlights of the AP investigation are here. A summary:

Domestic spying
"AP's investigation has revealed that the NYPD dispatched undercover officers into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program. Police also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there was no evidence of wrongdoing. The articles showed that police systemically listened in on sermons, hung out at cafes and other public places, infiltrated colleges and photographed law-abiding residents as part of a broad effort to prevent terrorist attacks.

"Individuals and groups were monitored even when there was no evidence they were linked to terrorism.

---

"The AP also determined that police subjected entire neighborhoods to surveillance and scrutiny, often because of the ethnicity of the residents, not because of any accusations of crimes. Hundreds of mosques and Muslim student groups were investigated and dozens were infiltrated. Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit after 9/11."

Reporter Apuzo describes the reporting on the series in a podcast for Pro Publica, the nonprofit investigative news organization. You can listen to the podcast here.

More winners
The winners in journalism, letters and the arts are listed at the Pulitzer Prizes site at Columbia University, and nominated finalists who did not win are listed separately.

The Huffington Post news website won its first Pulitzer Prize, for national reporting, for articles describing wounds suffered by American veterans in Iraq and Afghanistan. The series is called "Beyond the Battlefield."

 

Two Secret Service supervisors and three members of the agency's elite Counter-Assault Teams were among the 11 agents sent back from Colombia and placed on administrative leave over allegations that they brought prostitutes to their hotel rooms in Cartagena, law enforcement officials tell NBC News.

The involvement of Counter-Assault Team (CAT) members-- who are not members of the Uniformed Division, but full-fledged Secret Service agents -- ratchets up the seriousness of the incident, officials said.  The heavily armed agents play a key role in protecting the president, serving as part of any presidential motorcade, usually a few cars back from the president's. Their responsibility is to "neutralize" any attack "as quickly as possible," according to the Secret Service website.

---

"Their job is to fend off a heavy assault on the motorcade to give POTUS a chance to flee to a safe locale," one law enforcement source familiar with the investigation told NBC News, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The source said the two of the CAT team members were directly involved in the dispute with one of the prostitutes at the Hotel Caribe that led to the scandal. After bringing back the prostitute to their hotel room, the agents reportedly got into a dispute with one of the women when she complained she hadn’t been paid. The woman then went to the Colombian police -- who reported the matter to the U.S. Embassy.

Others involved in the incident include three members of the Secret Service Counter-Sniper Team, which is part of the Uniformed Division.

The source also said the incident raised the possibility of a potential security breach, telling NBC News that all Secret Service personnel had been given copies of the president's schedule, which they are told to lock up in a safe in their hotel rooms.

Michael Isikoff is an NBC News national investigative correspondent.

U.S. officials and others who track the nuclear capabilities and internal politics of North Korea say they don't see any indications that Pyongyang is planning an imminent nuclear test, but they caution that after the embarrassment of Friday's failed rocket launch it could move provocatively and quickly to do so.

"We consider it at any time a possibility," said one U.S. official who follows North Korea and who briefed NBC News on condition of anonymity. "Might kind of ruin the party or enhance it", he added, referring to Sunday's celebration of North Korean founder Kim il-Sung's 100th birthday.

The officials and experts who spoke with NBC News on Friday questioned whether the North would want to risk another, far greater embarrassment so quickly after the rocket failure. But if it does conduct a nuclear test, it will be following a long tradition of crisis escalation, they said. 

---

The usual sequence in a North Korea crisis is threefold, said a second U.S. official, also speaking on condition of anonymity. First, the North does something untoward, and then the West protest, the official said. In response, North Korea does something to provoke even more reaction and get more attention, with the goal of ultimately driving the U.S. to the negotiating table. In this case that third piece could be the nuclear test, the official said. 

"What surprises me is how quickly this is moving. Things that used to happen in years (in North Korea) are now happening in months," said the second official. "When things start spinning fast, I don’t think that's stable, that's safe. So that's concerning.”

David Phillips of Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights and a North Korea expert, said the government of Kim il-Un does not have to "go nuclear." It has at least two options if it decides to make noise on the international stage: a renewed attack on South Korean islands or naval vessels, or a nuclear test, he said.

"One would be a serious provocation," Phillips said of the first option; the other would quickly become a "global issue."

U.S., South Korean and Japanese officials and experts note that there have been recent preparations at North Korea’s P'unggye-yok test site that could signal a nuclear test, but said those preparations have not intensified over the last few days.

