The meeting did go well, and I appreciate them making the trek. We had a good and frank conversation and it’s one that I hope we can continue on a more regular basis.

We all understand that there are legitimate and genuine differences between the parties, but despite the political posturing that often paralyzes this town, there are many issues upon which we can and should agree. That’s what the American people are demanding of us. I think they’re tired of every day being Election Day in Washington. And at this critical time in our country, the people sent us here expect a seriousness of purpose that transcends petty politics.

That’s why I’m going to continue to seek the best ideas from either party as we work to tackle the pressing challenges ahead. I am confident, for example, that when one in 10 of our fellow citizens can’t work, we should be able to come together and help business create more jobs. We ought to be able to agree on providing small businesses with additional tax credits and much needed lines of credit. We ought to agree on investments in crumbling roads and bridges, and we should agree on tax breaks for making homes more energy-efficient — all of which will put more Americans to work. Many of the job proposals that I’ve laid out have passed the House and are soon going to be debated in the Senate. We spent a lot of time in this meeting discussing a jobs package and how we could move forward on that. And if there are additional ideas, I will consider them as well. What I won’t consider is doing nothing in the face of a lot of hardship across the country.

We also talked about restoring fiscal responsibility. There are few matters on which there is as much vigorous bipartisan agreement, at least in public, but unfortunately there’s also a lot of partisan wrangling behind closed doors. This is what we know for sure: For us to solve this extraordinary problem that is so many years in the making, it’s going to take the cooperation of both parties. It’s not going to happen in any other way.

I’m pleased that Congress supported my request to restore the pay-as-you-go rule, which was instrumental in turning deficits into surpluses during the 1990s. I’ve also called for a bipartisan fiscal commission. Unfortunately this measure, which originally had received the support of a bipartisan majority of the Senate and was cosponsored by Senators Conrad and Gregg, Democrats and Republicans, was blocked there. So I’m going to be creating this commission by executive order. And during our meeting I asked the leadership of both parties to join in this serious effort to address our long-term deficits, because when the politics is put aside, the reality of our fiscal challenge is not subject to interpretation. Math is not partisan. There ought to be a debate about how to close our deficits. What we can’t accept is business as usual, and we can’t afford grandstanding at the expense of actually getting something done.

During our meeting we also touched briefly on how we can move forward on health reform. I’ve already announced that in two weeks I’ll be holding a meeting with people from both parties, and as I told the congressional leadership, I’m looking forward to a constructive debate with plans that need to be measured against this test. Does it bring down costs for all Americans as well as for the federal government, which spends a huge amount on health care? Does it provide adequate protection against abuses by the insurance industry? Does it make coverage affordable and available to the tens of millions of working Americans who don’t have it right now? And does it help us get on a path of fiscal sustainability?

We also talked about why this is so urgent. Just this week, there was a report that Anthem Blue Cross, which is the largest insurer in the largest state, California, is planning on raising premiums for many individual policyholders by as much as 39 percent. If we don’t act, this is just a preview of coming attractions. Premiums will continue to rise for folks with insurance; millions more will lose their coverage altogether; our deficits will continue to grow larger. And we have an obligation — both parties — to tackle this issue in a serious way.

Now, bipartisanship depends on a willingness among both Democrats and Republicans to put aside matters of party for the good of the country. I won’t hesitate to embrace a good idea from my friends in the minority party, but I also won’t hesitate to condemn what I consider to be obstinacy that’s rooted not in substantive disagreements but in political expedience. We talked about this as well, particularly when it comes to the confirmation process. I respect the Senate’s role to advise and consent, but for months, qualified, non- controversial nominees for critical positions in government, often positions related to our national security, have been held up despite having overwhelming support. My nominee for one important job, the head of General Services Administration, which helps run the government, was denied a vote for nine months. When she finally got a vote on her nomination, she was confirmed 96 to nothing. That’s not advise and consent; that’s delay and obstruct.

One senator, as you all are aware, had put a hold on every single nominee that we had put forward due to a dispute over a couple of earmarks in his state. In our meeting, I asked the congressional leadership to put a stop to these holds in which nominees for critical jobs are denied a vote for months. Surely we can set aside partisanship and do what’s traditionally been done to confirm these nominations. If the Senate does not act — and I made this very clear — if the Senate does not act to confirm these nominees, I will consider making several recess appointments during the upcoming recess, because we can’t afford to allow politics to stand in the way of a well-functioning government.

My hope is that this will be the first of a series of meetings that I have with leadership of both parties in Congress. We’ve got to get past the tired debates that have plagued our politics and left behind nothing but soaring debt and mounting challenges, greater hardships among the American people, and extraordinary frustrations among the American people. Those frustrations are what led me to run for President, and as long as I’m here in Washington, I intend to try to make this government work on their behalf.

So, you know, I’m going to take a couple of questions, guys.

Major.

Q After meeting with you, John Boehner came out and told us, “The House can’t pass the health care bill it once passed; the Senate can’t pass the health care bill it once passed. Why would we have a conversation about legislation that can’t pass?” As a part of that, he said you and your White House and congressional Democrats should start over entirely from scratch on health care reform. How do you respond? Are you willing to do that?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, here’s how I responded to John in the meeting, and I’ve said this publicly before. There are some core goals that have to be met. We’ve got to control costs, both for families and businesses, but also for our government. Everybody out there who talks about deficits has to acknowledge that the single biggest driver of our deficits is health care spending. We cannot deal with our deficits and debt long term unless we get a handle on that. So that has to be part of a package.

