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From Los Angeles Times

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9/11: A decade after

Day of terror in New York: Pages from a reporter's 9/11 journal

by Geraldine Baum, Los Angeles Times

August 21, 2011

Reporting from New York

The brown-leather journal is my passport to Sept. 11, 2001. When I hold it in my hands, images and memories are no further away than yesterday.

I had no notebook with me when my husband and I dropped our children, 8 and 4, at school that morning. Then came news of the attacks at the World Trade Center, and my husband pulled the journal from his briefcase. He pressed it into my hand so I would have something to write on.

Rereading it, I wonder why I wrote in blue ink for several pages and switched to black. Why did I tear out pages and leave some with just a few scrawled words: "It looks like Beirut." "Whole south face coming down." "Fire dept. wiped out?"

Between chaotic interviews, I tried to get down what I was seeing: "Two guys, young guys, standing on the corner, looking up. One is screaming, 'Oh my God,' like were at a ballgame … a man w/a towel waving and then they jumped … two people jumping together. I don't know if they were office mates. They drifted down so slowly."

Some of this doesn't make sense: Why did I think people were jumping rather than falling? Tally marks appear for each person. There are eight. Was that all of them or had I turned away?

The journal had been an anniversary present to my husband. On that day, it served another purpose.

********

"Times Square, 9:15, people watching the zipper, no one moving at rush hour … people crying, on cell phones."

Times Square was frozen as people gaped up at the news crawl beneath the Jumbotron flashing a replay of the second plane crashing into the trade center towers.

The subway had shut down after only a few stops and there were no cabs, so I shoved $40 through the window of a beat-up car stopped at a light and asked for a ride downtown. The driver, a young man, waved away the money and said jump in.

Traffic stopped at 14th Street. I got out and jogged for several blocks before I hopped, uninvited this time, into another woman's cab. She didn't protest when I ordered the driver to tail a speeding firetruck. That's illegal, but on this day he did it.

At Canal Street, less than a mile from the burning towers, a cop on foot blocked the cab.

It turned out he actually wasn't a cop, but a uniformed guard, one of many citizens who took charge that day — directing traffic, handing out bottled water, crowding aboard flatbed trucks racing downtown to help any way they could.

"A businessman in a button-down shirt, open, hair completely matted. He's staring straight ahead, his hand firmly gripped around a bulging briefcase. He is in some kind of daze."

Heading south toward the trade center meant going against the tide, threading through a throng of disoriented people breaded in gray dust and dirt, their clothes disheveled.

On a side street three blocks north of the towers, a police lieutenant was examining a smoking hunk of jet plane engine that had landed next to a telephone booth. He said it had "knocked over a black lady and set her arms on fire." She had been taken to St. Vincent's Hospital with her skin hanging.

"A big roar. 10am. building collapsed. Cop cars going 50 mph backwards up Church. South building came down"

This was the first collapse. A wall of thick smoke and debris surged outward. Ash began to fill my eyes and throat. I banged on the glass door of a deli. Inside, two guys in white aprons shook their heads and mouthed "no." That was really upsetting. Finally I took refuge in a building lobby. People were gagging, vomiting grit. We broke into an emergency closet and retrieved plastic jugs of water.

"eerie eerie in lower Manh. Everyone had ducked into buildings. It was like people say is nuclear winter."

Outside it looked more like a Sunday morning after a heavy winter storm, but without the majesty of white. No footprints, no car tracks, just ankle-deep gray dust and rubble.

After a bit, I went back to Church Street to get a better view of the tower still standing. A policeman was telling a small group of people on a corner under the tower that the Pentagon had been attacked. My cellphone was dead and there was no way to know what was going on outside the cloud of dust.

That's when I first noticed people plummeting. How long did I stand there? Walter Pilipiak, an insurance broker who had just led his co-workers down 89 flights of the second tower, appeared. I took down his name wrong, spelling it "Pipiak." I was getting his phone number when there was another roar. The second tower.

What did it fall on? I remember thinking. Was it piled up in the East River?

Walter, a stranger just minutes ago, cupped his hand under my elbow and we sprinted ahead of the oncoming cloud.

********

"Suddenly the skyline is changed."

