Rendell administration says it was surprised by police opposition to private security firm

HARRISBURG - We didn't know the state police felt so strongly.

That was the message the Rendell administration sent Tuesday to a legislative committee, reacting to revelations that state police brass had repeatedly criticized the use of a private contractor to sift terrorism threats.

Steve Crawford, chief of staff to Gov. Rendell, wrote the chair of the state Senate Veteran Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee that he was taken by surprise by the depth of state police concerns over the contract with a Philadelphia-based intelligence firm.

The firm, the Institute on Terrorism Research and Response, was hired last October for $103,000 by the state Office of Homeland Security - which is separate from the state police - to monitor and track threats against critical infrastructure. Two weeks ago, the no-bid contract came under fire when it was revealed that the institute was tracking activist groups that posed no obvious threat to public safety, including student protesters and opponents of natural-gas drilling.

At the Senate committee's Monday hearing on the matter, state police officials testified that, starting last December, they had repeatedly warned the Office of Homeland Security that information generated by the institute was not only unreliable but was adding needless confusion, alarm, and toil for other law enforcement agencies.

In his letter Tuesday, Crawford wrote, in effect, that those concerns should have been aired more forcefully to Rendell and his aides.

"We must rectify the reluctance of top law enforcement and homeland security officials to share critical information with the governor's office when it involves disputes among agencies," Crawford wrote.

His letter, which the administration made public, was the latest salvo in what has turned into a messy he-said-she-said over who knew what - and when - about the state's controversial contract with the institute.

Under the contract, the institute gathered information on potential threats for the state Homeland Security Office, which in turn put the data into bulletins and circulated them to law enforcement as well as a number of private companies. The institute also offered ratings of potential threats, such as "low to moderate."

Rendell has ordered the contract terminated, saying he was unaware of the bulletins until the recent controversy began.

But at the Senate hearing on Monday, the state police disclosed a number of e-mails, including one that State Police Commissioner Frank Pawlowski wrote to Crawford in August.

The e-mail reflected Pawlowski's skepticism about the institute's work - in particular, the information it had gathered and disseminated about planned protests at a speech the governor was to give that month.

"This is one of the problems you have when you contract intelligence work to amateurs," Pawlowski wrote to Crawford at the time.

In his Tuesday letter, Crawford countered that Pawlowski's e-mail "hardly constitutes a comprehensive, detailed or critical analysis of what the State Police perceived as severe problems . . . Nor, as some have portrayed it, does it constitute 'a warning' to the Governor's Office about problems with the Homeland Security bulletins."

Pawlowski could not be reached for comment Tuesday. After Monday's hearing, the commissioner said he did not bring his concerns about the contract to the attention of the governor's office until August because "you hope the problem can be resolved in-house."

Other e-mails the state police released on Monday included exchanges between the head of the state police's special intelligence unit, George Bivens, and James F. Powers Jr., the state Homeland Security Office's director. In the e-mails, Bivens gives numerous examples of how the institute's information was faulty.

In an e-mail exchange from January, Bivens wrote that the institute was flat-out wrong when it warned of the existence of a "Muslims of America" training camp in Wayne County.

Another exchange of state police e-mails, sent in February, described how the institute had reported that protests were planned at nuclear facilities - a report later discounted by other agencies, including the FBI.

An e-mail from the FBI, included in that exchange, said that the federal agency had no information about any such protests, and that the institute's report was probably based on information gleaned "via an Internet search."