David Albright of the Institute for Science in International Security said his analysts have been monitoring the site almost daily using commercial satellite imagery, but have detected only some movement of earth at a tunnel, which may or may not be related to a test.  Albright agrees that a test would quickly move the North's nuclear program to the forefront of global crises.

One thing that could fuel the crisis, he said, would be for the West, particularly Japan and South Korea, to ridicule the failure of Friday’s satellite launch. 

"It makes the North Korean military mad,” said Albright, who has visited Pyongyang and met with senior North Korean officials. “If they feel that they are now perceived as weaker, they may react to re-establish their deterrence capabilities."

That, he says, could lead to a further escalation of tensions in the region.

"It would further lock in the view that North Korea does not intend to give up nuclear weapons and it would greatly worry Japan, which always feels it is in the North Korean bull’s-eye,” he said. “Among the public in both Japan and North Korea, it would greatly stimulate the debate that they should get nuclear weapons."

Particularly worrisome for the U.S., senior security officials told NBC News, is the possibility that North Korea would test more sophisticated weapons designs – hydrogen bombs or so-called "boosted fission" weapons, both with yields that far exceed those of nuclear designs. Either a "boosted fission" weapon or a hydrogen bomb would be expect to have yields in the tens or hundreds of kilotons, or many times greater than the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II.   

It is also possible the North Koreans could detonate a device fueled by highly enriched uranium (HEU) rather than plutonium, the officials said. . The North Koreans have used plutonium exclusively in the first two tests nuclear in 2006 and 2009.

Any of those tests -- HEU, "boosted fission" or thermonuclear-- would show that the North had more advanced weapons design and development capabilities, they said.

Indeed, U.S. officials said North Korea has done significant research into both "boosted fission" and thermonuclear weapons development in recent years. However, without testing, it couldn't be certain that such a weapon is reliable. One constraint, they said, would be whether the geology around the test site could withstand a test.

One U.S. official also said that U.S. intelligence might not be able to immediately confirm or contradict North Korean claims in the wake of such a test.

"If they do a very high yield test and get into multiple tens of kilotons, and they say it's thermonuclear, unless we have some kind of particulate sampling data, I'm not sure what we're going to say,” said one official. “And their statements could add to the confusion."

Phillips, the Columbia University expert, noted that a North Korean nuclear test could complicate U.S. proliferation priorities. What's more significant, he asked, an Iranian program that has been slogging along or a North Korean program with more than a dozen nuclear weapons, some of which that could have yields in the hundreds of kilotons.

“The Obama administration has been focused on Iran as the primary nuclear threat and proliferator. Many believe that Iran is a rational actor that will serve its own national interest and preserve the regime,” said Phillips. “The same can’t be said about North Korea. Successive generation of leaders in North Korea have shown that they are unpredictable and erratic. The recent satellite launch was designed to burnish the authority of its news leader. Instead its had the opposite effect internationally. ... There is now real risk of a nuclear test, which may now be accelerated by the launch failure and that’s the problem.”

And despite the failure of Friday’s rocket launch, U.S. officials say they expect North Korea to continue trying to develop a missile capability that could deliver a warhead big enough to destroy a U.S. city.

“The intelligence community has assessed for a number of years,” said the first U.S. official, “that this (launch) vehicle would be capable of reaching the continental United States -- beyond Alaska, beyond Hawaii --  with a payload of several hundred kilotons.”

Giselle and Zenayda Sedano of Cranford, N.J., never had a chance of keeping the rampaging waters of the Rahway River out of their home when Hurricane Irene roared through northern New Jersey in August. Now they are wondering if they ever had a chance to get any of the $21 million that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sent to help New Jersey’s flood victims.

We first met the Sedano sisters a day after the hurricane hit on Aug. 28, causing the Rahway River to breach containment and wreak havoc in their suburb of Cranford, where about one in five homes were damaged. They were picking through all of their worldly belongings and looking for something, anything, that wasn’t completely waterlogged. 

Now, more than eight months later, they are wondering why they didn’t receive any federal disaster aid to flood-proof their home, which is only about 100 feet from the river, while some of their neighbors who live farther from the water are getting nearly $200,000. Other Cranford residents are asking similar questions.

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“There are homes in plain sight of mine that were selected which I will have to witness get elevated. But I'm right next to the river. I just don't understand," Giselle Sedano said. "It’s so hard waking up every day not knowing what’s going on."

The controversy highlights the challenges that FEMA and local officials face as they try to plan ahead and minimize future flood disasters.