I can't tell whether those are my words or someone else's. I remember hunting for a pay phone to unload my interviews. But I was also consumed by concern for my children. Inside a small secondhand bookshop, the elderly owner let me call my husband's office. The children were safe, but he was beside himself. The last he knew, I was headed for the towers, he would later tell me.

After calling in my notes, I went out to a barricade where people were asking an FBI agent how they could help, but he wouldn't let them past. A nurse from Stamford, Conn., wanted to know where to go. He had no good answer.

"1pm, office chairs, gurneys, 20, covered w/white sheets … dozens of medical people in green scrubs waiting… beds waiting."

In Greenwich Village, outside St. Vincent's Hospital, university students had formed lines behind people holding up handmade signs that read "O+" "O-" and other blood types. St. Vincent's doctors and nurses hovered at the entrance. But no one came. Where were the wounded?

Kelly Badillo, a World Trade Center elevator operator, agreed to talk as he made his way to the river hoping to catch a ferry home to Jersey City. He said he'd seen charred bodies and people on fire that morning. Everybody who could ran out, he said, and then he added: "The rest, well, I don't know what's left of them."

Across the street, inside a small flower shop, a young woman with a dozen ear piercings was cutting lilies. The smell, the relief, was overwhelming. She gave me a Diet Coke and let me use the shop's phone. She also mentioned that she'd gone that week to get a gun permit. I remember thinking, if only a gun could have protected us from all this. I took her card to remind myself to call and thank her for her kindness.

"7 WTC is billowing in smoke. Every inch of West Side Highway is covered with emergency vehicles. Stopped, not moving. Hazmats, ladder 138, 262, 307, 136, helicopters. River oddly empty."

More interviews: firemen, a plastic surgeon, three Orthodox Jewish EMTs and several ironworkers from the local union. They had torches and tanks of oxygen and acetylene to burn through the rubble.

Police were holding them back, knowing that the trade center's building No. 7 was about to fall. At 6 p.m. it did. In a few minutes, police opened the highway and the rescuers all rushed toward the ruins.

The writing is dense on the pages of the diary, with words running up the sides and into the crevices. I think I was getting tired. I know my feet were killing me. I was wearing backless shoes.

Linda Solomon, a high school friend, lived in SoHo. Maybe she could lend me some sneakers. We wore the same size.

"What the hell are they doing?"

On West Broadway, two women were eating and drinking wine at a cafe as though thousands of people hadn't just perished. As though smoke wasn't still pouring from the tip of Manhattan. As though a charred stench wasn't still wafting through SoHo. Linda wasn't home.

Near Washington Square Park, I flagged down a police officer to ask whether there was any public transportation that would get me to the Times office in midtown. He offered a ride, which stunned me. They never do that. I sank into the back seat of his cruiser.

I hadn't realized how tired I was and sounded almost casual when I asked, "How's it going?"

"We lost our whole day tour," he said. He started crying.

Hours later, I finally made it home to the Upper West Side, where my little night owl, Louisa, opened the door. "Mommy, Mommy, your hair is gray!" she screeched. Ben was sound asleep, but as promised, I woke him. Fear welled up in his face. He grabbed me by the shoulders. "I'm scared, Mom," he said, and started crying.

I showered, put on a pair of white pajamas and took both of my children to bed with me.

********

This summer I went back to find the flower shop. It is gone, replaced by a chain coffee shop known for cutting-edge barista technology. St. Vincent's is also gone, now that a charity hospital is no longer needed in the upgraded neighborhood. Its main building is slated to become apartments.

My friend Linda is gone as well, to Canada.

Kelly Badillo was out of work for six months after the attack. He drank too much and was plagued by nightmares, he recalled when we had lunch the other day. But his union eventually found him a new job running the elevator at the Bank of New York, a sturdy old cement building close to the trade center site.

"I was hoping after 10 years everything would be finished and the trade center would be open," says Kelly, now 50. "I think it will get done before I retire. Then I can leave, move to Florida, knowing what I went through is behind me."

Walter Pilipiak, the insurance broker whose name I had misspelled, has a new office near the site.

"I always forget you're not a blond," he said this summer. My dark hair had been covered in ash when we first met.

We had seen each other only once since Sept. 11 — the following Monday, when I showed up at 5 a.m. at his suburban New Jersey home to chronicle his return to work in a midtown high-rise.