Number two, we’ve got to deal with insurance abuses that affect millions of Americans who’ve got health insurance. And number three, we’ve got to make health insurance more available to folks in the individual market, as I just mentioned, in California, who are suddenly seeing their premiums go up 39 percent. That applies to the majority of small businesses, as well as sole proprietors. They are struggling.

So I’ve got these goals. Now, we have a package, as we work through the differences between the House and the Senate, and we’ll put it up on a Web site for all to see over a long period of time, that meets those criteria, meets those goals. But when I was in Baltimore talking to the House Republicans, they indicated, we can accomplish some of these goals at no cost. And I said, great, let me see it. And I have no interest in doing something that’s more expensive and harder to accomplish if somebody else has an easier way to do it.

So I’m going to be starting from scratch in the sense that I will be open to any ideas that help promote these goals. What I will not do, what I don’t think makes sense and I don’t think the American people want to see, would be another year of partisan wrangling around these issues; another six months or eight months or nine months worth of hearings in every single committee in the House and the Senate in which there’s a lot of posturing. Let’s get the relevant parties together; let’s put the best ideas on the table. My hope is that we can find enough overlap that we can say this is the right way to move forward, even if I don’t get every single thing that I want.

But here’s the point that I made to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell: Bipartisanship can’t be that I agree to all the things that they believe in or want, and they agree to none of the things I believe in and want, and that’s the price of bipartisanship, right? But that’s sometimes the way it gets presented. Mitch McConnell said something very nice in the meeting about how he supports our goals on nuclear energy and clean coal technology and more drilling to increase oil production. Well, of course he likes that; that’s part of the Republican agenda for energy, which I accept. And I’m willing to move off some of the preferences of my party in order to meet them halfway. But there’s got to be some give from their side as well. That’s true on health care; that’s true on energy; that’s true on financial reform. That’s what I’m hoping gets accomplished at the summit.

Q Do you agree the House and Senate bill can’t pass anymore?

THE PRESIDENT: What I agree with is that the public has soured on the process that they saw over the last year. I think that actually contaminates how they view the substance of the bills. I think it is important for all of these issues to be aired so that people have confidence if we’re moving forward on such a significant part of the economy as health care, that there is complete transparency and all of these issues have been adequately vetted and adequately debated.

And this gives an opportunity not just for Democrats to say here’s what we think we should do, but it also gives Republicans a showcase before the entire country to say here’s our plan; here’s why we think this will work. And one of the things that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell both said is they didn’t think that the status quo was acceptable, and that’s, right there, promising. That indicates that if all sides agree that we can’t just continue with business as usual then maybe we can actually get something done.

Q Mr. President, one of the reasons Anthem said — Anthem Blue Cross says that it’s raising its premiums is because so many people are dropping out of individual coverage because the economy is so bad and that leaves the people in the pool who are people who need medical care driving up costs. One of the reasons why businesses are not expanding right now, in addition to some of the credit issues you’ve talked about, at least according to business leaders, is they say there’s an uncertainty of what they need to plan for because of the energy bill, because of health care. That’s what they say. I’m not saying it’s true or not, but that’s what they say. What do you say when you hear that?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that the biggest uncertainty has been we just went through the worst recession since the Great Depression and people weren’t sure whether the financial system was going to melt down and whether we were going to tip into a endless recession. So let’s be clear about the sources of uncertainty in terms of business investment over the last several years: A huge contraction, trillions of dollars of losses in people’s 401(k)s; people have a lot of debt coming out of the previous decade that they still haven’t worked out; the housing market losing a whole bunch of value.

So the good news is that where we were contracting by 6 percent the economy is now growing by 6 percent. The CEOs I talked to are saying they are now making investments, and I anticipate that they’re going to start hiring at a more rapid clip. What I’ve also heard is them saying that we would like to feel like Washington is working and able to get some things done.

There are two ways of interpreting the issue of uncertainty. One way would be to say, well, you know what, we’ll just go back to what we were doing before on, let’s say, the financial markets. We won’t have the regulations that we need; we won’t make any changes in terms of “too big to fail.” That will provide certainty — until the next financial crisis.

That’s not the kind of certainty I think that the financial markets need. The kind of certainty they need is for us to go ahead and agree on a bipartisan effort to put some rules of the road in place so that consumers are protected in the financial markets; so that we don’t have banks that are too big to fail; that we have ways of winding them down and protecting the overall system without taxpayer bailouts. That requires legislation. The sooner we can get that done, the better.

The same would be true when it comes to health care. A lot of CEOs I hear from will say, boy, we’d like you to get health care settled one way or another, but they will acknowledge that when they open up their latest invoice for their premiums and they find out that those premiums have gone up 20 percent or 25 percent, that’s the kind of uncertainty that also tamps down business investment.

So I guess my answer would be this: The sooner the business community has a sense that we’ve got our act together here in Washington and can move forward on big, serious issues in a substantive way without a lot of posturing and partisan wrangling, I think the better off the entire country is going to be. I absolutely agree on that.

What I think is important is not to buy into this notion that is perpetrated by some of the business interests that got a stake in this who are fighting financial reform, for example, to say, boy, we’d be doing fine if we just didn’t try to regulate the banks. That I think would be a mistake.

Q Just to play devil’s advocate on that — a small business, let’s say, not somebody who’s going to be affected by the regulatory reform, small business — you have proposed, you would acknowledge, a bold agenda. And a small business might wonder, I don’t know how the energy bill is going to affect me, I don’t know how the health care reform bill is going to affect me — I’d better hold off on hiring.