Msnbc.com profiled the Sedano sisters in August when writing about the towns hit hardest by Irene. Giselle is a hedge-fund analyst and Cornell graduate; Zenayda works in the pharmaceutical business and is a Rutgers graduate. The two successful 20-somethings pooled their resources to buy a home in 2009, soon after they graduated from college, so they could move with their parents to Cranford.

Their parents came from Peru in the 1980s with nothing other than the clothes in their suitcase. Irene left the entire family in a similar fate; mom, dad, and the two sisters had little left outside the clothes they took when fleeing to a nearby hotel right before the Irene hit.

Nearly six months to the day after the storm, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced that FEMA had awarded the state $21.6 million through its Hazard Mitigation Grant program. The money was promised to seven municipalities hit hard by the storm; Cranford received $3.1 million for "the elevation of select dwellings."  At around the same time, some Cranford residents began receiving phone calls saying they'd been selected for elevation grants. Others, including the Sedanos, heard nothing.

Like dozens of other Cranford residents, the Sedanos had responded to a notice last fall from the township indicating they'd like to participate in the elevation grant program. It's not cheap; even with the grant money, residents have to pay 25 percent of the cost.

Neighbor Kristen Wolansky also requested elevation aid, but she said the township never even acknowledged receipt of the request.

"There was no confirmation that your name was received. The information was just submitted into a void," she said.

The list of lucky homeowners isn't public -- "winners" were notified only by phone call, said Wolansky. But she and another frustrated Cranford resident, Steve Gorski, have pieced together a map based on conversations with neighbors. While unofficial, it shows several homes around the Sedanos' house receiving aid.

It makes sense for FEMA to flood-proof homes that are subject to repeated disasters. Like most flood victims, the Sedanos paid to participate in the National Flood Insurance program – in their case, the premiums were $2,015 annually. Elevating homes -- or purchasing them outright and making them into parkland -- is cheaper in the long run than continuing to pay pricey settlements every 10 or 20 years.

But there's not nearly enough money to buy out or elevate every home in danger -- only about 1 in 10 homes statewide in risky areas will receive funds from the $21 million FEMA grant, New Jersey state officials say. That means there's always a lot of disappointment when flood relief grants are doled out.

But the process for picking winners and losers raises questions. Ultimately, local officials decide which residents get the aid. There are complex considerations, such as preserving the character of neighborhoods, which are best left to local officials. But that also leaves them open to criticism and accusations of political patronage.

Compounding the problem are privacy requirements surrounding the process. Because participation is optional, and residents can decline the aid, the list of selected homeowners remains a secret until contracts are signed to begin work. That also means families like the Sedanos have no real avenue for appeal.

FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Program has benefitted communities around the country. The state of Vermont received post-Irene buyout and elevation grants of $19.8 million, for example.  But the program also has a spotty history. More than $1 billion was set aside for land acquisitions and home elevations after Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, but arguments over how to implement the program delayed the awarding of any grants for two years – and by 2008 – three years after the monster storm -- only 14 grants were paid out. Claims of contractor fraud also complicated that awards process.

By that measure, the post-Irene grant process is moving swiftly in New Jersey. Still, the Cranford secret has been kept for a while -- the homes picked by Cranford officials had to be included in the town's initial application for aid, which was filed sometime in the fall, according to state officials.

FEMA directed questions about the New Jersey grant process to state officials; the governor's office directed questions to the state’s Office of Emergency Management.

Mary Goepfert, spokeswoman for that agency, explained the process to msnbc.com.

"The homeowners have to stay private because if they don't participate, and their name is on a list … their home would be severely devalued," she said.

Goepfert said local officials must show that the choice of winners is "financially advantageous" -- that is, a buyout or elevation project must be cheaper than expected future insurance payouts. But otherwise, home selection is entirely up to municipalities, she said.

"For instance, it might make more sense to buy out three, four, five or six houses in the same neighborhood than it would to buy a house here and a house there,” she said.

But what if a resident who wasn't selected feels the process was unfair?

"That's a question for the municipality," she said.

Cranford Mayor David Robinson said he understands why some residents might be frustrated, but said the municipality initially tried to get enough money to elevate about 50 homes and was told by federal and state authorities to tone down its application.  Right now, 18 homes are slated to get elevation aid, and another five are selected as alternates in case others back out.

"We're going to go neighborhood by neighborhood and try to get all of them elevated," he said. "It's just a matter of which homes get first priority. That's what we really focused on." The town plans to apply for additional elevation grants in the future, he said.