In the last decade a lot has happened to Walter, now 58. He left one job and landed another; one son is about to marry and the other is just out of college. His wife, Carol, who had also been working in the financial district, was more traumatized than he had initially understood. She still won't set foot in Manhattan.

In the months after Sept. 11, Walter was preoccupied with trying to find who led him and his co-workers to a stairwell, saving all their lives. Finally, he was able to identify "our hero" — Pablo Ortiz, a Port Authority employee who had died helping others. A photograph of Ortiz's family hangs on Walter's office wall.

During our visit, he kept fiddling with a charm on a chain hanging around his neck. It's a replica of the twin towers. First he bought a cheap one from a tourist vendor. Then he had one made of 14-karat gold. "This is my little baggage," he says. "That was my World Trade Center, where I became president of a company. That was my life and it is what it is."

********

I am still not sure why we save mementos from a day we would all just as soon forget.

Walter boxed up the tassel loafers and the hockey jersey he'd worn around his neck as he descended the tower. Kelly Badillo kept a ring of about 30 or 40 keys. They are to utility closets, lockers and offices that no longer exist.

Just an hour after the towers had fallen, Ryan Sheehan, then 17, filled a bottle with the soot. Ryan had been looking for his mother. I talked to him briefly that day. "I'm going to save this," he said.

How could he have already been thinking about a time when the calamity would be over? The diary holds no explanation.

But just as they saved shoes and keys and dust, I still have my have journal.

I also live with two realities of Sept. 11 that still stagger me — the people plunging off the buildings and the children. Nearly 3,000 children, average age 9, lost a parent. My son was close to that age.

Like many parents, I measure my life by the progress of my children. We will soon be dropping the kids off at school again.

Louisa is starting at a big public high school in the Bronx. And on Sept. 12, we get to take Ben to college.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/september11/la-na-towers-journal-20110821,0,3496237,print.story

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A Japanese internment camp revisited

Hundreds of Japanese Americans interned during World War II at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming return — many for the first time — for a reunion and museum opening.

by Esmeralda Bermudez, Los Angeles Times

August 21, 2011

Reporting from Heart Mountain, Wyo.

When they first came to this corner of Wyoming 69 years ago, shops and restaurants in the tiny town of Cody hung banners warning "No Japs Allowed." A local newspaper announced their arrival with the headline, "TEN THOUSAND JAPS TO BE INTERNED HERE."

But this weekend, as hundreds of Japanese Americans interned during World War II at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center returned, many for the first time, new signs greeted them: "Welcome all Japanese Americans. Congratulations."

They returned to see the land, now fields of lima beans and alfalfa, and to see the opening of a long-awaited museum at the site that will preserve their stories. They came to see each other.

Leading them in this pilgrimage was a pint-sized man with the improbable name of Bacon Sakatani. On Friday, the 81-year-old climbed on top of a hotel chair and screamed out marching orders:

"OK! Come on, come on! You have to get your badge. You have to take your photo. We have to get going!"

Sakatani is known as Mr. Heart Mountain, the Heart of Heart Mountain. He's such a force within the group that an entire room honors him at the museum, which was dedicated Saturday.

He talks fast, moves quickly and knows more of the 10,000 men, women and children who lived for three years at the base of the jagged mountain than anyone else. It seems everyone — internees and their children and their children's children — knows him or at least knows of him.

"Hey, you're Bacon!" they call out every few minutes, their faces filled with joy at finally meeting him in person. "I've heard all about you."

For nearly three decades, Sakatani, who lives in West Covina, has made it his mission to preserve the history of the internment — when the federal government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans to leave their homes on the West Coast in the hysteria following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

As the internees and their families poured into the registration room at the local Holiday Inn, Sakatani ran around at his usual frantic pace, adjusting tables, guiding photographers, checking schedules and welcoming guests.

Eizo Nishiura, with glasses and a Hawaiian shirt, caught his eye in the commotion.

"Hey, I know you," Sakatani said, turning his name tag around to see it. "Your brother was a Boy Scout in the camp and we'd run around together."

Nishiura, 76, nodded his head, smiling. He was 7 years old when he was brought to the dusty, wind-swept camp, six years younger than Bacon, who picked up his funny nickname as a child because someone once held him over a small bonfire like bacon. Nishiura came to Heart Mountain with his brothers, parents, grandparents and one great-grandparent.

