Melvin W. Russell, who created a stir in military circles in January when he proposed moving the Pentagon-funded but editorially independent newspaper Stars and Stripes from downtown Washington, DC, to rural Fort Meade, Virginia, served as acting director of the Defense Media Activity (DMA) from October 2009 until he retired on April 30, 2012.

 

DMA, formerly known as the American Forces Information Service, is the communications media propaganda arm of the Department of Defense, employing 2,400 active duty military, civilian, and contract personnel at 8 U.S. locations and 33 permanent overseas sites.

 

Born circa 1939, Russell earned a B.S. in Chemistry and Secondary Education at Texas A&M University in 1961, and an M.A. in Television and Film Production at the University of Texas in 1970.

 

Commissioned in the U.S. Army through the ROTC program in 1961, Russell served more than 22 years as a Signal Corps officer. Early career assignments included Fort Hood, Texas; Naples, Italy; and Hue, Vietnam. After earning his M.A. in TV and film, Russell was assigned to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he ran the television, film, and radio facilities for the next three years and made the first Army conversion form black-and-white to color.

 

From 1973 to 1975, Russell served in an exchange program with the British Army, where he established the first television facility at the engineering department of the Royal Signals School. After serving two years at the Pentagon as a senior staff officer responsible for Army audio visual activities, in 1977 Russell took command of the Army Audio Visual Activity, which he ran for almost five years. In 1981, Russell became the assistant director of the American Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS), serving in this position until his military retirement in 1983, when he became the operations manager for D-K Associates, an audio-visual firm in Rockville, Maryland.

 

In 1984, Russell returned to AFRTS, this time as director, and became acting director of DMA in October 2009. He also served as the senior manager of Department of Defense visual information, web, print, new media and broadcasting.

 

Russell counts among his most satisfying achievements arranging for members of the military abroad to see live television broadcasts from the United States, including sports events, beginning in the 1980s, eventually reaching Navy ships at sea in 1997. Today AFRTS provide eight TV channels and twelve radio services.

 

“The bottom line for me,” he said in a farewell interview, “is that when you go overseas, you don’t leave the States behind. You need to feel that connection. So if you are in Afghanistan at an outpost, you should be able to watch a live NFL game.”

 

“I’ve been unbelievably lucky in life,” he concluded, “being allowed to do what I love doing and getting paid for it. I don’t see how you can beat that. You just can’t.”

-Matt Bewig, David Wallechinsky

 

A Vietnam Era veteran who started his cemetery career as a day laborer has risen to be the number one man at Arlington National Cemetery, the crown jewel of the national cemeteries, which conducts about 27 funerals per day. Patrick K. Hallinan was appointed acting superintendent of Arlington National Cemetery on June 10, 2010, in the wake of a scandal involving lost remains, mismarked graves and financial irregularities that severely tarnished Arlington’s reputation. The appointment was made permanent as of October 10, 2010.

 

Arlington National Cemetery is the nation’s largest national cemetery, and the only one administered by the Army; all others are administered by the National Cemetery Administration (NCA) of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Arlington is also the only national cemetery that routinely holds graveside services and provides full military honors for eligible veterans.

 

Born in 1956, Hallinan served as an infantry squad leader with the Marine Corps during the Vietnam Era. Hallinan joined the NCA as a temporary laborer at Long Island National Cemetery in New York in 1977. At the same time, Hallinan attended college under the G.I. Bill, earning an associate’s degree in liberal arts at Suffolk Community College in Long Island, and a B.A. in Social Science (pre-law).

 

Rather than attending law school, however, Hallinan decided to build a career in the national cemeteries system. In September 1978, he was one of the original 37 employees who opened Calverton National Cemetery in Long Island, New York. Over the next 16 years, Hallinan gradually advanced at Calverton, from day laborer to work supervisor to assistant cemetery director. In August 1994, Hallinan was named director of Calverton National Cemetery.

 

In June 2003, Hallinan left Calverton to join VA headquarters in Washington, DC, as associate director of the Office of Field Programs, and he was promoted to director on October 20, 2008. As director, Hallinan had oversight responsibilities for five Memorial Service Network offices and 131 national cemeteries.

 

Hallinan and his wife Doreen reside in Bristow, Virginia. They have a son, Matthew, and a daughter, Rachel.