This time, municipal officials looked at prior loss history, past flood claims and other data when picking the homes, he said, admitting that some of that data is incomplete.

"We've also found instances where people may have had private flood insurance, and we discover that's a blind spot not included in (our) loss data," he said. "We're working hard to fix that. ... (This time) we focused on homes closest to the river and going neighborhood by neighborhood with the loss data that we had." 

While the 18 "winning" homeowners and 5 alternates have been informed, he said there is no process to tell disappointed homeowners that they weren't picked, or why.

And how should a homeowner like Sedano feel if they feel left out, while neighbors benefit?

"If it's a next-door neighbor, maybe the explanation was that their loss data didn't fit into the cost-benefit analysis that was being worked on at that point," he said. 

The "losers" must simply trust that the selection was fair. The data -- and the reason for the selections -- remains private.

There is one public curiosity about Cranford's aid grant. The other six cities that were promised post-Irene grants all elected property buyouts; Cranford was the only municipality to pick home elevation.  That can be far less disruptive for homeowners, of course, because they don’t have to move. Elevation benefits the town's tax coffers, too, Goepfert said.

"With a buyout, those properties are written off from the tax ratable base," she said.  "But why Cranford chose elevation, you'd have to ask them."

Mayor Robinson said no one in the town expressed interest in a buyout.

All this mystery might be over soon. Goepfert said post-Irene aid was fast-tracked, and she hoped contracts for construction and buyouts would be signed within a month. Then, the list of winners and losers will be made public, she said.

For now, the Sedanos are slowing putting their lives, and their home, back in order. Most of the basic reconstruction of their home has been completed, and the family has moved back in, albeit with sparse furniture. They celebrated Easter Sunday at home this past weekend, their first meal in their rebuilt dining room since the flood.

"There were a few tears during dinner," Giselle said.

But the view of the river out their window, which once brought a sense of tranquility, now only brings trepidation. And until the list of to-be-elevated homes is published, the Sedanos are forced to wait and wonder why they weren't chosen.

"We find it totally unfair. Our home is directly in front of the river," Zedayna said.  

By Scott Cohn
CNBC Senior Correspondent

Millions of Americans hunt, but it is fair to say none of them expect what happened to Justen Yerger of Monroe, Louisiana.

“My life changed forever that day,” he recalls in an interview broadcast on April 11 on Rock Center with Brian Williams.

Yerger was 19 years old, fresh out of high school; the star kicker on his football team, with dreams of playing in college. But all that was about to change.

Yerger had returned to his truck after dove hunting alone near his home. He says he leaned his shotgun--a Remington Sportsman 12--against the wheel well, with the safety on. As he tossed his gear into the back, the gun fell over and went off.

He insists his hands were “nowhere near the trigger,” yet the gun fired anyway. His understanding had always been that a gun is not supposed to fire without the trigger being pulled.

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“That’s what I’ve always known,” he says. “Especially when the safety is on.”

The next thing Yerger remembers was lying flat on his back on the ground. He'd been hit in his left leg and was bleeding badly.

“Seemed like every time my heart would beat, it looked like a water sprinkler.” 

A couple driving by saw Yerger and stopped to help. They rushed him to the emergency room at a nearby hospital.

“I was hit in my left leg - probably about three inches above my knee.”

Yerger’s ordeal was just beginning.

He spent three months in the hospital. Ultimately, it would take 13 surgeries, 128 units of blood and hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills for him to walk again.

He does not believe anything he did that day was wrong.

“I leaned my gun up. Gun's on safety,” he recalls. “There's not a doubt in my mind that I did not do anything wrong that day.”

Yerger sued Remington and the case eventually settled out of court. The terms of the agreement are confidential.

Now 34 years old with a family of his own and still suffering the effects of his injury, Yerger says his story is a cautionary tale for other gun users.

“They need to know that it can happen to anybody, anywhere, any time. I'm proof of it.”

No government agency can order a manufacturer to recall a defective gun. In fact, Congress specifically barred the Consumer Product Safety Commission from regulating firearms and ammunition, in keeping with the Second Amendment guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms. That means gun manufacturers police themselves.

But critics say Remington is shirking its responsibility when it comes to the firing mechanism used in some of the most popular long guns in America, including the shotgun owned by Justen Yerger.

