President Richard Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods demonstrates the backwards-leaning stretch with which she erased eighteen-and-a-half minutes of a key Watergate conversation recorded on White House tapes.

Via George Washington University’s National Security Archive:

The Rosemary Award for worst open government performance, named after President Nixon’s secretary who erased 18 ½ minutes of a crucial Watergate tape, this year goes to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council, the senior federal officials (responsible for $71 billion a year of IT purchases) who have never addressed the failure of the government to save its e-mail electronically, according to the citation Friday by the National Security Archive.

Formed by Executive Order in 1996 and codified in law by Congress in the 2002 E-Government Act, the CIO Council describes itself as the “principle interagency forum for improving practices in the design, modernization, use, operation, sharing, and performance of Federal Government information resources.” Yet neither the Council’s founding documents, its 2007-2009 strategic plan, its transition memo for the Obama administration, nor its current Web site even mention the challenge of electronic records management for e-mail.

Last month, the Justice Department investigation of former senior officials John Yoo and Jay Bybee over their authorship of the so-called “torture memos” revealed that “most of Yoo’s email records had been deleted and were not recoverable.” The Yoo deletions represent only the latest red flag about government e-mail preservation – dating back to the January 1989 attempt by the Reagan administration to destroy its e-mail backup tapes, thwarted by the National Security Archive’s lawsuit.

A 2008 survey by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and OpenTheGovernment.org did not find a single federal agency policy that mandates an electronic record keeping system agency-wide. Congressional testimony in 2008 by the Government Accountability Office indicted the standard “print and file” approach by pointing out: “agencies recognize that devoting significant resources to creating paper records from electronic sources is not a viable long-term strategy”; yet GAO concluded even the “print and file” system was failing to capture the historic records “for about half of the senior officials” checked – John Yoo’s peers.

“The CIO Council has a bad case of attention deficit disorder when it comes to the e-mail disaster in the federal government,” commented Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive and author of a book on the e-mail lawsuit against the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. “We hope this year’s Rosemary Award will serve as a wake up call to the government officials who have the power, the money and the responsibility to save the e-mail sent in the course of the public’s business.”

The disaster of disappeared e-mail implicates almost every agency of the U.S. government, not only the Department of Justice which could not recover the Yoo e-mails. The National Archives and Records Administration also bears responsibility for coming up with the “print and file” approach to begin with, but NARA’s $400 million budget is miniscule compared to the annual IT spending of $71 billion over which the federal government’s CIO’s preside, so the CIO Council won the 2010 Rosemary Award based on the well-established Watergate principle of “follow the money.”

The only part of the federal government that seems to be facing up to the e-mail preservation challenge with any kind of “best practice” is the White House, where the Obama administration installed on day one an e-mail archiving system that preserves and manages even the President’s own Blackberry messages.

The National Security Archive brought the original White House e-mail lawsuit against President Reagan in early 1989, and continued the litigation against Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, until court orders compelled the White House to install the “ARMS” system to archive e-mail. The Archive sued the George W. Bush administration in 2007 after discovering that the Bush White House had junked the Clinton system without replacing the systematic archiving functions. CREW subsequently joined this suit and with the Archive negotiated a settlement with the Obama administration that included the recovery of as many as 22 million e-mails that were previously missing or mis-filed.

As a result of the two decades of the Archive’s White House e-mail litigation, several hundred thousand e-mails survive from the Reagan White House, nearly a half million from the George H.W. Bush White House, 32 million from the Clinton White House, and an estimated 220 million from the George W. Bush White House.

Previous recipients of the Rosemary Award include the FBI in 2009 (for having a record-setting rate of “no records” responses to FOIA requests), the Treasury Department in 2008 (for shredding FOIA requests and delaying responses for decades), the Air Force in 2007, and the Central Intelligence Agency in 2006. The Award is named after President Nixon’s long-time secretary Rose Mary Woods and the backwards-leaning stretch – answering the phone while keeping her foot on the pedal of a tape transcription machine – that she testified caused the erasure of an 18 ½ minute section of a key Watergate conversation on the White House tapes.

State Senator John Marty was the Democratic nominee for governor of Minnesota 16 years ago and is making another run for it. My friend Vin Gopal, who’s working on Marty’s campaign, tells me “Senator John Marty is the real deal. If he gets elected Governor this year, which he has a good shot at, it’s a whole new ballgame for the single-payer movement. No other statewide candidate in the country is as committed to the movement as he is.”

