September 29, 2008
U.S. ATTORNEY DELIVERS REMARKS AT FORT CARSON JAG CORPS REGIMENTAL BALL
COLORADO SPRINGS – Last Saturday, September 27, 2008, United States Attorney Troy Eid delivered the keynote address at the Fort Carson JAG Corps Regimental Ball, Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, in Colorado Springs. Below you will find U.S. Attorney Eid’s prepared remarks.
Remarks of U.S. Attorney Troy A. Eid
At the Fort Carson Regimental Ball
Office of the Staff Judge Advocate
Colorado Springs, Colorado
September 27, 2008
General and Mrs. Graham, Colonel Meier, Colonel Davis, Judge Shakes, members of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, distinguished guests – thanks for the honor of joining you tonight.
I really do appreciate the gracious introduction, but let me dispel any lingering confusion about my real identity. I live in Golden and like to exercise in the morning at the city Recreation Center along with the cops and volunteer firefighters and all the locals. I was working out as usual early one morning – it was August of last year – only that day CNN happened to be on the TV and the headline spanning the bottom of the screen caught my eye: “Gonzales Resigns.” This was how I learned that my boss, the former Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, had left office.
Well, there I was, doing my little weight routine with a line of other middle-aged guys and we’re all staring at the tube. And CNN is playing what’s called the “B-roll,” meaning that there were same few video clips playing over and over again as some expert opined about what Attorney General Gonzales’ resignation meant to the country. One of those video segments was file footage of the former Attorney General and I together at a news conference. They kept playing it again and again.
Then I notice that the middle-aged guys in the line were all staring at me. I just kept doing my routine. Finally, I feel this tap on my shoulder and one of the guys says, “Excuse me, sir. Are you Gonzales?”
Like the Colonel said, my name is Troy Eid. As some of you who’ve served way downrange in the Middle East may already know, my last name means “party” or “festival” in Arabic, as in the Eid al-Fitr, the feast at the end of Ramadan. For our purposes tonight, just think of me as The Party Guy. And I’m humbled to be in your company. I regret Allison couldn’t join us. One of her two law clerks at the Colorado Supreme Court is getting married tonight in Denver, and she sends her best regards.
Let me congratulate Colonel Meier and the entire Office of the Staff Judge Advocate for the tremendous job you’re doing. Just yesterday, I received an unsolicited e-mail from the Clerk’s Office at the U.S. District Court in Denver praising the “great job” our respective offices are doing in collectively handling the Fort Carson docket. The message continues: “The dockets are flowing smoothly and the court is pleased. Any influence you have in maintaining the current attorneys and staff, at Fort Carson and in your office, would be greatly appreciated.”
Thank you, each and every one of you. This includes the Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys I’ve been privileged to appoint, along with the entire JAG Corps attorney contingent and the talented paralegals and professional staff in garrison at Fort Carson. The same goes for everyone in theater or preparing to head that way – training for missions on which the lives of your colleagues must ultimately depend. Let’s remember and honor our retirees, including Colonel Dave Shakes, and the family members and friends and loved ones here tonight. And we mourn those colleagues who have passed on, including Major Jim Wiley.
And let me recognize all my colleagues at the U.S. Attorney’s Office who are privileged to work with you, and with whom it is my distinct honor to serve. Time doesn’t permit to name everyone, but let me mention two of the finest Assistant U.S. Attorneys anywhere: Jim Hearty, Chief of our Major Crimes Section, and Kurt Bohn, who as you know doubles at Fort Carson as a Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve JAG Corps.
Together, your shared successes not only strengthen public safety and the quality of life in and around Fort Carson. They radiate throughout Colorado, because when the Carson docket runs smoothly, the entire federal court system benefits.
We live amid extraordinary times for the United States military; the U.S. Department of Justice; federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement in Colorado and across our great nation; and the practice of law. Our world has accelerated to Internet speed, with advanced technology and global interconnectedness reshaping our lives in remarkable ways. Last week, I was privileged to review some of the plans for the new $40 million crime lab for the Denver Police Department, approved by voters as part of a new Justice Center complex. DPD now processes more than 6,000 cases per year involving DNA evidence. Once completed, the new crime lab will cover more square footage than the entire current DPD headquarters building in downtown Denver.
At the Colorado Springs Police Department, Chief Richard Myers and his team have similarly been leaders in many various initiatives that apply advanced technology to law enforcement. This includes serving as lead agency for Colorado’s statewide Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. At the Colorado U.S. Attorney’s Office, we’ve quadrupled Internet-enabled child pornography prosecutions in the past two years alone, thanks in large measure to Chief Myers and the ICAC team.
Yet this problem, like many involving our wired and wireless world, is much bigger than we ever imagined. The Colorado ICAC recently assembled some of our region’s top computer forensic experts to determine the extent to which child pornography is being traded over the Internet using what is called peer-to-peer software. The experts took a series of images of known child victims – including violent pictures of children six years old and younger – obtained from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and mathematically mapped them, so that they could be identified by their digital “hash marks.” A computer program developed for use by the ICAC then permits law enforcement to track where those particular images are being traded on individual computer servers, according to Internet Protocol or “IP” numbers registered within the boundaries of the State of Colorado.
Prior to this statewide test, Colorado’s ICAC predicated that they would find this particular series of images, depicting violent child sexual abuse, being traded on between 500 and 1,000 servers registered in Colorado. Guess what the real number was? More than 50,000 Internet servers registered in Colorado were trading those images. That number corresponds to what experts are finding in other parts of our country. Clearly, we need to do more – much more – to protect our children.