Tom Butters, an engineer, marksman and a trained authority on firearms, has been paid as an expert in more than 100 claims involving reported malfunctions of Remington guns. He alleges Remington has been hiding a dangerous secret about the firing mechanism, which is known as the Common Fire Control or CFC. He says guns equipped with the CFC can go off without pulling the trigger, even with the safety on. And he claims the company has known about it for years.

“I would say it's been known to Remington ever since that first batch of guns went onto the market,” he told Rock Center.

That was in 1948, and since then, Remington has installed the CFC in some 20 million of its guns, and at least 20 different models. They include the 870 shotgun, which is widely used by law enforcement, the 742 semi-automatic rifle, and the Sportsman 12 that Justen Yerger owned.

The patented design of the CFC is unique to Remington. While the safety—the switch that's supposed to keep a gun from firing accidentally—locks the trigger in place, it doesn't block the internal parts from moving; specifically the hammer, the sear and the firing pin.

Butters says if those parts become disengaged, because of debris or even just bumping or dropping the gun, the result can be disastrous.

Butters and several other experts consulted by Rock Center say unlike some other gun makers that have changed their designs in response to similar issues, Remington has held firm.

Butters says Remington has done “virtually nothing” about the problem, and as a result, the owners of tens of millions of guns know nothing about it.

“And Remington does not want them to know about it,” Butters alleges, “because it will affect their market position.”

He claims Remington has essentially put profits over human lives.

“And I have made that allegation under oath on a number of occasions.”

Remington denies there is any problem with the CFC, and insists its guns are safe.

The company declined Rock Center’s requests for an on-camera interview, instead providing a written statement.

“The only defect rests with NBC’s inaccurate and biased reporting,” the statement says.

"(T)he fact remains that these guns are owned and used by tens of millions of waterfowl and upland hunters, competition shooters, law enforcement officers and military personnel—men and women who have relied on these firearms under the most extreme conditions over the last 60 years. These field, home and battlefield experienced users stand as a sophisticated and time-tested testament to the quality and reliability of these iconic firearms."

While the statement does not directly address the allegations of a design defect, Remington has confronted the issue head-on in numerous court cases. The company has consistently maintained its guns are safe, and that every incident can be attributed to modifications made by the user, poor maintenance, or careless handling.

The company has also challenged the credibility of Tom Butters, suggesting he is an expert for hire who has testified against a number of gun companies.

However, when Rock Center asked Remington to offer an expert of its own to counter Butters’ claims of an unsafe design, the company declined.

Butters says one of the most troubling aspects of the issue is that the guns can fire with the safety on, which is exactly what Russell Chaney of Pryor, Oklahoma says happened to him in 1984 while he was out on a boat, duck hunting with friends.

“I had my gun setting up on a bench. Kind of a seat,” he says.

He says as the gun slipped off the seat of the boat. As he tried to grab it, his hand slipped over the gun’s barrel. Just then, the butt of the gun hit the bottom of the boat. The gun went off, and blew off two of Chaney’s fingers.

A retired police officer, Chaney has been around guns his whole life and says he had never seen anything like it. Wondering how his gun could go off with the safety on, he sent it to an independent lab for testing.

“They duplicated the discharge, just like it happened, just like we did,” he says.

In its report, obtained by Rock Center, the Oklahoma forensic lab said it took the gun "with the safety off and no pressure on the trigger" and dropped it butt first.

"(T)he weapon discharged," the report says.

The test was then repeated with the safety on.

"(T)he weapon discharged again."

The report notes that in both tests, “the hammer had disengaged from the sear and had struck the firing pin, a condition which should only exist when the trigger is pulled."

So Chaney decided to write a letter to Remington.

“I was involved in a hunting accident because my gun goes off on safety when bumped on the butt,” he wrote. “Would Remington be interested in this gun for research?"

Chaney says he wrote the letter with one purpose in mind.

“I didn't want this to happen to somebody else.”

Remington agreed to look at the gun, but the letter the company sent back offered a much different conclusion than the independent lab.

"(T)he fire control, as received, showed no defective parts which could have caused the incident although the trigger was loose," Remington wrote, adding "(T)he firearm was repeatedly bounced on the butt from as high as thirty (30) inches without any discharge."

“I don't believe what they wrote to me in saying that it wouldn't go off,” Chaney says.

Asked if he thinks Remington was lying to him, Chaney says, “Well, I believe they probably were.”

Chaney decided not to sue Remington, but says he is troubled by the fact that he alerted them more than 25 years ago, yet incidents continued.