THE PRESIDENT: The small businesses I talk to — and I’ve been talking to a lot of them as I’ve been traveling around the country over the last several months — their biggest problem is right now they can’t get credit out of their banks so they’re uncertain about that. And they’re still uncertain about orders — do they just have enough customers to justify them doing more.

It’s looking better at this point. But that’s not the rationale for people saying, I’m not hiring. Let me put it this way. Most small businesses right now, if they’ve got enough customers to make a profit and they can get the bank loans required to boost their payroll, boost their inventory, and sell to those customers, they will do so. Okay?

Let’s see, let’s get a print guy here. David.

Q You heard McConnell talk about nuclear power, offshore drilling, free trade — that’s a lot of Republican stuff. Is your party going to go for that if you decide to support that –

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I think that on energy there should be a bipartisan agreement that we have to take a both/and approach rather than an either/or approach. What do I mean by that? I am very firm in my conviction that the country that leads the way in clean energy — solar, wind, biodiesel, geothermal — that country is going to win the race in the 21st century global economy. So we have to move in that direction.

What is also true is that given our energy needs in order to continue economic growth, produce jobs, make sure our businesses are competitive around the world, that we’re going to need some of the old, traditional energy sources as we’re developing these new ones and ramping them up. So we can’t overnight convert to an all-solar or an all-wind economy. That just can’t happen. We’re going to have needs in these traditional sources.

And so the question then is, are we going to be able to put together a package that includes safe, secure nuclear power; that includes new technologies so that we can use coal — which we have in abundance and is very cheap, but often is adding to our greenhouse gases — can we find sequestration technologies that clean that up; can we identify opportunities to increase our oil and natural gas production in a way that is environmentally sustainable? And that should be part of a package with our development of clean energy.

And my hope is that my Republican friends, but also Democrats, say to themselves, let’s be practical and let’s do both. Let’s not just do one or the other; let’s do both. Over time I think the transition is going to be more and more clean energy and over time fossil fuels become less prominent in our overall energy mix. But we’ve got to do both.

Q How confident are you there will be that kind of consensus for that double-edged approach?

THE PRESIDENT: I am just a eternal optimist — (laughter) — and so — it’s the right thing to do. And all I can do is just to keep on making the argument about what’s right for the country and assume that over time people, regardless of party, regardless of their particular political positions, are going to gravitate towards the truth. Okay?

I’m going to take two more. Let’s see –

Q How about the back? (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I just want to make sure that I was getting a balance here, so — go ahead, Chuck.

Q Awwww –

THE PRESIDENT: Why is everybody moaning about Todd?

Q He’s too good. His questions are too precise. (Laughter.)

Q Iran — we got the news today that they’re doing more of these — trying to enhance this uranium even more. Obviously Secretary Gates today in Paris was quoted as saying basically the dialogue seems to be over and now the question is sanctions. Where are we on sanctions? How close is this? I know you had sort of an end-of-the-year deadline when you stood up there with Sarkozy and Brown. It’s now February. How quickly is this moving along?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it’s moving along fairly quickly. I think that we have bent over backwards to say to the Islamic Republic of Iran that we are willing to have a constructive conversation about how they can align themselves with international norms and rules and reenter as full members of the international community.

The most obvious attempt was when we gave them an offer that said we are going to provide the conversion of some of the low-enriched uranium that they already have into the isotopes that they need for their medical research and for hospitals that would serve up to a million Iranian citizens. They rejected it — although one of the difficulties in dealing with Iran over the last several months is it’s not always clear who’s speaking on behalf of the government, and we get a lot of different, mixed signals. But what’s clear is, is that they have not said yes to an agreement that Russia, China, Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States all said was a good deal, and that the director of the IAEA said was the right thing to do and that Iran should accept.

That indicates to us that, despite their posturing that their nuclear power is only for civilian use, that they in fact continue to pursue a course that would lead to weaponization. And that is not acceptable to the international community, not just to the United States. So what we’ve said from the start was we’re moving on dual tracks. If you want to accept the kinds of agreements with the international community that lead you down a path of being a member of good standing, then we welcome you. If not –

Q Haven’t they responded, though? I mean, by deciding to do what they did, with these –

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m getting to that.

Q Okay.

THE PRESIDENT: And if not, then the next step is sanctions. They have made their choice so far, although the door is still open. And what we are going to be working on over the next several weeks is developing a significant regime of sanctions that will indicate to them how isolated they are from the international community as a whole.

Q What do you mean by “regime of sanctions”?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, meaning that there’s going to be a –

Q Some will be U.N. and some will be –

THE PRESIDENT: We are going to be looking at a variety of ways in which countries indicate to Iran that their approach is unacceptable. And the U.N. will be one aspect of that broader effort.

Q China will be there? You’re confident?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the — we are confident right now that the international community is unified around Iran’s misbehavior in this area. How China operates at the Security Council as we pursue sanctions is something that we’re going to have to see. One thing I’m pleased about is to see how forward-leaning the Russians have been on this issue. I think they clearly have seen that Iran hasn’t been serious about solving what is a solvable dispute between Iran and the international community.

All right? I’m going to make this the last question. And I’ll take somebody from the back — yes.

Q Me?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q Thanks for doing this. It’s been a while. (Laughter.) On health care, the Republicans are asking whether the February 25th session will include economists and public interest groups and people supporting your side, or will it just be the members of Congress? And on Anthem Blue Cross, do you have the authority to go in and tell a private company they can’t charge that — how will you stop them?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I don’t have the authority as I understand it — I can’t simply issue an executive order lowering everybody’s rates. If I could I would have done that already and saved myself a lot of grief on Capitol Hill. That’s why reform is so important. That’s why the status quo is unacceptable.

