TSA questions a former air marshal about e-mail on talking to CNN. Here's a preview

Program Note: Federal officers charged with keeping terrorists off planes are now searching their own ranks for staff who told CNN that few flights were protected by air marshals. Watch Drew Griffin’s report tonight on AC360° 10p ET.

Drew Griffin
Special Investigations Unit

Here’s a little behind the scenes truth telling most reporters, well a lot of reporters won’t admit: we all fear being wrong. The day after we reported the lack of federal air marshals on domestic flights was one of those days I felt that fear. The Transportation Safety Administration publicly came after our reporting. The agency set up a blog on its website, challenging our numbers, calling the report itself false, eventually even going to congress and testifying that CNN got it wrong.

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Jeff Denning, Former Air Marshal

Barclay Palmer
AC360° Senior Producer

We see the headline and our eyes glaze over. What could be more boring than the 7-year-old fight since 9/11 over how much power the government should have to monitor private communication in its efforts to fight terrorism? Without warrants, that is. (By the way, how hard is it to get a warrant from a terrorism-fearing judge? Some people wonder — why are politicians even fighting about this?)

Even the acronym bandied about in the news these days has no ring… no zing. FISA?? Couldn’t they think up one of those cool, secret-sounding three-letter acronyms, like FBI, CIA or NSA?
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Ed Henry
CNN White House Correspondent

Sex is not involved so let’s call it Money, Lies and Videotape.

It’s a shocking tape that comes from a sting operation by the Times of London newspaper. It shows a Texas lobbyist and Bush fundraiser, Stephen Payne, trying to wrangle a big donation for the George W. Bush Presidential Library from a man whom he thought was representing the exiled former president of a Central Asian country who wanted some White House access.

“A couple hundred thousand (dollars),” says Payne. “I think that would probably get the attention of people.”

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Randi Kaye
AC360° Correspondent

Wait ’til you hear this!

So many of you were fired up about yesterday after I blogged about Army Specialist Jeremy Hall, an atheist soldier who is suing, among others, the Department of Defense and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

We were flooded with responses!

Specialist Hall alleges the military is becoming a Christian organization. He says his religious freedom protected under the First Amendment was violated.

If you missed the original blog, Hall was raised Baptist, said grace before dinner and read the bible each night before bed. Then a friend, a fellow atheist, suggested he read the Bible again. When he did, Hall says he had so many questions that he decided to embrace atheism. He no longer believes in God, luck, fate, or anything supernatural.

That change in Hall’s beliefs, he says, cost him his military career and nearly cost him his life in Iraq. He says his life was so at risk that the army assigned him a full-time bodyguard and even sent him home early from Iraq.

Hall says he was ostracized for not embracing fundamentalist Christianity in the military. At Thanksgiving two years ago, Hall says he was told to sit at another table because he refused to pray at mealtime.

After he was nearly killed during an attack on his humvee, Hall told me, a fellow soldier asked him “do you believe in Jesus now?” Keep reading

Randi Kaye
AC360° Correspondent

Is the United States Military becoming a Christian organization? That’s what one U.S. soldier tells us.

I met Army Specialist Jeremy Hall in Kansas City a few weeks ago. He’s based at Fort Riley, in Junction City, Kansas about an hour away.

At 24, he’s a remarkable young man determined to complete one final mission. That is to win a lawsuit against the federal government.

Specialist Hall is suing the Department of Defense and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for failing to protect his religious freedom. He says the military discriminates against non-Christians and his rights under the First Amendment were denied.

Hall has served two tours in Iraq as a gunner. He’s back at Fort Riley now only because he says his life was threatened after it became public he is an atheist. Keep reading

A U.S. Sugar Corp. mechanical harvester cuts sugar cane in a field outside of Clewiston, Fla., Nov. 2001.

Steve Turnham
AC360° Staff

Big Sugar’s sweet deal with the U.S. Government is looking a little shakier today with the news that one of the nation’s largest sugar producers, U.S. Sugar Corp., is closing shop and selling it’s cane fields to the state of Florida.