“Just kinda sad that these people are injured or killed,” he says, “after I know that they knew about the problem.”

Determining just how many others complained, though, is not easy. 

While a source close to the company insists Remington keeps records of every complaint, court testimony shows the company began destroying at least some records in the 1980s. But before that change, Remington had compiled a list of 119 complaints over a ten-year period.

Records or not, the problems continued. 

A five-month investigation by Rock Center has uncovered 125 incidents—including 75 injuries and seven deaths—all linked to alleged malfunctions of the Common Fire Control since 1973.

In Alaska, Paul Flynn was left quadriplegic when his Remington went off, and 15-year-old Philip Kensinger was shot in the face.

But many gun enthusiasts swear by their Remingtons. Jack Burch runs an Olympic training center outside Kerrville, Texas. He says Remington should alert the public if there's a problem. But over the past 11 years he says he has never seen any evidence the Remingtons are flawed.

“We see thousands of them come through here,” he says. “Kids shooting them, everybody.  Just not an issue.”

Asked why more users are not aware of the customer complaints, Burch says, “I'm suspecting because it's not as common as people would like to think it is.  It’s just not a pervasive problem that we see.  Not only in this range, but I talk to ranges all over the state.”

Remington does include all kinds of warnings with every gun it sells, including what the company calls "The Ten Commandments of Firearm Safety."

By the book, Russell Chaney and Justen Yerger violated at least two, including the first commandment, "always keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction,” and the third, "don't rely on your gun's safety."

But critics say that only proves that even the most experienced shooter isn't perfect, and the design of the CFC should take that into account. Yet Remington has turned down a number of patented design changes, offered from inside and outside the company. They include a mechanism patented by Tom Butters and a colleague aimed at keeping the guns from going off unless the trigger is pulled.

In court cases, Remington has contended that Butters’ criticism of Remington’s fire control is motivated by a desire to make money from his alternative design, which Butters denies.

“Well, if I were all that interested in pushing the design I would have protected it,” Butters says. Instead, he allowed the patent to expire.

Remington contends the design change is unnecessary because the theory advanced by Butters and others that debris can compromise the CFC is implausible. The company maintains its engineers have never been able to duplicate the problem, and one of Remington’s paid consultants has called the debris theory “a mythical allegation.”

But documents from the 1950s paint a different picture.

In 1957, when a gun shop owner in Michigan wrote to complain about a customer's gun going off with the safety on, he mentioned "gunsmiths around here have told us this is a rather common occurrence and that the guns are unsafe."  

Remington responded the incident was "most unusual."

But just a year later, in a 1958 internal memo, Remington engineers identified the problem, that "might be aggravated by dirt or foreign matter in the fire control.”

And in 1985, when an insurance adjuster asked whether there were any problems with the model 1100 shotgun, Remington responded that it "had no problem," even though we found at the time of that letter, Remington had already faced a dozen lawsuits involving that model alone.

“As a professional engineer, my first canon of ethics reads, ‘I will hold the public safety paramount in each professional act,’" Tom Butters says. “I don't believe they did that.”

Who says there's no free lunch?

You may have read over the past week about the release of 1940 Census records on a new U.S. government website, a site that buckled under the huge demand from people looking up details on the lives of their friends and relatives from the Great Depression.

You may not have realized that the site was built for U.S. taxpayers for the price of — not one dime. A company from Silicon Valley built the site, and is operating it, for free. Genealogy buffs have been using the site for a week now to check millions of records. (See our earlier story for tips on searching the 1940 Census, and examples of people who have found relatives.)

Of course, the company, Inflection LLC of Redwood City, Calif., did get something in return for its effort: a free copy of those 3.8 million images of records from the 1940 Census. While other companies paid $200,000 for a set of the public records, Inflection can use those records in its for-profit business, a genealogy site called Archives.com.

It's a barter system for federal records: the public gets a free official U.S. website, and the company gets free data. It's been done before, as when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office gave data to Google, which since 2006 has hosted the site for free as Google Patents.

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Do you approve of the approach that the National Archives took, giving the data away in exchange for the free website? And what stories have you found in the 1940 Census? Add your story in the comments below or on our Open Channel page on Facebook.

Inflection also was hoping to get a boost to its reputation for building websites that could withstand a storm of traffic.

Performance standards in the contract
Both the company and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had anticipated that the site would draw a crowd, as 72-year privacy restrictions expired and the records became available. What happened next lends credence to the boast that genealogy is the country's favorite hobby.