Marty tells me he’s optimistic about bringing single-payer healthcare to Minnesota, and that he has a third of the legislature on board with it at this point. Marty’s election campaign can be supported here http://johnmarty.org and the campaign for single-payer in Minnesota can be found here http://muhcc.org and here http://mnhealthplan.org

The legislation currently moving forward is somewhat unusual. Like any single-payer plan, it would eliminate the for-profit health insurance companies and all of their bureaucracy. It would cover all medical needs of all Minnesota residents. There would be no co-pays, deductibles, or out-of-pocket expenses. All bills would be paid by the single plan. Those who now have no coverage would be covered. Those who do have coverage would, in most or all cases, save money in the new system which would be far more efficient, purchase drugs in bulk, etc. All of that should be familiar to supporters of single-payer or visitors to civilized nations. What’s different is that the word “premium” would still be around.

Most single-payer healthcare plans raise funding through taxes. The Minnesota plan would ask the same Department of Revenue that collects taxes to collect premiums from both individuals and businesses, but the premiums would go into a separate fund for healthcare that could never be tapped for anything else. Premiums would be based on each person’s ability to pay, but they would not be optional. However, they would fund a public system developed by elected representatives, unlike the legislation being considered in Congress which would require people to fund for-profit corporations that come with the built-in motivation to provide as little healthcare as possible.

Will Minnesota be our Saskatchewan, the Canadian province that led the way on healthcare? Not if Maryland can help it. I asked Eric Naumburg, a doctor with the Maryland chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, where things stood in his state, and he told me:

“We have bills in both the Maryland Senate (SB-682) and House of Delegates (HB-767). The Senate Bill has 12 co-sponsors and the House Bill 38; that’s approximately 1/4 of each chamber. So far we have only Democrats on board. The leadership has not taken serious notice yet but there are some good signs and we are really just getting started. Also, between the state’s budget problems, the upcoming election and the health insurance reform mess in Washington, we hear lots of excuses for why not this year.

“The reality is that our bill, which is modeled after the one that has passed twice in California, has only general language about funding. We are raising money for an economic impact study on the effects of single payer. Key areas would include the effect on the state budget and economic growth within Maryland. This will help us with the best ways to fund the system. We continue to build our grassroots movement. This summer we are planning a concerted effort to talk to as many legislators as possible.

“As you have probably heard we have been collaborating on a weekly basis with groups from California and Pennsylvania; learning from each other’s experiences. California and Pennsylvania are further along in this process than we are; but we’re working to catch up. Also, the knowledge that there are several states working on state level single-payer healthcare reform has had a positive effect on some of our legislators. Down the road there is the possibility that a region could develop single payer reform, e.g. two or more adjoining states.”

Maryland and Pennsylvania? The Mason Dixon line crossed by a humane healthcare region? Why not. And who knows, maybe the nation someday!

The Maryland Senate bill is scheduled for a hearing March 10th at 1:00 p.m. in the Finance Committee.

David Swanson is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town by visiting davidswanson.org/book.

Many of these people are “paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests,” writes the magazine’s Sebastian Jones, a freelance reporter after a four-month-long probe.

“Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens—and in some cases hundreds—of appearances,” Jones reports.

For example, Tom Ridge, identified as the former governor of Pennsylvania, appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews urging the White House to “create nuclear power plants.” What viewers were not told, though, is that Ridge since 2005 has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation’s biggest nuclear power company, Jones writes.

On the same day, last Dec. 4th, retired general Barry McCaffrey, told MSNBC viewers the war in Afghanistan would require a three-to-10-year effort and “a lot of money.” Unmentioned, Jones says, was the fact DynCorp paid McCaffrey $182,309 in 2009 alone and that DynCorp has a five-year, $5.9 billion deal to aid U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Jones describes MSNBC as “the cable network with the most egregious instances of airing guests with conflicts of interest.” He notes, “Only on MSNBC was a prime-time program, Countdown, hosted by public relations operative Richard Wolffe and later by a pharmaceutical company consultant, former Governor Howard Dean, with no mention of the outside work either man was engaged in. And MSNBC has yet to introduce DynCorp’s Barry McCaffrey as anything but a ‘military analyst.’”

Moreover, last January 22nd, MSNBC’s Morning Joe audience saw Mark Penn, identified only as a Clinton administration pollster, suggest the Obama administration put healthcare reform on ice. Unmentioned, says Jones, was “Penn’s role as worldwide CEO of Burson-Marsteller, which has an entire healthcare division devoted to helping clients like Eli Lilly and Pfizer ‘create and manage perceptions that deliver positive business results.’”

