FEDS NOT ABOVE FAKE NEWS REPORTS

When half a dozen or more federal employees endorse a lame, dishonest
idea, we have a problem.

Here's how it unfolded: U.S. Border Patrol agent Steve Garceau staked
out a house in Orleans County near the Canadian border one night in
January 2003 and caught a guy picking up 45 pounds of pot. He'd
planned to deliver it to someone else at a restaurant in Stowe.

Garceau handed the chap over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement
officers, who cut the fellow, identified in court papers with the
pseudonym John Smith, a deal: We'll let you free if you agree to tell
us more about this and future marijuana sales.

This is Crimefighting 101 -- use the guy as a baitfish to nail a
bigger trophy.

That's when feds got creative. To ensure John Smith could prove to his
Canadian cronies that he'd escaped unscathed, the Border Patrol would
spread word through the Vermont media that he'd gotten away undetected.

At least two Border Patrol agents beside Garceau knew of the outgoing
fake news release. There might have been a fourth in Vermont. He
doesn't recall, but somebody else remembers his involvement.

All this appears in court documents in U.S. District Court in
Burlington, where Garceau faces charges for falsifying information in
another drug case. The bogus news release is ancillary information to
the case.

At least two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents visited
Burlington -- John Smith in tow -- to run it past an assistant U.S.
attorney.

Seemed like a decent idea to everybody around the table.

The Border Patrol bunch, eager to dot all the i's and cross all the
t's, asked their agency's public affairs headquarters in Washington,
D.C., and got a thumbs-up. Artificial news release? News that never
happened disseminated to the masses via somebody else's printing
press? Very innovative.

And so they wrote a fictional account on Jan. 27, 2003: They'd found
the dope inside two duffel bags dumped on a roadside in Beebe Plain,
they told newspapers, radio stations and television stations in a
release. They even sent a photograph of a crime scene they'd
manufactured -- two roadside bags atop the roadside snow.

To make sure the prank didn't get messy, they falsified the Border
Patrol investigative paperwork, so that if some sucker, someday, ever
filed a Freedom of Information request, he'd be none the wiser -- the
investigative report mirrored the news release.

The Newport Daily Express published the photograph and the information
on the front page of the Jan. 29, 2003, edition, said Anne Squire, the
newspaper's managing editor. The Burlington Free Press didn't publish
the information.

John Smith had a little newspaper story to clip, to hang on his
refrigerator, to send a copy to grandma and to show his drug-dealing
buds that although they'd lost $186,000 worth of pot, they still had
their mule.

It's not illegal to lie to the media in Vermont. But it's bad form,
especially for the federal government.

Law enforcement agencies and the media have performed their
informational Kabuki for generations -- cops tell reporters what they
want, when it's useful. The unwritten code is that when they do say
something, it's true. We're manipulated into helping to solve crimes,
palatably.

We in the media take lots of knocks, some of them accurate. We don't
need the U.S. government's help printing incorrect information. We
wear our mistakes in print, and at this daily newspaper, like at most
worth their salt, we correct them.

"This is an undercover operation. They were trying to mislead bad guys
and, yes, they did mislead the press," said David Kirby, the acting
U.S. attorney for Vermont. He was not leading the office at the time
of the bum news release, though he's prosecuted cases here for nearly
two decades.

"This may be the only instance I know of in my tenure in Vermont" of
intentionally faking a news release.

"Whether we would do it again, I cannot say," Kirby
said.

Here's a passage from the local mission statement of the U.S.
Attorney's Office in Burlington: "We seek to instill public
confidence as to the fairness and integrity of both this office and
the federal criminal justice system of which we are a part."

Here's a pertinent portion of the now-named Customs and Border
Protection standard of conduct: "Employees will not make false,
misleading, incomplete, or ambiguous statements, whether oral or
written, in connection with any matter of official interest."

Customs and Border Protection in Washington, D.C., didn't consider
this breach of faith serious enough to merit a response Monday.

We have a problem.