The contract says, "Drawing from NARA's experience in releasing the 1930 Census, and the experience of the National Archives of the United Kingdom when they released their 1901 and 1911 Censuses, NARA anticipates immense interest in the 1940 Census and a tremendous increase in traffic to its www.archives.gov web site." (Here's the contract in a PDF file.)

But how much of a crowd?

Here are the performance standards in the contract:

• "When browsing from one image to another, each image should be presented to the user in 3 seconds or less."
• "When moving from the standard rendered image to each zoom level (e.g. zoom 1x, 2x, 3x), the reformatted image should be rendered in 2 seconds or less."
• "Support up to 10 million hits per day while providing response times of less than three seconds for keyword searches of the descriptive metadata."
• "Support up to 25,000 concurrent users."

There was one more element in the contract, a somewhat vague requirement that Inflection increase service if demand was greater than anticipated.

• "Scale on demand in the event that 10 million hits and/or 25,000 concurrent users are exceeded to ensure that the performance requirements ... are still achieved."

The crowd certainly exceeded those levels, as the most old-fashioned sounding search term possible, "1940 Census," became a top "trending topic" on Google and Twitter.

Most people seemed to get little or nothing from the site on the first day, including Census leaders, who were prepared to show off how easy it was to look up their grandparents. When the site stuck on "loading image," as it did for many other users, the officials resorted to showing a PowerPoint presentation with the results from an earlier search.

A 'tsunami'
As Inflection's general manager, Joe Godfrey, told us last week, "We were expecting a flood, but we got a tsunami."

• On Day One, Monday, an estimated 100 million hits, or requests, with 22.5 million hits in just the first three hours. Though Inflection scrambled to improve service, the site was unusable for many users on the first day. The company added more servers through Amazon Simple Storage Service, its cloud data service provider, and also restricted some features on the site (such as zooming of images), until finally it was able to get on top of the traffic.
• On Day Two, Tuesday, the numbers haven't been totaled, but it's believed to be higher than on Day One, with an estimated 40.1 million hits in the three-hour peak.
• By Friday, the site was stable with about 60 million hits per day, and had served up more than 80 million images, or about 61 terabytes of data, the National Archives said. (That's more than the data contained in the first 20 years of astronomical observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.) The service quality was better than called for in the contract, with a load time of about 1.8 seconds per page, according to the Archives.

In other words, this might have been a good project for a "soft launch."

The contract called for extensive load testing before the release. We asked the National Archives for copies of those test results, but its spokeswoman said it wouldn't be able to provide them. But it said the site was tested to handle more than 70,000 simultaneous users — more than the contract called for, and fewer than the level that resulted.

A 'no-cost contract'
No-cost contracts are allowed under Federal Acquisition Regulation competitive procedures. This contract has a one-year base period and options to extend for four more one-year periods.

"NARA provided a copy of the data to Inflection at no cost, copies that were sold to others for $200K," said spokeswoman Laura Diachenko of the National Archives. "Why Inflection agreed to this is a better question for them, but we are very happy to have them as a partner. They have experience with Census data, and managing access to large data sets, the capabilities we were seeking for this project."

She added, "Even though this is called a no-cost contract, the Government did incur costs — in this case, aside from our resources, we also provided a copy of the 1940 Census to Inflection, at no cost.  In this particular case, we provided them data that they wanted in exchange for hosting access to this data.  Their interest was in getting the data (for their archives.com business), and for business development (attracting users to their site and eventually converting them to a subscriber."

Inflection's Godfrey said, "The primary value for us was in building our brand/notoriety, leveraging and expanding our technical expertise/infrastructure and helping to getting this extremely valuable record collection into the hands of as many people as possible.  Also, our engineering team (like all great engineers) are motivated by tackling challenging technical problems, and so the team was very excited to work on this."

Competition
All or most of the 1940 Census is now available free from several other companies, which had to pay for the public records. As a sort of loss leader, other genealogy sites, even the commercial ones, are making the 1940 Census records available for free, to subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

Here's how the race worked: All the commercial sites that chose to buy the data for $200,000 were handed a rack of hard drives full of 20 terabytes of images, taken from 4,745 rolls of microfilm, at 12:01 a.m. on April 2, or 72 years and a day after the Census Day in 1940.