Jones reports that what transpires on MSNBC also occurs on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN and CNBC. These outlets “eager to fill time and afraid of upsetting the political elite, have often looked the other way (and)at times…have even disregrded their own written ethics guidelines.” MSNBC may be the most flagrant example of deception but the other networks do not appear far behind.

During a Sept. 18, 2008, Fox News appearance to discuss Sarah Palin, Bernard Whitman, president of Whitman Insight Strategies—whose clients include marketing/PR firms like Ogilvy & Mather—lambasted Sen. John McCain for proposing to “Let AIG fail,” saying his position demonstrated “just how little he understands the global economy today.” Whitman’s “ongoing work” for AIG was not mentioned!

“When there’s a whole host of pundits on the airwaves touting the same agenda at the same time, you get a cumulative effect that shapes public opinion toward their agenda,” Janine Wedel, an anthropologist at George Mason University told Jones. Another academic, Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, said, “More disclosure is good—I’m certainly in favor of that—but why are these people on at all?”

That’s a very good question. MSNBC, Fox, and the others guilty of deceptive journalism owe their viewers an apology. Such broadcasts are neither fair nor balanced. They are deceptive, slanted, and contrary to the public interest. The cable broadcasters need to pledge to their viewers to reveal the hidden corporate agendas of their guests. Until that time, viewers can always turn them off.

Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist who writes on world events. Ross formerly worked for the Chicago Daily News and wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

City leaders and the downtown business community in Philadelphia are wringing their hands and calling for “tough action” against a horde of some 150 high school kids from eight of the city’s decrepit and failing high schools who rampaged late Tuesday afternoon through the Center City district’s shops, from the Gallery mall at 10th Street to Macy’s near City Hall, frightening tourists and suburban shoppers, and knocking over shopping displays.

By evening, police had reportedly locked up 15 kids who were charged with violent offenses, such as beating other kids or bystanders, or destroying property (Macy’s claimed damages to its flagship store totalling $700). Some of these kids were held overnight on lesser charges such as shoplifting or disturbing the peace.

I’m not going to diminish the seriousness of the incident. Nobody should be trashing stores or stealing things, and certainly nobody should be hurting other people.

At the same time, the official response, which has been to treat minor crimes like shoplifting or engaging in showball fights on the sidewalk or in the interior mall of City Hall like major criminal activity and to seek heavy penalties against these kids reeks of the growing police-state metality that is poisoning our society, locally and nationally.

Some of the kids who were arrested by police were under 16, and yet six hours after they were locked up, many, and perhaps all of them, had been prevented by Philadelphia Police from even contacting their parents. When a police officer at the 22nd Precinct, where some of the kids were being held, was asked by a caller why parents–who were understandably frantic by 11 when they still didn’t know where their sons and daughters were–hadn’t been allowed to call home, his response at first was a sneering, “Oh, you think they should have a right to a phone call?” Later, when pressed, he said, “They’ll get to call home when we’re done processing them.”

This was already some six hours after the kids had been picked up, and he gave no indication when the “processing” would be completed.

This is not, I suspect, how such things are handled by police in the suburbs, where parents of arrested minors, especially white minors, tend to get called immediately by police.

Now the city is seeking to have at least some of the kids who were arrested expelled from school, though the incident has absolutely nothing to do with their behavior in school. This is just punitive, law-and-order thinking that will do nothing to make these kids better behaved. In fact, it will just ensure that they are angrier and less able to make their way in society as adults. Do kids in the suburbs get expelled from school if they get convicted or shoplifting, or if they get busted for drunk driving on the weekend?

No. Of course not. They get expelled for violations that happen on school time on school property. Police are also calling for the Philadelphia School District to make free student transit passes invalid after 4 pm, instead of 7 pm–a truly stupid idea that if implemented would make it hard for all low-income students in the public schools to participate in after-school activities.

What really needs to be addressed, and what instead is being completely ignored by authorities and the public, is the question of why we’re seeing this kind of rampage in the first place.

Having talked with kids who frequent the Center City commercial area, I know that those with dark skin are regularly mistreated by store owners and store personnel in the Gallery, and in stores like Macy’s. My 16-year-old son reports that when he and friends have gone shopping in stores in the Gallery, for example, he has seen store personnel falsely charge his black friends with “planning to steal” items, when they were merely looking at things in the same way that other kids who were white, or asian like him, were doing.

In other words, African-American kids feel blatant prejudice downtown, which does much to explain the hostility that was apparent in the recent rampage. If Philadelphia politicians and business leaders want to make the Center City area more shopper- friendly, they might start by getting store owners (and police) to start treating all people in the area equally, including the kids who go there.