-Matt Bewig

 

Official Biography (pdf)

The Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), which manages the Transportation Department’s research and development programs with the goal of creating technologies that can be used to improve transportation, has an acting administrator who has worked at the agency since 2010. On June 2, 2011, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and RITA Administrator Peter Appel appointed Gregory D. Winfree to become the next deputy administrator on July 15. Upon Appel’s resignation, Winfree became the Acting Administrator on October 8, 2011.

 

Born in New York circa 1964, Winfree earned a B.S. in Communications and Public Relations at St. John’s University in 1986 and a J.D. from Georgetown University in 1989, where he served as a lead articles editor for The Tax Lawyer, the A.B.A. journal of taxation.

 

After a stint at a Washington, D.C., law firm, about which he later wrote a chapter in the book My First Year as a Lawyer: Real-World Stories from America's Lawyers, Winfree served as a trial attorney in the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section of the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. Then, he embarked on an in-house career pathway, working as senior litigation counsel at Union Carbide and as director of litigation at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which is now part of Pfizer.

 

Winfree worked as chief litigation counsel for Freeport-McMoRan Corporation, which through its subsidiary, Phelps Dodge, is one of the world’s largest producers of copper, gold and other industrial and precious metals. During these years, Winfree resided in Phoenix, Arizona, where he also founded the Eight Iron Golf Apparel Company to market his two patents, registered in 1995, for a “sport shirt or other garment provided with a load-distributing shoulder yoke for relieving the strain resulting from carrying a golf bag.” 

 

Winfree was also the co-founder of Charting Your Own Course (CYOC), a professional networking organization for minority in-house attorneys.

 

Winfree left the private sector for public service again in 2010, and was sworn in on March 15, 2010, as chief counsel at RITA. 

-Matt Bewig

In the middle of one of its largest ever projects–the rollout of a new air traffic control system, dubbed “NextGen”–the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lost Administrator Randy Babbitt, who resigned on December 6, 2011, days after he was arrested for drunk driving outside of Washington, DC. FAA, which oversees the US commercial aviation industry for the Department of Transportation, with a mission to promote the airline industry and ensure the safety of its passengers, has been led ever since by Acting Administrator Michael P. Huerta, whom President Obama has nominated to be the next permanent FAA Administrator.

 

Born in California circa 1956 to Solomon T. Huerta and Della Montoya Huerta, Michael Huerta earned a B.A. in Political Science at the University of California at Riverside in 1978 and an M.A. in International Relations at Princeton University in 1980.

 

Huerta served as commissioner of New York City’s Department of Ports, International Trade and Commerce from 1986 to 1989. In January 1989, he left to serve as the executive director of the Port of San Francisco, where he remained until 1993. From 1993 to 1998, he served in two senior positions at the Department of Transportation, first as an associate deputy secretary to Secretary Federico Peña from 1993 to 1997, and as chief of staff to Peña’s successor, Rodney E. Slater.

 

Huerta left government to serve as managing director of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, a position he held from 1998 to 2002, focusing in part on transportation issues. In 2001, he even registered as a lobbyist for the Salt Lake City Olympic Organizing Committee. While in Salt Lake City, Huerta worked closely with presumptive Republican 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who was president and CEO of the 2002 Games.

 

After the games were finished, Huerta went to work as group president of the Transportation Solutions Group at Affiliated Computer Services, a Xerox subsidiary specializing in business processes and information technology, from 2002 to April 2009.

 

Huerta joined then President-elect Obama’s transition team, working on transportation issues. President Obama nominated Huerta as deputy administrator of the FAA in December 2009, but his Senate confirmation was held up by Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), who wanted more fighter drones patrolling the Mexico–United States border near Corpus Christi. After waiting more than five months, Huerta became deputy administrator of the FAA on June 23, 2010. 

 

Huerta is married to Ann Sowder, and they have a son, Matthew. A lifelong Democrat, since 1990 Huerta has contributed $30,000 to political candidates and causes, all but one of them Democrats, including $6,500 to the Democratic National Committee, $750 to President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, $2,300 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2007, and $2,300 to Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Huerta’s lone Republican contribution was to Mitt Romney’s 2008 primary campaign, to which Huerta donated $2,300.