Now, he and three of his brothers had flown in from New Mexico, Pennsylvania and California to see the desolate land that was once their home.

Many of the returning internees were children when they arrived at Heart Mountain. The experience was an adventure. They remember the baseball diamonds that turned into ice-skating rinks in the winter, the swimming hole dug by their fathers, the chipmunks and rabbits they chased in the hills when they sneaked out of the camp.

They remember the fence posts with barbed wire that caged them, the machine gun mounts and the guards in the guard towers, vigilant day and night.

Heart Mountain was one of 10 internment camps around the country, 740 acres with rows upon rows of wood- and tar-paper-lined barracks in the Shoshone Valley. Thousands came from California.

In 1945, when the war ended and the families were released — to start again from nothing in most cases — the barracks, along with the government-issued beds and the coal-fired potbelly stoves, were sold and scattered across the farmland.

Sakatani was 16 when he left the camp. His parents never spoke about the internment for as long as they lived.

Sakatani didn't think about it much until 1982, when he heard that a group of internees, like those from other camps, were organizing a reunion. He helped create an exhibit. It was through his research that he realized the injustice of the internment.

"I was flabbergasted when I saw those headlines," he said. "I couldn't believe how the government had fooled us, how they misled us."

In 1985, he helped install a memorial here for Japanese American soldiers who died in the war. In 1994, he tracked down two original barracks in the Shoshone Valley and, with help from other internees, had one put on display at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo. A few years later, he urged the mayor of Powell, a town near Heart Mountain, to write a letter acknowledging that the internment was wrong.

He has traveled to Heart Mountain more than 20 times, taking back to his home in West Covina old fence posts, strings of barbed wire, and an original potbelly stove. He has collected thousands of archived documents and news clippings.

In photos of their 11 reunions — in Salt Lake City, San Jose and Las Vegas — Sakatani's face is always missing. He was the one behind the camera, documenting their moments.

On Friday afternoon, as he made his way up a gravel road in his blue SUV, he came across Nancy Takano, 70.

She stood near the soldier memorial, staring up at Heart Mountain, its shiny peak several miles away. Her husband stood by her side. She was only 3 when her family arrived at the camp from Coachella; she has no memories of the place, save a few lyrics of a song she learned in school: Ten little black birds all in a row …

"I know I was in Block 8," she said.

"Oh, Block 8. That was right over there," Sakatani said, pointing far away to neat rows of lima beans that stretch for acres. "I have Block 9, so you and me were neighbors."

Takano squinted her eyes and tried to make something out of the view, but she appeared overwhelmed.

"I wish my dad could see this," she said in a quiet voice.

As the opening dinner got underway, Sakatani was walking toward the stage when someone shouted, "Bacon!"

It was Norman Y. Mineta, the former congressman and secretary of Transportation, who spent three years at the camp as a boy. He was a Boy Scout and befriended a local kid who belonged to the same troop, but lived outside the camp fences. That boy was Alan K. Simpson, who later became a U.S. senator.

Mineta went up to Sakatani and pulled him in for a hug. "I want to thank you for absolutely everything you've done."

The next day, as a crowd gathered under a white tent to celebrate the opening of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center, Mineta and Simpson looked on as Sakatani took part in the ceremonial ribbon-cutting with two other people. Instead of a ribbon, they cut a strip of barbed wire.

Off to the side stood the peak of Heart Mountain, which was off-limits to the internees seven decades ago.

On Sunday, a group of nearly 100 former internees, now in their 70s and 80s, will head up the mountain, many for the first time.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-heart-mountain-20110821,0,7728788,print.story

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Opinion

For juvenile lifers, a chance

SB 9 would let youthful offenders request a parole hearing. That's both sensible and humane.

August 21, 2011

California lawmakers have repeatedly missed opportunities to bring some fairness, rationality and humanity to juvenile sentencing. They get another chance this week, and they should take it. The Assembly should pass SB 9, a bill to give offenders sentenced as minors to life without parole a chance to request a parole hearing.

Assembly Democrats who have voted against earlier versions of this bill for fear of being labeled soft on crime should look at the facts. SB 9 would not automatically open prison doors for violent criminals. It would not eliminate life-without-parole sentences for any offender, adult or juvenile. It would merely give inmates serving life terms for crimes they committed before they turned 18 a limited opportunity to seek a 25-years-to-life sentence — and for the first time, a slim chance of parole before they die.