Experts also tell us that while the majority of Internet child porn “consumers” live in the United States, much if not most of the violent images are being produced overseas, especially in places like the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations and in Asia. This is just one example of the globalization of crime. There have been United States Attorneys serving in the field since 1789, but never before have so many of our cases crossed international boundaries.
Changing technology and the globalization of crime is changing how we do business. My office totals 69 Assistant U.S. Attorneys in three offices, Denver, Durango and Grand Junction, with a total staff of 140. We serve a state of nearly 5 million people across 104,000 square miles, making us one of the most under-served areas in the nation in terms of federal law enforcement, prosecution and judicial resources. This challenge is magnified because we have one of the busiest civil dockets in the entire nation since Colorado has more federal employees per capita than anywhere outside of Metropolitan Washington. During one recent week, we had one AUSA, Greg Holloway, traveling to Russia to work on a bank fraud. Another AUSA from our office who some of you know, Linda McMahan, was supporting an undercover investigation involving the illegal importation of endangered sea turtles from Mexico. This ultimately resulted in an award-winning international takedown of traffickers in endangered animal skins and parts, including the cowboy boot maker for former Mexico President Vincente Fox. Still another AUSA, Ken Harmon, was in China conducting interviews in – get this – a People’s Liberation Army prison, identifying a source of supply in a so-called “Internet pharmacy” case, U.S. v. Xydeas, involving a Greek national who was apprehended in Panama. The list goes on. By the way, we have another Internet pharmacy case where Coloradans thought they were buying Cialis and Viagra, but were actually getting an anti-schizophrenia drug, Haldol, that landed them in the emergency room.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the JAG Corps share much in common. Facing accelerating technology and globalization, my colleagues in the Justice Department and I feel the constant pressure as legal professionals to specialize. My suspicion is that you’re experiencing some of the same phenomena, given the massive growth of Fort Carson, the changes in your mission, length and complexity of deployments, and the shifting political landscape. And yet ultimately, I also suspect the U.S. Attorney’s Offices and the JAG Corps share a stubborn pride in our increasingly lonely status within the legal profession as general practitioners. Like you, we handle criminal and civil cases, investigations and trials and appeals, running the gauntlet of real-life and, yes, life-and-death situations.
So how do we not just keep up, but stay ahead?
I have no easy answers, but I do take comfort – in courage – that we’re not the first to feel this way. Days before his death in 1885, Ulysses Grant wrote: “There is now such a co-mingling of the people” that America has “filled up” and is “no longer localized to any great extent.” He continued: “Growing as we are, in population, wealth and military power, [America] may become the envy of nations which led us in all these particulars only a few years ago. . . and in danger of a combined movement being someday made to crush us out.”
We can draw strength and inspiration from those who have gone before, from our ancestors, and from each other. Despite the rise of Google and Wikipedia and all that other information available instantly at our fingertips, no one really expects us to know all the answers – even lawyers. Perhaps I’m not alone in believing there are much greater forces at work in directing our lives. Certainly Grant and countless others took comfort in that, and can help guide the way.
Meanwhile, here and now, let’s concentrate on strengthening what we can control: Our attitudes toward ourselves, our colleagues, and our country.
A person’s rank or title or position or assignment doesn’t determine what kind of leader he or she will be. Back in 2001, I accepted former Governor Bill Owens’ invitation to serve on his cabinet running a department, Personnel and Administration, which The Denver Post had days earlier characterized as being “on fire” from mismanagement, poor service, and financial woes. I did so reluctantly, after not getting another position I really wanted, and my attitude could have been much better. Frankly I felt sorry for myself, especially when I read people speculating that my government career was over and I’d been “shelved.” Colorado’s state budget at the time was the worst since 1944, and our talented state workforce was challenged as never before.
It just so happened that, a short time later, I happened to hear General H. Norman Schwarzkopf give a speech up at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Afterwards, there was a receiving line and I introduced myself to the General. To my surprise, he asked what I did. His face brightened. He told me about his own experience coming back from two tours in Vietnam as a Colonel. He was assigned to lead a personnel department in Washington, across from the Pentagon, responsible for officer assignments. He said that he dreaded the job and thought his once-promising career was over. But to his surprise, he said he loved his team at the Personnel Office and learned the critical skills for his later assignments, including the first Gulf War. I’ll always remember what General Schwarzkopf said: “To work with great people on a great team and do important work that makes a difference – it doesn’t get any better than that.” Well, the General was right, and the encouragement he gave me helped turn my self-pity into what became one of the happiest and most rewarding times in my own life, providing stewardship for Colorado’s 70,000 state employees at a difficult time. Leaders make their positions, not the other way around.
As for our country, the framers of our Constitution said it best: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.” Every generation, each of us has the responsibility – and the joyful opportunity – to work with our colleagues to perfect the reality of that magnificent idea that makes the United States of America unlike any other nation in human history.
My father immigrated to the United States from Egypt in 1957, when he was just 17 years old. He had $100 and some fabric from his mother, some of which was made into the vest I’m wearing tonight. My Dad had a dream: That anyone who believed in and worked for the American ideal could contribute to the destiny and greatness of this country. It wasn’t easy. He had his challenges, including tough economic times and the bitter taste of discrimination. But his love for our country never wavered. On his gravestone is an image of the stars and stripes and words he wrote, not long before he died, of his pride in being an American. Just yesterday, 50 years later, I stood in U.S. District Court moving the application of 50 new U.S citizens. One of the applicants from 26 nations was a young man from Egypt not much older than my Dad was at the time. An astrophysics student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, he told me he wants to be the first Egyptian-American astronaut. I can only say: Go for it.
Thank you for making it possible for us to live in freedom, and God bless you.
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