-Matt Bewig

 

Testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation (pdf)

Head of Federal Aviation Administration Resigns after Drunk Driving Arrest (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

One of the most oppressive post-Soviet dictatorships, the central Asian nation of Tajikistan has won the friendship of the U.S. government through its cooperation with Washington’s wars in the region. President Barack Obama on April 16 nominated career diplomat Susan Marsh Elliott to be the next ambassador in Dushanbe. If confirmed by the Senate, Elliott will be the second female U.S. Ambassador to Tajikistan after her predecessor’s predecessor, Tracey Ann Jacobson, who is currently Ambassador to Kosovo.

 

Born circa 1952, Elliott earned a B.S. at Skidmore College in Sarasota Springs, New York, in 1974, an M.S. at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York, and a doctorate in Nursing at Indiana University in 1987, with a thesis entitled “Variables associated with organizational effectiveness of schools of nursing.” She taught Nursing at Ball State University and the University of Virginia.

 

Elliott joined the Foreign Service in 1990 after working as a nurse at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Her early career postings included service in Lima, Peru, from 1990 to 1992, and Moscow, Russia, from 1992 to 1994. She served as a desk officer from 1994 to 1995 in the Office of the Coordinator for Regional Conflicts in the New Independent States, where she reported on conflicts in the Caucasus (Nagorno-Karabakh and Georgia) and Central Asia, including Tajikistan. Elliott also worked as a member of the Executive Secretariat Staff from 1995 to 1997. Elliott then served four years at the embassy in Athens, Greece, as deputy economic counselor from 1999 to 2001 and as visa section chief from 2001 to 2003.

 

From 2003 to 2005, Elliott served as office director of the Executive Secretariat Staff, and from 2005 to 2007 as a deputy executive secretary on the staff of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, where her responsibilities included Europe, and South and Central Asia. Elliott was the principal officer at the U.S. consulate general in Belfast, Northern Ireland, from 2007 to 2009, and served in Moscow as minister counselor for Political Affairs from 2009 to 2010. Since September 2010, Elliot has been deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs.

 

Elliott speaks Russian, Greek, and Spanish. She is married to Matthias Mitman, who is also a Foreign Service officer. They have two adult sons.

-Matt Bewig

 

On April 11, President Obama announced his intent to nominate Jay Nicholas Anania to be the next Ambassador to Suriname, which is the smallest independent nation in South America and the only independent Dutch-speaking nation in the Western Hemisphere. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Minister-Counselor, Anania is expected to be confirmed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

 

Born circa 1960 in Silver Spring, Maryland, Anania earned a B.A. in History at Kenyon College in 1981 and an M.B.A. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joined the Foreign Service in 1985, serving early foreign postings at the consulate general in Tijuana, Mexico; at the Interests Section in Havana, Cuba; and at the embassies in Amman, Jordan, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and Hong Kong, China, where he served as management officer from 1999 to 2002.

 

In Washington at the State Department, Anania served as director of the Office of Management Policy from 2002 to 2005 and acting chief information officer in the Bureau of Information Resource Management from 2005 to January 2006. In 2003, he established and led the department’s Office of Rightsizing the U.S. Government Overseas Presence. From 2006 to 2009, Anania was minister-counselor for Management Affairs at the embassy in Berlin, Germany, where he also served for seven months as acting deputy chief of mission. From 2009 to 2011, he served as executive director of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. Since 2011, he has served as management counselor at the embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.

 

Anania and his wife, Lourdes, have a college-age son named Nicholas.

-Matt Bewig

 

Dormant for four years, a federal watchdog charged with preventing anti-terrorism-related abuses of power may finally come back to life.

 

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), created in 2004 at the urging of the 9/11 Commission, is tasked with overseeing privacy-related concerns involving such activities as airport screening, Internet use and law enforcement use of tracking devices. It did little during the George W. Bush administration due to political interference from the White House. And until recently it was also entirely ignored by President Barack Obama, who finally nominated the last of the five members to the vacant board in December 2011.

 

Three of the nominees are Democrats: James Dempsey, an executive with the Center for Democracy & Technology; Patricia Wald, a former federal judge for the DC Circuit; and David Medine, an attorney-fellow at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a former WilmerHale partner chosen to chair the board.

 

The two Republican nominees are Elisebeth Collins Cook, a former Department of Justice lawyer who also works for WilmerHale, and Rachel Brand, chief counsel for regulatory litigation for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who also used to work at WilmerHale.

 

The Senate Judiciary Committee this week grilled the five nominees during their confirmation hearing.

