Center for Instrumented Critical Infrastructure - Murthamoney

The Center for Instrumented Critical Infrastructure (CICI) sounds like an outfit that would promote sensors built into roads and bridges and might be of interest to tollroads. Tollroads are leaders in road instrumentation - with electromagnetic and fiberoptic loops in the pavement, light curtains in toll lanes, laser and optical profilers overhead, radar detection and tracking of vehicles, weigh in motion gear, pavement modules to predict icing, weather stations, video surveillance, and more. Toll bridges and tunnels have been beefed up with more security and safety instrumentation.

CICI got an earmarked grant of $1m in a recent US appropriations bill. But CICI doesn't exist.

Turns out due to the scrutiny given it by earmark watchdog Jeff Flake (Repub AZ) that CICI is a racket being worked by Congressman John Murtha (Dem PA). The unusual congressman, regarded as aptly named by many of his colleagues, Flake revealed that a letter submitted along with the earmark by Murtha's office directed that the CICI money should go to Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC).

CTC is "not-for-profit" established by Murtha himself back in the 1990s, the recipient of hundreds of millions in Murtha earmarks over the years, and located in Murtha's congressional district in Johnstown PA with head offices in the John P Murtha Technology Center.

Staff of the not-for-profit are - surprise, surprise - faithful and generous contributors to Murtha's campaign funds, the New York Times reports.

Murtha makes announcements of contracts received by CTC, taking credit for getting the hometown pork. If CTC had earned the contracts in honest competition they'd surely announce them themselves.

see http://www.house.gov/murtha/news05-06/PRcambriafunds.html

CTC "isn't giving interviews" about its plans for the million taxpayer bucks Murtha is sending its way for a CICI, a spokesman says.

Murtha star in old FBI video - "not yet" to $50k bribe

Murtha is most famous for his performance in an FBI video that was part of the Abscam corruption sting in 1980 in which he brags endlessly about his influence within the US government. He is pitching his power. He calls it "business". He meets an agent for a non-existent Arab sheik wanting to buy sanctuary in the US from a congressman.

At the climax point of the sting he is shown bundles of hundred dollar bills - a $50k bribe - in the drawer of a desk in the agent's Washington DC townhouse. Murtha dithers: "I'm not interested (pause) at this point... You know, we do business for a while, maybe I'll be interested, maybe I won't, you know."

You know, indeed.

Murtha wants desperately to take the money. He has no scruples against taking it. He isn't the least surprised, let alone offended, by the bribe. He wouldn't turn in the briber.

But instinct makes him cautious, so he says: "Not now."

The Justice Department decided that Murtha's "not-now-but-maybe" wasn't quite enough to put the bum in jail. So he has remained a racketeer at large, deferred to as an "Honorable" US Congressman.

Here is the video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2131539854655700584

[At least we can be encouraged that by demanding this Honorable prefix these guys reveal some self-doubt and anxiety about the level of esteem in which they are held. Would it occur to a class of people normally or naturally honorable to ask for such an off form of address?]

Here is a lowkey reporter who visits Johnstown in search of CICI:

http://www.townhall.com/video/HamNation/1450_134986


DEFINITION: Not-for-profit corporation - a purportedly charitable entity that gets to strike a benevolent pose and avoid taxes while keeping its profits entirely for its staff and political patrons, immune to takeover bids, and shareholder scrutiny, with trivial reporting requirements.

Johnstown Flood City USA

Johnstown is about 65km (40mi) east of Pittsburgh and north of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Founded as a mining and steelmaking town it is Flood City USA. Badly located in a gorge just below the confluence of two rivers it has had many floods but the most famous was in 1889, when an upstream dam collapsed after prolonged rains and generated a 10m (35ft) high torrent through the city that killed 2,209 people or nearly 10% of its inhabitants.

Now that dam was a piece of critical infrastructure to Johnstown that badly needed some instrumentation.

TOLLROADSnews 2007-09-09