But there is no shortcut in dealing with this issue. I know the American people get frustrated in debating something like health care because you get a whole bunch of different claims being made by different groups and different interests. It is a big, complicated, tough issue. But what is also true is that without some action on the part of Congress, it is very unlikely that we see any improvement over the current trajectory. And the current trajectory is premiums keep on going up 10, 15, 20, 30 percent. The current trajectory is more and more people are losing health care.

I don’t know if people noted, because during the health care debate everybody was saying the President is trying to take over — a government takeover of health care. I don’t know if anybody noticed that for the first time this year you saw more people getting health care from government than you did from the private sector — not because of anything we did, but because more and more people are losing their health care from their employers. It’s becoming unaffordable. That’s what we’re trying to prevent.

We want people to be able to get health care from their employers. But we also understand that you’ve got to fix the system so that people are able to get it at affordable rates and small businesses can afford to give their employees insurance at an affordable rate. And that’s not happening right now.

To your question about the 25th, my hope is that this doesn’t end up being political theater, as I think some of you have phrased it. I want a substantive discussion. We haven’t refined exactly how the agenda is going to go that day. We want to talk with both the Democratic and Republican leaders to find out what they think would be most useful. I do want to make sure that there’s some people like the Congressional Budget Office, for example, that are considered non-partisan, who can answer questions.

In this whole health care debate I’m reminded of the story that was told about Senator Moynihan, who was I guess in an argument with one of his colleagues, and his colleague was losing the argument so he got a little flustered and said to Senator Moynihan, “Well, I’m entitled to my own opinion.” And Senator Moynihan said, “Well, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” I think that’s the key to a successful dialogue on the 25th or on health care.

Let’s establish some common facts. Let’s establish what the issues are, what the problems are, and let’s test out in front of the American people what ideas work and what ideas don’t. And if we can establish that factual accuracy about how different approaches would work, then I think we can make some progress. And it may be that some of the facts that come up are ones that make my party a little bit uncomfortable. So if it’s established that by working seriously on medical malpractice and tort reform that we can reduce some of those costs, I’ve said from the beginning of this debate I’d be willing to work on that. On the other hand, if I’m told that that is only a fraction of the problem and that is not the biggest driver of health care costs, then I’m also going to insist, okay, let’s look at that as one aspect of it, but what else are we willing to do?

And this is where it gets back to the point I was making earlier. Bipartisanship cannot mean simply that Democrats give up everything that they believe in, find the handful of things that Republicans have been advocating for and we do those things, and then we have bipartisanship. That’s not how it works in any other realm of life. That’s certainly not how it works in my marriage with Michelle, although I usually do give in most of the time. (Laughter.) But the — there’s got to be some give and take, and that’s what I’m hoping can be accomplished. And I’m confident that’s what the American people are looking for.

So, all right?

Q Jobs question?

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, since there wasn’t a jobs question –

Q Well, I just –

THE PRESIDENT: I’ll make this the last one, jobs question.

Q At the stakeout, the Republicans were saying, well, the jobs package we’ve seen, it’s not really ready yet, we’re a little worried about the cost. Are you satisfied that there is something that can be quickly moved through Congress on jobs?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, my understanding is — first of all, the House has moved forward a jobs package that has some good elements in it. My understanding is, is that there is bipartisan talks taking place as we speak on the Senate side about some elements of a package.

I think there are some things that a lot of people agree on. Just to give you an example, the idea of eliminating capital gains for small businesses — something we can all agree on. I talked about it at the State of the Union address. My hope would be that we would all agree on a mechanism to get community banks who are lending to small businesses more capital, because that is something that I keep on hearing is one of the biggest problems that small businesses have out there.

So I think that it’s realistic for us to get a package moving quickly that may not include all the things I think need to be done, and it may be that that first package builds some trust and confidence that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill can work together and then we move on to the next aspect of the package and so forth. It may take a series of incremental steps, but the one thing I’m absolutely clear about is, is that we’ve got an economy that’s growing right now, a huge boost in productivity — that’s the good news. The bad news is, is that companies still haven’t taken that final step in actually putting people on their payroll full-time.

We’re seeing an increase in temporary workers, but they haven’t yet taken on that full-time worker. And so providing some additional impetus to them, right as the economy is moving in a positive direction, I think can end up yielding some good results.

All right? Thank you, guys. That was pretty good, thanks.

Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security John Brennan. Photo/Pete Souza

What is to be done about the idiocy that has spread, like a poisonous but imperceptible gas, from the Pentagon to Congress, and is now wafting through the White House, deranging all it touches? As it travels, this dismal infection transforms statistical impossibilities into magic numbers, which appear, to the uninformed observer, to confirm the most shameless lies of former Vice President Dick Cheney: that Guantánamo was teeming with hardcore terrorists, who couldn’t wait to “return to the battlefield.”

Only last month, I tore into the mainstream media for abandoning all its fabled fact-checking and objectivity, when the Pentagon claimed, without producing any evidence whatsoever, that 1 in 5 prisoners freed from Guantánamo had “engaged in terrorist activity after their release,” and these claims were repeated as facts by numerous supposedly reputable media outlets.

As I explained at the time, this was just the latest installment in a campaign of misinformation, which, in May last year, led to humiliation for the New York Times, when its editors allowed a front-page story to run, claiming that 1 in 7 released prisoners (74 in total) had “returned to terrorism,” even though only 27 names were provided, and, of those, independent experts could only verify somewhere between 13 and 20 of them.