Meanwhile, the kids, who have demonstrated in this and earlier rampage incidents tremendous organizing skill at using social networking systems like MySpace, Facebook and cell-phones to pull together large groups of kids like the latest one along Market Street, should give some thought to taking their facility with the new technologies and using it more productively. Instead or organizing riots, they could organize protests that, instead of angering and frightening the majority of Philadelphians, would earn the support of at least some of them. Instead of calling kids together for a rampage against store-owners, they should organize peaceful protests against store operators who are demonstrably racist.

Imagine if kids used the new media to bring a thousand kids to the Gallery to march on the sidewalks with signs demanding an end to racism in the stores. Imagine if they used social media to organize mass boycotts of stores known to target black students for harassment. Imagine if they used social media to organize protests against police bias and police brutality.

There is enormous potential here, if kids would only grab hold of it and put it to good use.

They might even be able to teach some lessons to us adults about how to organize protests over things like the War in Afghanistan, or the failure of our congressional representatives to support real health care reform.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

It’s bad enough we know that the government tortured Abu Zubaydah, Binyam Mohamed, and countless others in an attempt to produce false confessions, faked intel about Iraq, and in general hype up a “terrorism” threat that would justify the billions bilked from the U.S. treasury for the bogus “war on terror.”

But now apparently the campaign to find terrorist boogie-men has come home with a vengeance. Just ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) informants Emilio and Analia Maya of Saugerties, New York. According to a fascinating Associated Press report by Helen O’Neill, on November 17, 2009, Emilio was surrounded by nine ICE officers in flak jackets with guns.

“We are deactivating you”

“We are deactivating you,” the officers told their former Argentinian immmigrant informer. The prisoner, who recognized agents who some years earlier had recruited him, was taken to jail over 100 milies away, and held over two weeks without charges.

Emilio and his sister Analia had made a deal with ICE back in March 2005. They could get S visas, “often known… as the ’snitch visa’… because [it's] given to aliens who assist US law enforcement to investigate and prosecute crimes and terrorist activities.”

But as O’Neill reports, quoting New York immigration lawyer Claudia Slovinsky, ICE and parent agency the Department of Homeland Security never actually award anyone the S visa. Instead, “they use the most vulnerable people to do dangerous work, make them all sorts of promises and then just abandon them.”

The AP story relates how the Mayas got involved with ICE, the dangerous missions they went on, the undercover work. When the brother and sister tried to back out of the informant game, they were told they had to continue or they would be deported. In fact, it turned out later that a deportation order for Emilio had been shuttling around ICE since December 2005, while for years they used him as an informant.

The Coerced Production of “Intelligence” on Terrorism

But the most interesting part of the story concerns what happened after Emilio and Analia had been working for ICE for some three years (emphases added):

In 2008, they say, the agents began demanding information on terrorism and guns – information the Mayas simply couldn’t provide. The brother and sister continued offering tips about local activities, but they were no longer sent on undercover jobs….

At a meeting in the Price Chopper parking lot [in May 2009], Emilio says, agents bluntly told him that unless he delivered information on weapons and terrorism, his work permit would not be renewed and he would be deported.

What seems clear is that the government, failing to get the easily controlled Mayas to drum up some kind of terrorist plot in order to feed the agency’s need promote itself and get a larger slice of the anti-terrorism funds sloshing around Washington, D.C., put the strong-arm on these immigrants, and when they couldn’t get them to produce, has prepared to deport them.

It doesn’t matter if a Congressman or a Senator intervened, as they did in this case. ICE and DHS apparently have little to fear from congressional inquiry. They are in a bureaucratic war to justify their existence, and in DC, it’s still, in the Obama years, all about terrorism.

Take a look at ICE’s own website, where it touts itself as “A Federal Leader in Combating Terrorism.”

As the second largest federal contributor to the nationwide network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plays a critical role in protecting the country against the threat of terrorism. With agents assigned to counter-terrorism investigations across the United States and around the world, ICE lends its expertise in enforcing immigration and customs laws to the over 100 JTTFs to investigate, detect, interdict, prosecute and remove terrorists and to dismantle terrorist organizations.

What are the JTTFs?

Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) are small cells of highly trained, locally based, passionately committed investigators, analysts, linguists, SWAT experts, and other specialists from dozens of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It is a multi-agency effort led by the Justice Department and FBI designed to combine the resources of federal, state, and local law enforcement.

