RETRIEVING DOCUMENT
Day 11 of 16. The committee meets on July 16th.
Mrs. Adaeze Mbeki is in Roseland. She is sleeping on an air mattress in her sister's two-bedroom apartment with six other people. She called me Wednesday morning. I asked her what she planned to say to the committee if she got to speak.
She said: "I would tell them that I had a refrigerator. I would tell them that my daughter had a room."
She has a past tense now. I wrote that down.
The Prior Positioning Question
I have been sitting with the audio from Darius's drive for eleven days.
My source — the one who characterized the equipment as consistent with field signal collection — used the phrase "SIGINT forward deployment" and then ended the call. She has not returned three subsequent calls. That was eleven days ago.
I found someone who would talk to me on background. A former signals intelligence contractor, not affiliated with any government agency he is willing to name. I will call him D.
D said the following, which I am summarizing without quotation marks at his request: Pre-positioning for signal collection requires either advance knowledge of a window of activity, or continuous surveillance coverage of an area. A team arriving eleven minutes after a shockwave event — before any marked agency vehicle — is not responding to the event. They are monitoring and moving to a predetermined collection point.
D did not tell me who the two individuals were. He said he could not speculate on that.
I asked him: is there a circumstance in which that pre-positioning is routine?
He said yes.
I asked: is this one of those circumstances?
He did not answer. I noted the non-answer.
The FOIA Clock
I submitted my Freedom of Information Act request on June 23rd. The standard response window is thirty days. That puts the first compliance date at July 23rd.
July 23rd is seven days after the committee meets.
The sequencing matters. The committee will act, or decline to act, before any agency is required to respond to a request about agency activity at the incident site. If the committee acts in a way that resolves or forecloses Mrs. Mbeki's situation, the FOIA response becomes the only remaining institutional clock.
I have noted the sequencing in the record.
What I Know as of July 11th
Five days until the committee meets.
Mrs. Adaeze Mbeki: Roseland, two-bedroom, seven people. Air mattress. Daughter on the same air mattress. Thirteen apartment rejections.
The fake Chicago Housing Transition Office man: dark for thirty days as of today. The handwriting examiner's note is still in my files. Printing consistent with someone trained to print under time pressure. He left a phone number. The number is a VoIP line I cannot place.
UIAP's Reston number: rings three times, disconnects. Has rung three times and disconnected every time I have called since June 20th.
My SIGINT source: three unreturned calls.
Terri Walcott, Columbus: not responding.
The Wilmington law firm: no reply to two letters.
Darius's drive is still in my bag. I carry it everywhere now. I do not know why I do this, but I do.
I am counting. The committee is not required to.