Last May, the Pentagon at least provided names, but last month’s fact-free assertions have now found their way to the White House, and were repeated on February 1 by John Brennan, the assistant to President Obama for homeland security and counterterrorism, in a letter to House Leader Nancy Pelosi, which was obtained by ABC News (PDF).

Brennan wrote that:

[T]he Intelligence Community assesses that 20 percent of detainees transferred from Guantánamo are confirmed or suspected of recidivist activity. This includes 9.6 percent of detainees who have been confirmed as having returned to terrorist activities, and 10.4 percent whom the Intelligence Community suspects, but is not certain, may have engaged in recidivist activities.

Brennan attempted to use these spurious figures to score points, asserting that all of the largely unidentified prisoners had been released by the Bush administration. Defending the Obama administration’s careful and thorough interagency review of the remaining prisoners’ cases, he wrote:

I want to underscore the fact that all of these cases relate to detainees released during the previous administration and under the prior detainee review process. The report indicates no confirmed or suspected recidivists among detainees transferred during this Administration, although we recognize the ongoing risk that detainees could engage in such activity.

Despite this, it frankly beggars belief that a spokesman for an administration that has pledged to close Guantánamo would publicly cleave to the kind of wretched propaganda that will make that task all but impossible.

So who are these approximately 116 men (out of the 532 prisoners released from Guantánamo under George W. Bush) who have allegedly “engaged in recidivist activities”?

We know, from earlier Pentagon claims, that this “recidivism” has included — and may well still include — publishing houses, the offices of newspapers, TV studios and film sets, because the Pentagon admitted (in a press release that was subsequently deleted from the Pentagon’s website, but is mirrored here) that it included former prisoners, like the Tipton Three — three young men from the West Midlands — who appeared in a film, “The Road to Guantánamo,” which dramatized their experiences, and the five Uighurs sent to Albania in 2006, after tribunals at Guantánamo cleared them of being “enemy combatants.” In the latter case, this was apparently because one of them, Abu Bakker Qassim, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he urged US lawmakers to defend habeas corpus.

In the years since, many more ex-prisoners have written books, newspaper articles and op-eds, and have appeared on TV and in films. Perhaps Omar Deghayes, the British resident (released in 2007), who appeared in the Guantánamo documentary that I co-directed, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” has now joined this ever-expanding group of “recidivists” who have dared to use their words and their voices to “attack” the United States for what it did to them in its brutal, experimental prisons in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere.

Clearly, however, the main thrust of this propaganda is directed not at these men, but at others — 70, 80, 90 men, perhaps — who have supposedly engaged in terrorism since their release.

Is this plausible? In a word, no.

Even the most rampant apologists for the lawless regime created by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have never realistically tried to claim that more than a dozen or so Saudis slipped through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program with their burning hatred of America still intact. Moreover, once a handful of other regularly cited names have been dealt with, and it becomes apparent that no “recidivists” have emerged from a vast array of countries — throughout Europe, North Africa and the Gulf — the only conclusion that a logical analyst can reach is that this vast and largely undefined number of “recidivists” must include as many as 1 in 3 of all the Afghans who were ever held.

This, to be honest, is no less preposterous, as only a handful of Taliban commanders (released through the Pentagon’s own ineptitude) were mistakenly freed from Guantánamo, but it at least has the benefit of a certain amount of logic, in that men repatriated to a country still occupied by a foreign army that is as useless at rounding up “terrorists” as it was eight years ago, may find a reason to resist the occupier on their doorstep, even if they have never been near a “battlefield” before.

Even this, however, presupposes that the Pentagon’s “facts” and “suspicions” are remotely accurate, and as researchers — particularly those at the Seton Hall Law School, who have relentlessly analyzed the repeated claims of recidivism — have demonstrated time and again (PDF), the propaganda does not stand up to any form of scrutiny. John Brennan may be at liberty to talk about a few dozen released prisoners who have “engaged in recidivism,” but entertaining the prospect that this figure could be as high as 116 is, to put it frankly, either a dereliction of duty, or a sign that he has fallen under the sway of Dick Cheney’s still malevolent influence.

To understand how easy it is for credulous officials to fall for this propaganda, I’d like to take you back to last month, when Senator Dianne Feinstein, who, laughably, is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, falsely claimed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “about a third of former inmates at the US naval base who have returned to fight against US interests come from Yemen,” as AFP described it. “If you look at Yemen, and we’re taking a good look at Yemen,” Feinstein said, “what you see is, I think, at least 24 or 28 are confirmed returned to the battlefield in Yemen, and a number are suspected. If you combine the suspected and the confirmed, the number I have is 74 detainees have gone back into the fight, and I think that’s bad.”

It was a poor day for the Senate’s “intelligence” when Feinstein (drawing on the May report) made this ridiculous statement. Its most baleful effect was to add a deceptive veneer of acceptability to the pressure exerted on President Obama to suspend the release of any more cleared Yemeni prisoners at Guantánamo, for one simple reason: only 16 Yemeni prisoners were released from Guantánamo between 2004 and November 2009, and only one of these men allegedly became involved in terrorism.

But in this new world of groundless hysteria, which seems to reveal only how the baleful reach of the Pentagon’s scaremongering has finally engulfed the White House, no one cares that Feinstein couldn’t even get her facts straight.