 

“All of the candidates seemed reluctant Wednesday to comment on Obama administration policies that most trouble civil libertarians,” reported Adam Klasfeld of Courthouse News Service. Zach Rausnitz of Fierce Homeland Security put it even more politely, noting that “The nominees were light on specifics when committee members asked for their positions on various issues.”

 

That was a bit of an understatement. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) tried to get them to express an opinion about the CIA’s assassination program, but without success. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) pressed the nominees about domestic spy drones, facial-recognition technology, warrantless cell phone surveillance and immunity for private companies that share information with the military. No luck.

 

Franken zeroed in on Rachel Brand, who was assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice during George W. Bush’s second term as president. Brand publically defended Bush’s use of National Security Letters for terrorism investigations even though the Office of Inspector General later determined that they had been used to violate FBI policy approximately 85,000 times. Brand claimed that she did not know the intent of the letters was being abused.

-David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Hearing Strains to Revive Addled Privacy Watchdog (by Adam Klasfeld, Courthouse News Service)

PCLOB Nominees Ready To Hear the Government's Case for Security Measures (by Zach Rausnitz, Fierce Homeland Security)

Webcast of Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing (video)

Obama Finally Starts to Activate Privacy Oversight Board (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

The Nine 9/11 Commission Recommendations Still Unmet (by David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

The Pentagon’s top spy agency, like the rest of the intelligence community, was roundly criticized for key intelligence failures in the run-up to the war in Iraq, including finding that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and had close relations with al-Qaeda. It will soon be led by one of those critics, who recently published a trenchant critique of American intelligence in Afghanistan. Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, an intelligence insider over his thirty-year career in Army intelligence, was nominated by President Barack Obama to be the next Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Primarily responsible for providing data on foreign militaries, DIA is part of the Department of Defense.

 

Born circa 1959 in Middletown, Rhode Island, Michael Flynn is one of nine children of Helen and Charles Flynn, who was a small-town banker. Growing up, Michael Flynn worked at local restaurants and as a lifeguard, graduating Middletown High School in 1977. Flynn earned a B.S. in Management at the University of Rhode Island, where he participated in the ROTC program, in 1981. Flynn has since earned an MBA in Telecommunications from Golden Gate University, an M.A. in Military Arts and Sciences from the United States Army Command and General Staff College, and an M.A. in National Security and Strategic Studies from the United States Naval War College.

 

Commissioned an Army second lieutenant in 1981, Flynn became an intelligence officer, platoon leader, and then instructor in his early days. Flynn’s assignments included multiple tours at Ft Bragg, North Carolina with the 82d Airborne Division, 18th Airborne Corps, and Joint Special Operations Command, where he served in the 1983 invasion of Grenada and the 2005 invasion of Haiti. He also has served with the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii; the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana; and the Army’s Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

 

Flynn served as the Assistant Chief of Staff, G2, XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina from June 2001 and the Director of Intelligence, Joint Task Force 180 in Afghanistan until July, 2002. He commanded the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade from June 2002 to June 2004, and was director of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command from July 2004 to June 2007, with service in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He served as the director of intelligence, United States Central Command from June 2007 to July 2008,and director of intelligence, Joint Staff from July 11, 2008 to June 14, 2009. Flynn assumed duties as the Chief, CJ2, International Security Assistance Force, with the additional appointment as the CJ2, US Forces–Afghanistan on June 15, 2009. As such, he was NATO’s director of military intelligence.

 

Flynn’s years in Iraq and Afghanistan were not without controversy. Most notably, the horrific examples of torture and abuse of prisoners that were carried out at Camp Nama in Baghdad took place while Flynn was in charge. For reasons of secrecy, it is difficult to sort out Flynn’s role in the illegal and inhumane activities. He is given credit for cleaning up the most extreme practices; what is unclear is whether he did so because they were morally wrong or merely inefficient.

 

Flynn was also closely aligned with Gen. Stanley McChrystal at the time that McChrystal’s arrogant and snarky attitude towards others was exposed in Rolling Stone, leading to his removal by President Obama as the leader of military operations in Afghanistan.

 

Since September 28, 2011, Flynn has been assistant director of national intelligence for partner engagement at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in Washington, D.C.

 

Flynn is married to his high school sweetheart, Lori Andrade; they have two sons. His brother, Charles A. Flynn, was promoted to Army Brigadier General in September 2011; Michael Flynn pinned the General’s Star on his brother. In honor of this, the State of Rhode Island and the Town of Middletown proclaimed it “Generals Flynn Day.” 