The picture is clear: ICE wants its seat at the table with the other 40 or so agencies now associated with the national JTTFs. It’s like a big assembly line feeding raw intel to the FBI and Department of Justice, and what matters is that you keep producing. The quality of the intelligence, as evidenced by the attempt to squeeze “terrorism” “tips” out of the hapless and unconnected Mayas, is evidently not so important. What is important is that everyone get paid and the gravy train keep rolling.

“We’re Going to Change Your Brain”

The saddest thing in the O’Neill story is to read about the impotence members of Congress have when soliciting the protection of their constituents with agencies from the executive branch.

But the scariest thing is to reflect upon similarities between the ICE/Mayas case and the torture of prisoners in the “black sites”, rendition hellholes, Guantanamo and Bagram. Rather than the use of blackmail and extortion to coerce informants to produce bogus reports about terrorism, the U.S. abroad has resorted to outright torture.

The torture of prisoners like Binyam Mohamed — much in the news lately with the revelations by UK judges that Mohamed was subjected to CIA “enhanced interrogation technique”-style torture as early as March 2002 — was not about, or at least not solely about, the collection of information. It was about the manufacture of information, including false confessions and fingering others for prosecution or further torture. In an interview a few years back with Binyam Mohamed’s attorney, Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve:

Binyam explained that, between the savage beatings and the razor cuts to his penis, his torturers “would tell me what to say.” He added that even towards the end of his time in Morocco, they were still “training me what to say,” and one of them told him, “We’re going to change your brain.”

This emphasis on brainwashing — for that is the popular terminology for such an assault on the psyche of a prisoner — is a key component of the kind of psychological torture that was researched by both the United Kingdom and the United States in the years following World War II. It highlighted the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, fear, stress positions, manipulation of the environment, of food, the use of humiliation and both sensory deprivation and sensory overload upon the prisoner. The idea was to overwhelm the nervous system and make a human being collapse without a blow being made, without scars, without evidence usable in court.

In an article at Truthout by H.P. Albarelli and Jeff Kaye, the connections between the old CIA mind control and torture research programs and those of today are documented. The conclusion is that radical change is needed if these crimes are not to consume our nation:

The allegations of drugging by Mohamed and other prisoners are redolent of the use of hallucinogenic and other powerful mind altering drugs by the U.S. in its Artichoke, MK-ULTRA and other programs….

The CIA has been accused of involvement in continuing interrogation experimentation upon prisoners. The recent release of the previously censored summary of Mohamed’s treatment in Pakistan notes that “The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed.” As Stephen Soldz notes in an article on the British court revelations, “Why were these effects being ‘carefully observed’ unless to determine their effectiveness in order to see whether they should be inflicted used upon others?”…. The role of doctors, psychologists, and other medical professionals in the CIA/DoD torture program has been condemned by a number of individuals in their respective fields, and by organizations such as Center for Constitutional Rights and Physicians for Human Rights….

This country needs a clear and definite accounting of its past and present use of torture. Like a universal acid, torture breaks down the sinews of its victims, and in the process, the links between people and their government are transformed into the naked exercise of pure sadistic power of rulers over the ruled. The very purpose of civilization is atomized in the process. We need a full, open and thorough public investigation into the entire history of the torture program, with full power to subpoena, and to refer those who shall be held accountable for prosecution under the due process of law.

This report was originally published at Firedoglake.com.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California, writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair

Raising troubling comparisons to tactics employed by Josef Stalin and right-wing Latin American dictatorships, the U.S. government has created a “hit list” of Americans abroad marked for murder.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Feb. 3, the U.S. may, with executive approval, target and kill American terrorist suspects, Inter Press News Service reported.

”We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community,” he said.

Blair added that U.S. counterterrorism officials may try to kill U.S. citizens involved in terrorism overseas with ”specific permission” from higher up.

In response to questions from the panel’s top Republican, Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Blair said, if ”we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

Blair’s statement recalls the policies of Soviet Russia’s secret police, who often murdered those who fled Stalin’s tyranny. Red Army founder Leon Trotsky, for example, was tracked to Mexico by a Soviet agent who killed him with an ice pick.

Blair’s remarks followed a Washington Post article reporting that President Barack Obama had embraced President George W. Bush’s policy of authorizing the killing of U.S. citizens involved in terrorist activities overseas.

The Post reported: “After the Sep. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said.

“The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for example, has to pose ‘a continuing and imminent threat’ to U.S. persons and interests.”

Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with Human Rights First, told Inter Press, “The short answer is that combatants can be targeted and civilians cannot under international law. Their citizenship isn’t relevant. But just being a ’suspected terrorist’ doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a combatant.”