With John Brennan embracing the lie that 116 of the 532 men released from Guantánamo between 2002 and January 2009 have “engaged in recidivist activities” — and with a compliant and complacent mainstream media happy to regurgitate such rubbish without asking for facts — it may as well be true, as Feinstein claimed, that 28 of the 16 Yemenis returned from Guantánamo have become terrorists.

Once upon a time, we used to pride ourselves on making policy decisions based on facts, rather than on the propaganda that was so prevalent in totalitarian regimes. Now, however, we might as well give up all pretense that this is the case. Just as people were tortured in Guantánamo to produce false confessions that could be used in show trials, like every other totalitarian regime, representatives of the US government now attempt to scare and intimidate the American public with “facts” about “recidivism” that have no basis in reality. In 2010, fear blinds reason, and the truth, it seems, is irrelevant.

This report was originally published on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Mumia Abu-Jamal. Photo/Wikicommons

The recent decision by the US Supreme Court to send convicted police killer Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case back down to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, with instructions for a three-judge panel there to reconsider its decision to uphold the lifting of the prominent African-American journalist’s death penalty, is only the latest in a long string of examples of how courts at all levels have made special exceptions to precedent in order to try and kill this particular prisoner.

The high court found on January 19, that Frank Spisak, a self-described Nazi and killer of three in Ohio, had been properly sentenced, because at the time the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his death penalty on appeal, “settled law” was that the jury instructions given to his jury had been proper. And under the terms of the 1995 Effective Death Penalty Act, federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have to defer to the judgements of state courts unless those courts’ decisions are deemed “unreasonable.”

Where it gets complicated though, is that subsequent to the conclusion of Spisak’s state appeals, the US Supreme Court, in a 1988 decision called Mills v. Maryland, ruled that ambiguously worded jury ballot forms and confusing or misleading jury instructions on sentencing by judges were grounds for reversing a death sentence. Mills was never made retroactive (one of the more repugnant features of many Supreme Court decisions), but Abu-Jamal’s state appeals didn’t even properly begin until after his 1995-96 Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing, and so the same finding made by the Supreme Court majority in Spisak’s case–that the confusing jury instruction standards were “settled law” at the time–cannot be made in Abu-Jamal’s case.

But the Supreme Court order sending Abu-Jamal’s case back down to the Third Circuit, right or wrong, hardly means Abu-Jamal’s battle is over, much less lost, despite his already having spent an astonishing 28 years in solitary confinement on Pennsylvania’s hellish death row.

Even if the Third Circuit were to reverse itself, and decide against all logic that because of another Supreme Court decision made last month, reimposing the death penalty on Frank Spisak, the self-proclaimed Nazi killer of three men, Abu-Jamal should also die, it would not mean he can simply be marched off to a gurney for a lethal injection.

As Hugh Burns, the assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who has been leading the effort by the DA’s office to have Abu-Jamal executed for the last decade and a half, noted in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, threre are at least three more avenues of appeal of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence that still need to be considered at the district Federal Court level (actually there are four).

That’s because when Federal Judge William Yohn, way back in 2001, issued his historic ruling revoking Abu-Jamal’s death sentence on the grounds that the jury ballot form used to determine sentencing, and the instructions of trial judge Albert Sabo, had been confusing on the question of mitigating circumstances, he mooted those other avenues of appeal, saying that he didn’t need to rule on them. The sentence was already lifted.

Now that Yohn has been reversed on that lifting of the death sentence, though, Abu-Jamal has a right to have Judge Yohn go back and look at the other three challenges to his sentence. And those challenges are very solid and serious. (Actually, I’ve always considered it a measure of how confident Judge Yohn was in the correctness of his decision on the jury instructions claim that he didn’t bother to deal with the other four appeals claims–something he could have done simultaneously.)

The first unresolved appeal claim goes to the heart of a defendant’s right to representation and a fair trial. Abu-Jamal’s attorney, Anthony Jackson, testified under oath at a Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing in 1995 to the obvious truth that did absolutely nothing to prepare for the sentencing portion of the trial. He called no witnesses to testify to Abu-Jamal’s character, an astonishing lapse which left the prosecutor free and unchallenged in portraying Abu-Jamal as a cop-hating terrorist.

Jackson prepared no witnesses, though Abu-Jamal’s siblings and mother were on hand and ready to testify, as were many others in the community. Jackson, astonishingly, didn’t even request a delay of a few days after the guilty verdict in order to prepare for the sentencing hearing. When the judge ordered the session to begin the next day, Jackson went along meekly. It didn’t help that on the morning of the sentencing hearing, Jackson was awoken first at 6 am by fire trucks at his home–the result of a “prank call”– and that after he got to court, he received a frightened and frightening call from his 15-year-old son saying that someone had called his home telling the boy “You are the one we want. We’ll be coming over to get you!” (Any bets on who was making those calls?) Abu-Jamal in his 1999 habeas appeal the federal court claims his constitutional right to representation was denied by Jackson’s dismal performance at the sentencing hearing.

A second line of appeal, also mooted and left unresolved by Judge Yohn, was a claim that Abu-Jamal’s first, fourth, fifth and fourteenth amendment rights were violated when Prosecutor Joseph McGill improperly used Abu-Jamal’s membership, as a 15-year-old boy, in the Black Panther organization, in trying to portray him as a vicious cop-hater. McGill came to court with a yellowed newspaper clipping from the Philadelphia Inquirer in which the young Abu-Jamal, quoting Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Tse-tung, had told reporters that “power flows from the barrel of a gun.” It didn’t matter that the article explained that Abu-Jamal had made that statement in the context of the murder days earlier of Panther leader Fred Hampton by Chicago Police, and that the context made it clear he was referring to the power of police.

