Ask Mr. Smartypants

Tuesday afternoon, I came into work and found waiting in my e-mail a copy of the letter from Maria Luisa O'Connell, assistant commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, that you can read in the "letters to the editor" of this very section.

On Aug. 30, we had run an editorial the letter said was full of "false claims."

Largely based on a series of articles by The Associated Press pointing out that stimulus money to improve border crossings has been distributed seemingly without regard to the government's priority list for the facilities, the editorial (and the articles) showed the funding awards were swayed by political pressure. This led to a border crossing in Montana that serves three people a day getting $15 million and Laredo, Texas, which serves 55,000 travelers and 4,200 trucks a day, getting no stimulus money at all, among many other obvious and similar oddities.

Now, it would be crass for The Associated Press to just assume that Montana got that money (and a lot more for other sleepy border crossings) because both its senators are Democrats and Washington and the Department of Homeland Security are run by Democrats. Luckily, The AP didn't have to assume that because Montana Sen. John Tester has been crowing about how he and Sen. Max Baucus personally appealed to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to make those and other Montana projects happen, ahead of higher-priority projects in other states.

Napolitano herself has acknowledged that politicians can influence an administration's spending plans, and she should know.

A border station in Nogales, Ariz., where Napolitano served as governor, will be getting $199 million, five times as much as any other station, while being rated only 34th on the priority list. Years of her lobbying for that project under the Bush administration yielded nothing.

The letter from DHS said if we had questions we should contact Rafael Lemaitre, senior adviser for media and communications in Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security (don't you just adore these titles). I did so.

The letter said The AP stories were "simply not true" and it was "unfortunate the Herald-Journal had chosen to repeat those false claims," so the first thing I asked Lemaitre was whether the DHS has demanded The AP run a retraction and, if so, how that was going.

Lemaitre: "We have reached out to them and they are ...I think they are not running a correction but let me get back to you on that."

To be safe, I also spoke to The AP deputy bureau chief in Washington, Steven Komarow, who said, "They took issue with the fact that our story said the funding decisions were political, but they didn't refute the sources we quoted as saying that, including the Montana senators and DHS Director Janet Napolitano, so no, there was no sense on our part that we should run any kind of correction or retraction at all."

Anabelle Garay, an AP reporter based out of Dallas who interviewed Napolitano and DHS officials for one of the follow-up articles, told me, "They were angry when I talked to them, but they weren't pinpointing what they were mad about."

The letter also asserted that the selection and funding process was totally transparent, and all relevant information could be found at www.recovery.gov. When I checked, I found a list of all the border crossings that did get funded, but not a list that also showed the ones that didn't, and the priorities of all the crossings, and why the priorities were ignored. The AP reporters based their analysis on documentation they were shown inside the DHS offices but not allowed to copy, keep, see all of or publish, an unusually opaque form of transparency.

So I asked Lemaitre if he could guide me to the information that would make it all crystal clear, as the letter we had been sent suggested such information was, and he said he'd ...wait for it ... "have to get back to you with that."

Over at The AP, Komarow said, "They are trying to argue that the process is transparent when it clearly isn't. What's on the Web site is the final decision, not the rationale or the reasoning behind funding low-priority projects ahead of high-priority ones." Komarow said even in the DHS offices, his reporters were not allowed access to "the whole deal."

When Lemaitre did get back to me, rather than having any answers on how negotiations with The AP on a correction were going (I imagine poorly, from his point of view) or any information on how I could find out on what basis, other than political pressure, we were spending millions on deserted checkpoints and ignoring mobbed ones, he said: "We have decided we are going to let the letter serve as our only response."

The fact that we, and The AP, were right seems obvious in retrospect. Our government involves too much partisanship and not enough transparency. The funniest thing Lemaitre said to me was, "This process was devoid of any political decision-making."

Me: "Was everyone excited at this historic first?"

Lemaitre: "What do you mean?"

Me: "You're asserting a decision was made, in Washington, about hundreds of millions of dollars, and it wasn't political. That would have been, in the history of our nation, a first. Did it excite you?"

That, like every meaningful question I asked Lemaitre, got no response.