California currently has 295 people serving non-parolable sentences for crimes they committed in their youth. Most were involved in homicides, but about 45% of them never pulled the trigger; they were convicted because they acted as lookouts or were involved in a concurrent crime when the homicide took place, usually at the hands of an adult accomplice. Underscoring the barbarity of the no-parole sentences is the fact that the actual killer often serves a shorter sentence or at least is eligible for parole.

Most other states, and every other nation in the world, have rejected juvenile life-without-parole sentences because they recognize the basic truth that juveniles are fundamentally different from adults. Their brains are less developed. They are less able to control their impulses. They are less capable of moral reasoning. They have less emotional power to resist peer pressure. They have a greater capacity to be rehabilitated, if given the chance.

They still should be held responsible for heinous crimes, and even sentenced to life in prison if appropriate. But the chance to get out provides a sliver of hope and a reason for self-improvement. Prison culture often rewards bad behavior, and youths who are locked up for life have less incentive to rehabilitate if they know they'll never be released. Giving these offenders hope for a future has the additional benefit of improving prison safety.

Another advantage of SB 9 is that California taxpayers would save money. The cost of new court and parole hearings would be more than made up for by the savings the state would reap by paroling former child felons. And the bill would help divert the state from two policy dead-ends: filling overburdened prisons with inmates devoid of hope, and dismissing young people who fall into lives of violence as incapable of redemption.

There are racial implications as well. Nationwide, young African Americans are sentenced to life without parole at 10 times the rate of white youths who committed similar crimes. Latinos are sentenced at five times the rate. Racial disparities in sentencing warrant a much broader examination, but in the meantime the differences in rates among races with non-parolable life sentences point to inequity — and cruelty — in the justice system.

The most noteworthy aspect of SB 9 is how astonishingly modest it is. It would apply only to people sentenced for crimes they committed before they turned 18. After serving 15 years, they could apply for a resentencing hearing. If such a hearing were granted, they could ask the judge to commute their sentences to 25 years to life. If resentenced, prisoners would still have to convince the parole board that they were remorseful and had made gains in rehabilitation — after serving a quarter of a century in prison. They could seek rehearings a maximum of three times, the first after serving 15 years, when most would be in their 30s and well into adulthood. They would get a second chance for resentencing after serving 20 years, and a final chance after 25 years.

This bill is even narrower than earlier versions. Similar steps have been taken by states, such as Texas, that once were dismissed in some parts of the country as intolerant and unenlightened but recently have jumped ahead of California in implementing compassionate juvenile justice and prison policy. The Legislature has dithered long enough on eliminating juvenile life without parole. It's time to pass the bill and send it to Gov. Jerry Brown for signature.

An e-ripoff of the U.S.

Disbursing public funds electronically sets up the federal government to be victimized by massive fraud.

by Malcolm Sparrow

August 21, 2011

Last week, a Los Angeles jury convicted a local pastor and his wife of fraudulently claiming $14.2 million from Medicare. The culprits recruited parishioners to help run fake durable medical equipment companies, and spent the proceeds on expensive cars and other luxuries. Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. Lanny A. Breuer described their efforts as "persistent and brazen" and said "they treated the Medicare program like a personal till."

Around the country, a never-ending stream of Medicare and Medicaid rip-off stories suggest many people now use these programs as personal tills. In July 2010, authorities exposed and shut down a more organized scheme, charging 94 conspirators from five cities who had stolen $251 million from Medicare.

Three months later, in October 2010, 52 members of an Armenian American organized-crime ring were arrested and charged with $163 million in fraudulent billing.

Scores of reports over the last decade catalog completely implausible Medicare and Medicaid claims paid, apparently without a hiccup, for patients who were dead, imprisoned or previously deported from the country and forbidden to return. A significant number of claims involved prescribing physicians who were long-since dead.

What makes these healthcare programs so vulnerable to fake billings and at such a scale? It's not so much the healthcare policy itself, nor the program design; the vulnerability stems from the payment mechanism the government has chosen to use. Most Medicare and Medicaid funds are paid out electronically and automatically, in response to electronic claims received from a vast spectrum of providers. Most claims are adjudicated by computers using rule-based systems, with no human intervention at all.