McGill took the quote out of context and made it appear as though Abu-Jamal was advocating war on the cops. In any event, the quote had been made 12 years before, when Abu-Jamal was just a boy. The reality was that, far from being at war with police, Abu-Jamal as an adult had a sterling record or no arrests or convictions. Here is a case where the Pennsylvania courts and federal courts in the Third Circuit have repeatedly overturned death convictions where membership in allegedly anti-social organizations was cited by prosecutors in an effort to tarnish defendants before a jury, but where a special exception has been apparently been carved out for Abu-Jamal. Judge Yohn has yet to rule on this line of appeal.

Third, there remains to be considered an appeal on the grounds that prosecutor McGill improperly sought, in his final argument to the jury in the sentencing hearing, to diminish the jurors’ sense of responsibility for their decision. McGill told the jury, “Ladies and gentlemen, you are not asked to kill anybody. You are asked to follow the law. The same law that I keep on throwing at you, saying those words, law and order.

I should point out that it’s the same law that has for six months provided safeguards for this defendant. The same law, ladies and gentlemen, the same law that will provide him appeal after appeal after appeal….The same law, ladies and gentlemen, that has made it so because of the constant appeals…nobody at all has died in Pennsylvania since 1962 for an incident that occurred in 1959.”

Again, the courts at all levels–in Pennsylvania, in the Third Circuit, and the US Supreme Court itself–have all overturned death penalty sentences based upon just such statements having been made to juries at trials. Indeed, another case prosecuted successfully by McGill himself was overturned because he made exactly the same statement to a jury, claiming jurors need not feel they are personally ordering a man’s death. So this appeal too needs to be considered in full by Judge Yohn.

Finally, there is a fourth avenue of appeal which was also mooted and left unresolved by Judge Yohn. That is the claim that the prosecutor knowingly withheld evidence in police files which showed that Abu-Jamal had no criminal record and no propensity for violence. Specifically, Abu-Jamal, years after his trial, obtained his FBI file–largely composed of materials obtained by the FBI from Philadelphia Police and the Philadelphia Police Department’s so-called “Red Squad.”

That file, 600 pages long, shows that surveillence of Abu-Jamal ended in 1973. A 1974 memo at the end of the file states, “In March 1973, per bureau instructions, captioned subject was deleted from ADEX [the list of people deemed subversive and slated as part of COINTELPRO to be rounded up and detained in the event of a national emergency] and no additionalinvestigation conducted concerning his activities.

Sources, however, have continued to report periodically on COOK [Abu-Jamal’s family name] and, although he has not displayed a propensity for violence, has continued to associate himself with individuals and organizations engaged in Extremist activities.” Clearly this file, stating that Abu-Jamal did not appear to be a violent person, had been available to the prosecution, and should have been offered to the defense. This appeal of Abu-Jamal’s conviction based upon a claim of prosecutorial misconducdt must also be considered by Judge Yohn.

Once the Third Circuit has reconsidered its decision on the jury instruction issue–and the outcome there is by no means certain, with Abu-Jamal’s attorney Robert Bryan planning a spirited argument that Abu-Jamal’s case is substantively different from the Spisak case–and if it were to rule against Abu-Jamal, there would first of all be a new appeal of that decision back to the US Supreme Court. Only if the high court were to uphold such a decision would these four other issues finally go back before Judge Yohn.

It appears that even if the courts continue to rule against this now world-renowned journalist who has spent more than half his life sitting confined in a small cell on death row, his controversial case, dogged as it is by charges of judicial misconduct, racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, purjured prosecution witness testimony and political interference, will continue to drag on unresolved for years to come.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-area journalist and has followed the Abu-Jamal case for more than 12 years. His book on the case, Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, was published in 2003 by Common Courage Press. Lindorff’s work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

Diverting the cost of a month of war to a year of giving substance to our “freedom of the press” would mean that the last time someone asked you about the Teabaggers’ genius in being smart enough to talk dumb enough to persuade everyone to be racists would, in fact, be the LAST time anyone would ask you how a creation of the corporate media manages to get coverage from the corporate media.

But what do I mean by government-funded independent media? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Aren’t we better off with a completely worthless and counterproductive corporate media system than with government-controlled media? Maybe, but I said publicly FUNDED, not government CONTROLLED. And the choice is between that sort of communications system or nothing.

Corporate news rooms, journalism, and investigative reporting are dying out as surely as if a plague were spreading among reporters; and they were already dying out before the internet came onto the scene. We need to take a lesson from current European or early American history and begin treating the press as the public good that Jefferson and Madison considered it, or give up on the accountability imposed on government officials in the United States just a few decades ago.

“The Death and Life of American Journalism” by Robert McChesney and John Nichols will persuade anyone with basic reading skills of the above assertions. I highly recommend reading this book, and skipping only the first page of the introduction. The authors begin by quoting a mass-murderer who libels the blogosphere and opposes “opinion” to “serious” news. But they don’t mean it any more than they mean to focus on early nineteenth century US history at the expense of examining more deeply the successes of European governments in the current era. That’s just packaging for xenophobes.

The book is a tour de force, providing an extremely persuasive analysis of where our communications system is headed if left alone, and a terrific survey of ways in which we can rescue it from disaster. In short, the book shows us that corporate media is dying as a form of substantive political reporting. We need a different approach. But I’m not sure we don’t also need to work within the existing and dying system, as we could have done decades ago but never have, as a step toward a long-term solution.