-Matt Bewig

 

Intelligence Aide Flynn re McChrystal: “Everyone Has a Dark Side” (by Jim White, Emptywheel)

Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan (by Michael T. Flynn et al, Center for a New American Security) (pdf)

Saluting A Family Legacy (by Jan Wenzel, Quadangles)

There is a saying in Burma that one must be wary of five evils:  fire, water (storms and floods), thieves, mean people and…government. The military junta that has ruled Burma (which it renamed as “Myanmar”) since 1962, has been one of the most repressive of recent decades. After opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party swept to victory in a September 1990 election, the junta simply cancelled the results of the election. In response, the U.S. downgraded its level of representation in Burma from ambassador to chargé d’affaires, and Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

 

However, in recognition of recent elections and other tiny moves toward democracy in Burma, on April 6, 2012, President Obama announced his intent to nominate Derek J. Mitchell, who is currently American special envoy to Burma, to be the first U.S. ambassador to Burma since ambassador Burton Levin left in September 1990.

 

Mitchell was born September 16, 1964, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Charlotte (née Mendelsohn) and Dr. Malcolm S. Mitchell, an academic medical oncologist and tumor immunologist, while his father was serving in the U.S. Public Health Service. The family settled in Orange, Connecticut, a suburb of New Haven, where Derek Mitchell grew up. He earned a B.A. in Foreign Affairs, with a concentration in Soviet Studies, at the University of Virginia in 1986, and an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University in 1991, earning a certificate for proficiency in Mandarin Chinese.

 

In the years between graduating in Charlottesville and matriculating at Tufts, Mitchell worked as a Senate aide and a journalist in Taiwan. He served as an aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) from 1986 to 1988, working as assistant to senior foreign policy adviser Gregory Craig, who was later White House counsel for President Barack Obama.

 

Mitchell started studying Chinese while working in Taipei as a copy editor at The China Post (then Taiwan’s largest English-language daily) from December 1988 to June 1989, and continued his study of Chinese at Nanjing (China) University in the summer of 1990.

 

From 1993 to 1997, Mitchell worked at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), an organization funded since 1983 by the National Endowment for Democracy to channel U.S. money to “pro-democracy” groups that are also friendly to U.S. policy in developing nations. He was senior program officer, first for Asia, from 1993 to 1996, and then to the former Soviet Union from 1996 to 1997.

 

From 2001 to 2009 he was a senior fellow, director for Asia, and director of the Southeast Asia Initiative, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in Washington, D.C. He established CSIS’s first dedicated Southeast Asian studies program, and in 2008-2009 led a study on the future of U.S. relations with Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. His 2007 article in Foreign Affairs, co-authored with Michael Green, has been credited with prefiguring the Obama administration’s new policy toward Burma, whose apparent early success has led to Mitchell’s nomination to be ambassador to Burma. During this time, Mitchell was also a visiting scholar, from April to June 2007, at Peking University’s School of International Studies.

 

Mitchell was appointed principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs by President Obama, serving from 2009 to 2011. He also served as acting assistant secretary of defense when the position was vacant for several months in 2011. On April 14, 2011, President Obama appointed Mitchell to be the first U.S. special representative and policy coordinator for Burma, with rank of ambassador.

 

A lifelong Democrat, Mitchell worked for the 1988 Democratic Presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis  as personnel firector for field operations in California. In 1992 he was logistics and operations manager of the United Democratic Campaign (Clinton-Gore; Senators Barbara Boxer & Dianne Feinstein) in California, for a field program with 20 offices. He has also contributed more than $9,000 to Democratic candidates and causes, including $1,500 to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, $4,600 to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and $2,500 to his 2012 presidential campaign.

 

Mitchell has been married since April 30, 2006 to Lee Hun-min (a.k.a. Min Lee), a Taiwanese reporter who has worked as a TV journalist in Hong Kong. An excellent pianist, Mitchell has played at social events in and around Washington, including public and private functions for Senator Edward Kennedy.

-Matt Bewig

 

Testimony Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (pdf)

Derek Mitchell to be Named Ambassador to Burma (by Josh Rogin, Foreign Policy)

US Burma Envoy Meets Aung San Suu Kyi (Voice of America)