She added, “The key question, and where there may be serious disagreement, is whether the person targeted is ‘directly participating in hostilities.’ If not, and they’re targeted, it’s a war crime.”

Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said, ”It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified ‘threat.’”

Attorney George Brent Mickum, an American lawyer who has defended a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, told Inter Press, “I guess my sense is that it’s just more fear mongering. They kill somebody and don’t need to offer any justification.”

”We have killed thousands of innocent civilians while attempting to target alleged operatives,” Mickum said. “And let us not forget how frequently our intelligence has been wrong about alleged operatives.”

“My clients Bisher al Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Martin Mubanga, abu Zubaydah, and Shaker Aamer all are alleged to have been operatives based on intel. In every case that intel was incorrect,” Mickum told Inter Press. “I don’t have any expectation that our intel with respect to alleged American operatives is likely to be any better.”

Other experts on international law were outraged, too.

“This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949,” said Francis Boyle, University of Illinois professor of international law at Champaign.

“In addition, the extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Boyle said, “The U.S. Government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called ‘dirty wars.’”

He claimed President Bush “reduced the United States of America to a Banana Republic waging a ‘dirty war’ around the world in gross violation of international law, human rights law, and the laws of war.  It is only a matter of time before the United States government will establish a similar ‘death list’ targeting U.S. citizens living here at home.”

Boyle added that, “As someone who used to teach Constitutional law, President Obama knows better.”

Boyle, a leading U.S. authority in international law, drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 for the U.S. He is the author of a number of books in his field, including Destroying World Order.

Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, told Inter Press, “As with its embrace of the [George W.] Bush approach to indefinite detention, the Obama administration’s even greater reliance on targeted extrajudicial killing – including of U.S. citizens – is a tragic legal, moral, and practical mistake.”

”Even for those who accept the legitimacy of the death penalty,” Pitts continued, “this further undermines the rule of law that is our best weapon in the fight against true terrorists, while completely subverting due process and constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.”

Basic reporting for this article came from Inter Press News Service of Rome. Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist who writes on world events. Ross formerly worked for the Chicago Daily News and wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

But now comes word from the Department of Labor that, whoops, we “minsunderestimated,” as former President George W. Bush would say, the number of jobs lost.  The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that because of a “modeling error,” it misstated the number of jobs lost between March 2008 and March 2009 by 17 percent. In hard numbers, that is to say, the BLS was reporting that a record 4.8 million jobs were lost during those 12 months of economic collapse, when in fact the job loss total was actually 5.6 million.

They missed 824,000 lost jobs! Just to give you an idea of how many people that is, we’re talking about 10 percent of the population of the city of New York, and more people than the entire population of San Francisco.

And it gets worse.  The same broken model was used for the next year, so that while we’ve been getting all those soothing words about how job losses are slowing, and about how the economy is going to start coming back, in fact, the number of jobs supposedly created or added during the past nine months has actually been overstated by almost one million! That would be the entire population of the cities of Seattle and Miami combined.

Technically, what happened is that the BLS was relying on an assumption that new businesses were forming all during these two periods, and that these new businesses were hiring people. That’s what happens during normal years, of course. But of course, any dunce without out an economics PhD could have told the BLS that over the past two years, which were hardly normal in any sense of the word, not many new businesses were being formed.

As Dean Baker, an economist with a PhD who is co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, and a guy who, as a left-leaning economist outside of the mainstream consensus does exercise common sense, puts it, when all those rosy numbers about job creation or slowing job losses were coming out, “the idea that we had a significant number of businesses being created didn’t make sense.”

Ah, but that begs the question: if the government numbers are that grotesquely wrong, what does that say about the government’s policy with regard to joblessness, about it’s policy towards economic stimulus, about the government’s policy towards alleviating the suffering of the struggling citizenry? After all, policies are supposed to be designed around a solid set of facts.

It would seem that a major reappraisal of economic policy would be in order, no?

But not a word are we hearing about such a reappraisal.

In fact, I suspect that after this little moment of embarrassment, the whole thing will be forgotten, and we’ll go on with our laissez faire approach to dealing with this recession, pretending that things will all get better on their own.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, we’re still hearing, day in, day out, on the news that the unemployment rate is only 10 percent, when the economists all know that this is a fiction. Thanks to political pressures dating back to the Reagan administration, and continued through the Clinton and Bush years, that figure has carefully excluded people who have been jobless for over a year, people who say to Labor Department pollsters that they have “given up” looking for work, and people who are working at a part-time job because they can no longer find full-time employment.