Fraud perpetrators have only to learn the rules; then they can submit thousands of claims electronically and with relative impunity. If they get things wrong, they'll receive helpful computer-generated messages explaining their mistake. Those committing fraud find it easy to get paid for fabricated claims because the government's systems check for billing correctness but not for truthfulness. The simple rule for getting rich quick through healthcare fraud is "bill your lies correctly."

In 1995, as electronic claims processing was becoming more widespread, one seasoned Medicaid fraud investigator warned: "Thieves get to steal megabucks at the speed of light, and we get to chase after them in a horse and buggy. No rational businessman would ever invent a system like this." Nevertheless, the government continues to find the use of such systems attractive, mostly because the processing efficiencies are obvious and tangible.

This problem is not restricted to healthcare. Federal and state agencies increasingly disburse funds through such "electronic signal in, electronic payment out" (ESI-EPO for short) systems. The economic stimulus package, for example, included 56 tax provisions projected to cost $288 billion. Ten of these have already been designated high risk because of the likelihood of fraud made easier with electronic processing. Submit a qualifying tax return electronically, and if it has been completed correctly, out will come an electronic payment with no human intervention and little or no validation of the supporting evidence.

Payments for the stimulus fund's first-time home-buyer credit were found to have included $9 million to 1,300 prisoners, 241 of whom were serving life sentences when they purportedly bought homes. More than 10,000 taxpayers received credits for homes also claimed by other taxpayers, and one home was claimed by 67 claimants. The home-buyer program paid out more than $23 billion in total, and claims sampled after the fact showed dead people and young children showing up as "home buyers," in patterns eerily reminiscent of healthcare fraud.

Another stimulus component, residential energy credits, disbursed $5.8 billion in 2009 for residential energy-saving improvements. Once again, "homeowners" included prisoners and infants, and — based on a review of a random sample of claims — 30% of the recipients appeared not even to own their own homes.

The recipe for disaster is now clear. Whatever the nature of the payments — welfare supports, reimbursements, health claims, tax credits, incentive payments or subsidies — pay them electronically. Set up the system with honest claimants in mind. Allow claims, and any supporting documentation, to be submitted electronically. Set the administrative budget low enough that the bulk of the claims have to be paid on trust, without verification. Use computerized rule-based systems to ensure consistency and predictability in the way claims are paid.

In terms of the underlying public policy objectives, this is exactly the right thing to do, serving the genuinely deserving in a most efficient manner. Unfortunately, this also creates perfect targets for fraud: giant, predictable, utterly transparent electronic cash machines, with insufficient audit and investigative resources behind them to cope with the inevitable onslaught.

To make things really dangerous, add a degree of urgency to the public purpose (as with the stimulus package). Urgency tends to trump caution and raises policymakers' perception of the "business-acceptable risk." And if it's a really "valuable" program, supporters and officials will be loath to hear any criticism of it, which will incline them to discount or downplay reports of extensive fraud.

It is no longer sensible to disburse public funds, on trust, through electronic systems. The commensurate risks are enormous and seriously underestimated. Organized-crime groups, prisoners and a host of other criminal entrepreneurs troll government websites looking for programs with these vulnerabilities. Such systems must now either be fortified with substantial resources for routine validation or, preferably, be phased out altogether through structural reforms.

Fixing these vulnerabilities offers substantial promise for long-term deficit reduction, in a form that both political parties could support. But one important political obstacle remains: finding the courage to admit how serious and pervasive this problem has become.

Absent some fundamental reassessment of electronic payment systems, we are doomed to continue dealing with serious fraud threats on a case-by-case rather than on a structural basis. Happily, each case detected provides some (false) assurance because it was, after all, detected. And each successive scandal offers an opportunity for officials to proclaim, once again, their "zero tolerance" for fraud in vital public programs.

I have zero tolerance for fruit flies. But they just keep coming, despite my protestations, until I put the fruit away.

Professor Malcolm K. Sparrow of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government is the author of "License to Steal: How Fraud Bleeds America's Health Care System." He is also deputy chair of the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, appointed by President Obama to advise on protecting the integrity of the economic stimulus package.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-sparrow-medicare-fraud-20110821,0,2283350,print.story

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