By Thursday, a relatively new genealogy site called myHeritage, was the first to have all the images online. Also making images available for free are Ancestry.com, a commercial site, and FamilySearch.org, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Thousands of volunteers are working on the next step: indexing the records by name, just as previous Census releases have been indexed by volunteers. Until those indexes are finished, searching is done only by address or neighborhood.

Your view
Do you approve of the approach that the National Archives took, giving the data away in exchange for the free website? And what stories have you found in the 1940 Census? Add your story in the comments below or on our Open Channel page on Facebook. See our earlier story for tips on searching the 1940 Census.

WASHINGTON -- Charges against five alleged co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks were referred to trial by the Pentagon on Wednesday, and the men could face the death penalty.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi are (once again) charged with planning and executing the attacks on Sept 11, 2001, leading to the deaths of 2,976 people.

The convening authority of the Office of Military Commissions referred the case to a capital military commission, so these men are eligible for the death penalty.

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The five men have been charged before, but charges were dropped against them in 2009 when President Barack Obama ordered a review of the Military Commissions process, hoping to move the process to a civilian court.

In May 2011, military prosecutors filed charges against all five again. Wednesday's announcement means that the convening authority has agreed they should stand trial.

The next step is for the chief judge of the Military Commissions Trial Judiciary to assign a military judge to the case and for a date to be set for their arraignment. According to the rules, they are supposed to be arraigned within 30 days of being served the charges. 

They will be tried at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Jim Miklaszewski is the chief Pentagon correspondent for NBC News and Courtney Kube is the Pentagon producer. 

More from msnbc.com and NBC News:

• Britain faces calls to ban Syria Olympic chief from London Games
• Muslim Brotherhood shocks Egypt with presidential run
• Myanmar house of fear becomes house of hope
• Chinese artist Ai Weiwei sets up live webcams at his home
• 'Cute-and-cuddly' primates from Indonesia sold illegally as pets

 

The war against al-Qaida is at a “critical moment” as the “much weaker” terrorist group looks to regroup in Africa, according to the author of a new report.

Valentina Soria, a counterterrorism research analyst at U.K. think-tank RUSI, told msnbc.com by telephone that the network had been damaged by the death of Osama bin Laden and other leading figures.

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Her report, titled “Global Jihad Sustained Through Africa,” which was published at 7 p.m. ET Tuesday, said al-Qaida’s leadership was looking for partnerships with like-minded organizations in parts of Africa – such as al-Shabab and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb -- to “regroup and re-energize itself.”

West 'unsighted' by shift
Soria told msnbc.com that the war on terror was at a key point, as while al-Qaida was weaker, Western counterterrorism officials had been “unsighted” by the apparent shift to Africa.

“I think it’s certainly an important junction, a critical moment because obviously counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan … and Yemen have been quite successful in decapitating the organization [al-Qaida], a lot of important figures have been removed,” Soria said.

“There is no doubt the organization is much weaker than it was a few years ago,” she added.

The report said that “despite greater co-operation, there seems to be an unresolved tension between transnational aims of al-Qaida-core and the local grievances of African partners.”

It added it was unclear whether al-Qaida was making a “conscious effort” to regroup in the Horn of Africa and sub-Saharan Africa or if this was the result of “displacement” and cooperation on an “ad hoc basis.”

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Islamist militant group al-Shabab, which operates in Somalia, has merged with al-Qaida’s core group, a move “officially endorsed” by al-Qaida’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in February of this year.

'Arc of regional instability'
The report noted that U.S. counterterrorism officials had been voicing concern about the prospect of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which is based in Algeria, using local instability and weak or absent government to expand its zone of influence.

“If correct, this assessment would raise the worrying prospect of an arc of regional instability encompassing the whole Sahara-Sahel strip and extending to east Africa, which the now weakened al-Qaida-core could well exploit to regroup, reorganize and reinvigorate its terrorist campaign in the West,” the report said.

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In Mali, south of Algeria, Tuareg rebels on Sunday seized the ancient city of Timbuktu, following a coup that overthrew Mali's government last month.

 “[Al-Qaida] appears to be adopting a strategy of ‘going native,’ which implies seizing upon and exploiting local grievances with the ultimate aim of securing a stable foothold in volatile countries,” the report said.

The report said that counterterrorism officials “privately acknowledge that they are unsighted” and are “working hard to understand how far the jihadist challenge may be migrating” to Somalia, Kenya, north Nigeria and parts of West Africa.

“From West to East Africa, across the Sub-Saharan region, we may well be witnessing a new phase of decisive developments that could trigger further turmoil,” the report said.

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