By any fair standard, all these people are unemployed too, but we just erase them from the books. If we counted all these people, as the Labor Department used to do back in the 1970s and earlier, the real unemployment rate would be over 18 percent today in America.

The bogus figure of 10 percent unemployment gives the false impression that unemployment in the US is not all that bad. It also gives the impression that it’s not any worse here than in Europe, where the rate is also about 10 percent, except that Europe, the long-term unemployed are counted, as are those who are only working part-time involuntarily.

The lesson here is not to trust the government. When it comes to the nation’s true economic condition, as the old saying goes: “Who are you going to believe: the numbers or your own lying eyes?”

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

The 2007 picture provided by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences shows Nidal Malik Hasan when he entered the program for his Disaster and Military Psychiatry Fellowship. Authorities said he went on the killing spree at Fort Hood, Texas which left 13 people dead. Photo/Wikimedia

This is a straight news release issued moments ago by the FBI pertaining to the agency’s review of the investigation into the massacre at Fort Hood late last year:

Results of FBI Review of Fort Hood Investigation

The FBI continues to work closely with the Department of the Army and others in the ongoing investigation into the November 5, 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. Given the pending nature of the case, we must continue to protect the ongoing investigation and the integrity of the prosecution.

Immediately after the tragedy, FBI Director Robert Mueller ordered a preliminary review of the FBI’s actions, as well any relevant policies and procedures that may have guided the FBI’s actions before the shooting. In addition, the Director asked for recommendations as to what changes should be made as a result of that review.

Also, on December 8, 2009, Director Mueller asked Judge William H. Webster to conduct a more comprehensive, independent review of FBI policies, practices, and actions. That review is currently underway. The goal of these reviews is to look at both the actions of individuals involved and the systems in place at the time of the tragic events at Ft. Hood and while ensuring that investigators have the tools they need to effectively carry out their responsibilities in today’s evolving threat environment. The paramount concern in this process is to make sure that the systems and policies that are in place support public safety and national security.

While the outside review being led by Judge Webster continues, as a result of the internal review, the FBI identified four areas for immediate adjustment and improvement:

Protocols with the Department of Defense (DOD)

Although information-sharing has dramatically improved since September 2001, there is still room for improvement in certain areas, especially given the changing nature of the terrorist threat, and the need to constantly recalibrate approaches and response. Working with DOD, the FBI has formalized a process for centrally notifying DOD of FBI investigations involving military personnel. This should streamline information-sharing and coordination between the FBI and all components of DOD, where appropriate, and as permitted by law. Improved processes for exchanging information will help ensure that FBI task forces, agents, and analysts have all available information to further their investigations.

Additional Levels of Review

The FBI determined that intelligence collected in connection with certain threats–particularly those that affect multiple equities inside and outside the FBI–should have a supplemental layer of review at the Headquarters level. This redundancy in the review process will limit the risk of human error by bringing a broader perspective to the review. In this way, the FBI should have a better institutional understanding of such threats.

Technological Improvements

During the course of the internal review, the FBI identified information technology improvements that should be made to our systems. Those improvements, which are being engineered, should strengthen our agents’ and analysts’ ability to sift through information by automatically showing certain connections that are critical to uncovering threats.

Training for Members of Joint Terrorism Task Forces

Expanded and strengthened training addressing legal restrictions which govern the retention and dissemination of information. The FBI also is increasing training for members of JTTFs on the use of FBI’s databases to better ensure JTTF members know how to maximize access to all available information and to best utilize existing tools to identify and link critical information.

The above changes reflect the findings of the FBI’s internal review, conducted in the weeks following the shooting. Judge Webster’s review is continuing and will evaluate additional areas, including whether current laws and policies strike an appropriate balance between protecting individuals’ privacy rights and civil liberties while detecting threats. The findings in the DOD review likely will also identify other areas that can be strengthened.

The Obama administration announced Sunday it will subject the citizens of 14 nations who are flying to the United States to intensified screening at airports, including being subjected to full-body pat downs or body scanners.

Under the new rules, all citizens of Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen must receive a pat down and an extra check of their carry-on bags before boarding a plane bound for the United States, officials said. Citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria — nations considered “state sponsors of terrorism” — face the same requirement.

In a statement, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), part of the giant Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said a majority of all other U.S.-bound international travelers — not just from the 14 countries — will also face random and threat-based enhanced screening.

But the agency denied that the new regulations amount to profiling. “TSA does not profile. As is always the case, TSA security measures are based on threat, not ethnic or religious background,” spokeswoman Kristin Lee said.

“We are only as strong as our weakest point,” said Cindy Farkus, the head of global security programs at the Transportation Security Administration. “We are always trying to stay ahead of where the emerging threats might be.”

