GAP's in your defense.

• Author: Kippen, Alexander
• Position: Government Accountability Project

Making the government more accountable isn't just a job for the General Accounting Office, the inspectors general, and congressional committees. Private organizations like the Government Accountability Project are important too.

It was one of those "60 Minutes" shows that if you didn't see, you certainly heard about. And if you saw it, you haven't felt the same about chicken salad since. It was all there: Hidden camera shots of workers in gore-spattered smocks gutting strung-up carcasses streaming by on an overhead conveyor. Dank sheds so dark you could barely see the putrid pools of God-knows-what on the shop floor. The highlight was when one of the birds fell off its hook onto that floor and a worker picked it up and put it right back on the line! It was as if someone had made a movie of The Jungle.

Not that any of this was news to consumer watchdogs or public interest groups. For years they've pushed chicken processors to clean up. But going against corporations it helps to have more on your side than file folders and newsletters. That Sunday night, the chicken industry got a hot rinse of America's universal solvent-publicity.

The notion that the media's bright lights are crucial for reform is what the Government Accountability Project (GAP) is all about. Making the government more accountable isn't just a job for the General Accounting Office, the inspectors general, and congressional committees-private organizations like GAP are important too.

Chicken in a bucket

At the Simmons Industries Inc. plant in South West City, Missouri, Department of Agriculture (USDA) grader Hobart Bartley says he was told by USDA superiors to approve chickens infected with salmonella, riddled with cancer, oozing with pus, and smeared with feces. "The damn thing would be half rotten, but they'd want me to put a grade on it."

Bartley was disgusted with the USDA'S Streamlined Inspection System (SIS) for chicken, a cost-cutting measure in place since 1983. SIS means fewer government inspectors have less time to check more chickens to see if they're fit for human consumption. Bartley complains that the speeded-up system, reported to shuttle up to 90 chicken carcasses by per minute, makes it impossible to check properly for diseases like salmonella.

One day Bartley happened to look into the eight-foot-high vat of water called the chiller," where as many as 10,000 chicken carcasses are left to float, soaking up moisture to increase their selling weight. Dried blood, feces, and hair were floating in the chiller along with the dead birds. Diane Sawyer called it a "fecal soup." It was, recalls Bartley, "a pool of disease and scum." After the vat had been drained one day, Bartley saw "about one foot of sludge ... clumps of manure and |chicken~ feed" left caked along the bottom. The chickens stored in that vat end up on our dinner tables.

About 50 feet from Simmons's main facility is the protein plant," where chicken parts deemed unsuitable for humans-chicken heads, feet, and feathers-are boiled. They subsequently show up in your pet food listed as "meat by-products."

Bartley claims the protein plant stank so badly one day that he decided to take a look. It wasn't his job, but he was curious. What Bartley found sounds like a scene from a bad late-night horror movie: Heaps of chicken parts were "infested with maggots two feet deep ... the pile would actually move like Jello."

Frustrated with the USDA, Bartley eventually took his complaints to GAP, and GAP took it from there, supplying the research and constant media pressure required to turn some hard-to-believe tales out of school into something like "fecal soup."

This private nonprofit group on E Street NW in Washington, D.C. is staffed by nine lawyers-most fresh from law school-paid between $22,000 and $40,000 a year to be a whistle blower's best friend. The group was born in 1975, its parent the unapologetically leftist Institute for Policy Studies. GAP hires no outside public relations or advertising people, relying instead on supporters and its own media successes to pass the word.

GAP'S motto could well be "Don't sue, publicize." It represents whistleblowers in court only as a last resort. GAP'S legal affairs director Tom Devine says, "Our job is to win a publicity campaign so that a lawsuit isn't necessary. When you're in a lawsuit, you're fighting a defensive battle .... We like to attack."

GAP reports that its current docket include whistleblowers from corporate America who allege wrongful dismissal after having charged that their companies violated safety and health regulations And GAP is representing Defense Department employees who claim that department regulations effectively block information from Congress. Two clients are Food and Drug Administration scientists alleging that the agency is failing to keep unsafe drugs out of the food chain. Another is the former director of Virginia's Department of Waste Management, who argued that the state must clean up a toxic landfill spanning two counties-and got fired for her efforts. And GAP currently has three CIA cases- one involving allegations that the agency supplied misleading information to Congress in connection with the Iran-contra scandal.

When GAP chooses to take a case to the media, its credibility and persistence are key. "60 Minutes" executive producer Don Hewitt is typical in wanting to flush out the motives of any group that brings a whistleblower's gripe to the program's attention. "If I find out that a group is always on left-wing causes, or right-wing causes," says Hewitt, "I get suspicious. You've got to be very careful of ideology."

Although GAP'S credibility...