For decades now American sugar producers have benefited from an arcane system that keeps sugar prices in the U.S. well above world prices. Despite loud complaints from candy manufacturers, many of whom have packed up and left for countries where sugar is cheaper, the propped up prices have survived.

It’s simple political math. The average consumer barely notices the added cost, because the high price of sugar adds just pennies to the products we buy at the supermarket. But all those pennies add up to a huge payoff for the sugar industry: subsidies in the farm bill that just passed Congress are estimated to be worth about $10 billion over the next ten years.
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David Mattingly
AC360° Correspondent

All roads to Gulfport, IL lead to nowhere. They all dead-end into Mississippi flood waters. The closest we could get to the inundated Village using roads in Illinois was a police roadblock that is SEVEN MILES from town. That might tell you how close this river town of about 200 was to disaster when the flood waters started to rise.

But people lived here comforted by a levee system that the government said would protect them from a 100 year flood. No one was required to have federal flood insurance. Only 28 property owners had it. Some now say they were misled about the risks they were taking and that the chance of catastrophic flooding was miscalculated.

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Drew Griffin reports on the threat to East St. Louis, Ill., posed by the floodwaters of the mighty Mississippi.

Drew Griffin
Special Investigations Unit

East Saint Louis, Illinois is not prepared for a major flood.

Fortunately it looks like the city won’t have to be. So many levees have been topped upstream, the pressure is now off this economically depressed town. But what is surprising to me, so many years now after Katrina, is that East St. Louis has not learned the lesson of New Orleans.

The levees that protect this city are not strong enough to withstand a major flood. The Army Corp. of Engineers is in the process of decertifying the levees, which means the Corp. does not have confidence they will hold. And yet the mayor and city manager seem only mildly concerned.

In fact when I visited the city manager in his office yesterday it was apparent he had not even been keeping up with the flood forecasts for his city…. Worse yet, we actually took him to a spot where he was surprised to see seepage in one of his levees, the initial warning stage of failure.

What the Mayor and city manager told me is Congress and the state and basically someone else needs to get busy fixing their levee.

Sound familiar?

Rep. Don Young, (R) Alaska

**Watch Joe John’s Keeping Them Honest report tonight at 10pm**

Joe Johns
360° Correspondent

We’re looking into a kind of congressional earmark whodunit. It’s a story about an order for a brand new highway interchange that just sort of appeared in a piece of federal legislation—after the legislation had already passed in a final vote.

The price tag? Ten million dollars.

It was basically a gift to the people of Lee County, Florida. And when they see it, people tend to ask what did we do to deserve this gift? Then they start asking—do we really want this gift?

But another problem is this: No one is sure how the interchange got into the legislation. The guy suspected of putting it there Congressman Don Young of Alaska (not Florida!), one of the masters of earmarking.

Young’s office seemed to take credit a few weeks ago, saying the bill was supposed to include it. But yesterday Young seemed to say he wasn’t involved.

People on the Hill are itching to get an investigation going on this.. But it may turn out that the only way Congress can find out what happened is to get itself investigated.

New Orleans residents affected by Katrina may have to pay back the money they were given in grants.

Every time I go to do a story in New Orleans I hold onto a little piece of hope that things are going to be better this time.

That the community is going to be more healed, that the town is going to look more alive, and that the programs put in place to help homeowners are actually doing so.

Well, I should have known better.

Imagine this: Louisiana residents – after all they’ve been through and all they’ve lost – are now being billed by the state for nearly $200 million!

Yes – you read that right, $200 million.

Why? Well – it turns out the contractor hired by the state to dole out federal dollars designed to help homeowners rebuild… uh… well… how do I say this… OVERESTIMATED!!

The contractor, ICF International, may have overpaid as many as 5000 residents. In other words, the state gave these people too much grant money after state inspectors estimated home damages.

In all, homeowners could be asked to pay up $175 million. Some families could be on the hook for $150,000 each!

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