But the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) told us that the new TSA guidelines were “a political solution to a security problem.” MPAC’s Communications Director, Edina Lekovic, urged the adoption of behavior-based screening rather than profiling, and called the TSA guidelines “a lazy solution that may make us feel good, but in fact merely creates blind spots that make us less safe.”

“These ‘blind spots’ can be identified and exploited by violent extremists. Furthermore, the new policy deeply undermines the Obama administration’s stated commitment to civil rights, equality before the law, and a much-needed effort to rebuild U.S.-Muslim world relations,” she added.

Lekovic also disclosed reports she has received from members of her constituency that TSA screeners at Washington DC’s Dulles airport have been instructed to carry out additional inspections of women wearing headscarves. These reports could not be immediately confirmed with the TSA.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the government should “adhere to longstanding standards of individualized suspicion and enact security measures that are the least threatening to civil liberties and are proven to be effective. Racial profiling and untargeted body scanning do not meet those criteria.”

“We should be focusing on evidence-based, targeted and narrowly tailored investigations based on individualized suspicion, which would be both more consistent with our values and more effective than diverting resources to a system of mass suspicion,” said Michael German, national security policy counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office and a former FBI agent.

“Overbroad policies such as racial profiling and invasive body scanning for all travelers not only violate our rights and values, they also waste valuable resources and divert attention from real threats.”

The organization said the government’s plan to subject citizens of certain countries to enhanced screenings is bad policy, because there is no way to predict the national origin of a terrorist and many terrorists have come from countries not on the list. It cited the case of the “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid, who was a British citizen, as were four of the London subway bombers.

“Singling out travelers from a few specified countries for enhanced screening is essentially a pretext for racial profiling, which is ineffective, unconstitutional and violates American values. Empirical studies of terrorists show there is no terrorist profile, and using a profile that doesn’t reflect this reality will only divert resources by having government agents target innocent people,” said German. “Profiling can also be counterproductive by undermining community support for government counterterrorism efforts and creating an injustice that terrorists can exploit to justify further acts of terrorism.”

Nihad Awad, national executive director for the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR), said in a statement, “Under these new guidelines, almost every American Muslim who travels to see family or friends or goes on pilgrimage to Mecca will automatically be singled out for special security checks — that’s profiling.”

He added, “Under these new guidelines, almost every American Muslim who travels to see family or friends or goes on pilgrimage to Mecca will automatically be singled out for special security checks -– that’s profiling. While singling out travelers based on religion and national origin may make some people feel safer, it only serves to alienate and stigmatize Muslims and does nothing to improve airline security.”

“We all support effective security measures that will protect the travelling public from an attack such as that attempted on Christmas Day,” Awad said. “But knee-jerk policies will not address this serious challenge to public safety.”

MPAC’s government liaison, Alejandro Beutel, said, “The new TSA guidelines deliver a propaganda victory to Al-Qaeda and other violent extremist groups, since they rob targeted groups of people from their civil liberties based on their ethnicity and country of origin,” said “Call it whatever you want, but this is religious and ethnic profiling at its worst.”

A number of legal experts were also critical of the new measures.

Georgetown University law professor David Cole said, “The danger with nationality-based profiling is that it sweeps up vast numbers of innocent people, may alienate those we need to have on our side if we are to reduce al-Qaeda recruitment, and takes our eyes off folks, like Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, who are citizens of other countries that don’t fit the profile.”

Richard Reid, a self-admitted member of Al Qaeda, was convicted by a U.S. federal court of attempting to destroy a commercial aircraft in-flight by detonating explosives hidden in his shoes in 2001. Moussaoui, a French citizen, was convicted of conspiring to kill citizens of the US as part of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In response to numerous calls for profiling from elected politicians, former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff told National Public Radio, “I’m going to argue that this case illustrates the danger and the foolishness of profiling…I think it’s not only problematic from a civil rights’ standpoint, but frankly, I think it winds up not being terribly effective.”

He cited a Justice Department 2003 advisory report that concluded, “Racial profiling in law enforcement is not merely wrong, but also ineffective. Race-based assumptions in law enforcement perpetuate negative racial stereotypes that are harmful to our rich and diverse democracy, and materially impair our efforts to maintain a fair and just society.”

A number of transportation security authorities have recommended that the U.S. adopt the screening practices used by Israel’s airports and airlines. El Al airlines, one of the world’s safest carriers, has spent many years developing screening methods based on passengers’ behavior, rather than looks, dress, or country of origin.