That is to say, in the wake of “Citizens United” we cannot possibly compete with corporate ad buys and shouldn’t try. Civic groups and labor unions and concerned Americans should not give funding to any organization or political candidate who will pass a penny along to the corporate media. Instead we should finally create our own media outlets with all of the money we waste on each election cycle.

We don’t have to do so in the corporate manner. McChesney and Nichols point to other approaches, such as the L3C Low-Profit Limited Liability Company. A low profit would be more of a profit than Air America managed, and its funding and purpose would not subject it to the same risks. While we need long-term public investment in media, we need short-term private investment in the same to achieve the public understanding necessary to get us there.

Then we need the emergency and long-term steps McChesney and Nichols prescribe, including a return to better subsidized postal rates for print media, an expansion of AmeriCorps to include journalist training, an investment in high school media, and serious government funding of news reporters:

“If by 2020 we roughly doubled the number of full-time working journalists in the United States,” McChesney and Nichols write, “to, say, 160,000, it would require a U.S. government subsidy of $7.2 billion in 2009 dollars.” That amount of money is what the Pentagon refers to as “a rounding error.”

The fact is that the fourth estate is a more critical public good than the military, police, fire, electricity, roads, water, wall street bailouts, or many other things we treat as public goods, or — for that matter — healthcare, retirement income, education, or many other things that some of us try to force our government to treat as public goods. And yet we do not even ask that freedom of the press be supported in any way by our elected representatives.

Despite our own nation’s history and many other nations’ current experience of publicly funding journalism without allowing politicians to censor and direct it, we are unable to even imagine such a thing, preferring to stick with the ever worsening pretense of corporate journalism in the name of a perverted freedom of the press that has been reduced to freedom of speech for corporate conglomerates.

We need to read “The Death and Life of American Journalism” and to think hard about the fate of media outlets that are not discussing this book despite it’s convincing prediction of their early demise. If these institutions would rather perish than change, how much concern can they have for the future of you or me or our children’s children?

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.

Balli Aviation Ltd., a subsidiary of the United Kingdom-based Balli Group PLC, pleaded guilty today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to a two-count criminal information in connection with its illegal export of commercial Boeing 747 aircraft from the United States to Iran, announced David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; Channing D. Phillips, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; Thomas Madigan, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement; and Adam J. Szubin, Director of the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Under the plea agreement, Balli Aviation Ltd. agreed to pay a $2 million criminal fine and be placed on corporate probation for five years. The $2 million fine, combined with a related $15 million civil settlement among Balli Group PLC, Balli Aviation Ltd., the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), and the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), that was also announced today, represents one of the largest fines for an export violation in BIS history. Under the terms of the related civil settlement, Balli Group PLC and Balli Aviation Ltd. have agreed to pay a civil penalty of $15 million of which $2 million will be suspended if there are no further export control violations. In addition, Balli Aviation Ltd. and Balli Group PLC are denied export privileges for five years, although this penalty will be suspended provided that neither Balli Aviation nor Balli Group commits any export violations and pays the civil penalty.  Under the terms of the settlement, Balli Group PLC and Balli Aviation, Ltd. will also have to submit the results of an independent audit of its export compliance program to BIS and OFAC for each of the next five years.

According to count one of the information filed with the court, beginning in at least October 2005, through October 2008, Balli Aviation Ltd. conspired to export three Boeing 747 aircraft from the United States to Iran without first having obtained the required export license from BIS or authorization from OFAC, in violation of the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and the Iranian Transactions Regulations. More particularly, the information states that Balli Aviation Ltd., through its subsidiaries, the Blue Sky Companies, purchased U.S.-origin aircraft with financing obtained from an Iranian airline and caused these aircraft to be exported to Iran without obtaining the required U.S. government licenses. Further, Balli Aviation Ltd. entered into lease arrangements that permitted the Iranian airline to use the U.S.-origin aircraft for flights in and out of Iran.

Count two of the information states that Balli Aviation Ltd. violated a Temporary Denial Order (TDO) issued by BIS on March 17, 2008, that prohibited the company from conducting any transaction involving any item subject to the EAR. Starting in or about March 2008 and continuing through about August 2008, Balli Aviation Ltd. willfully violated the TDO by carrying on negotiations with others concerning buying, receiving, using, selling and delivering U.S.-origin aircraft which went to the Export Administration Regulations.

“As this case demonstrates, corporations that conduct business with Iran in violation of U.S. export laws and sanctions face serious consequences,” said David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. “The many agents, analysts and attorneys who worked on this successful investigation and prosecution deserve special thanks for their efforts.”

“These charges reflect the commitment of the United States to vigorously enforce our laws against corporations that illegally seek to acquire U.S. aircraft from the U.S. on behalf of Iranian customers,” said Channing Phillips, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. “Those who seek to profit by violating and circumventing U.S. trade laws should take heed of today’s guilty plea by Balli Aviation.”

“The significant fine is a direct consequence of the level of deception used to mislead investigators,” said Thomas Madigan, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement. “The case agents worked through a complex corporate maze to obtain the facts and bring the violators to justice.”

“Today’s case should serve as further warning of Iran’s continued efforts to circumvent sanctions and obtain U.S. technology. Together with our colleagues from the Justice and Commerce departments, OFAC will continue to aggressively pursue both domestic and foreign entities that seek to violate U.S. sanctions programs by exporting goods to Iran from the United States.” said Adam J. Szubin, Director, Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Image/Center for Public Integrity

There were two points in President Obama’s State of the Union address that provoked resounding and universal applause in the chamber from the assembled senators and representatives of both parties. One point was when the president said he wanted to start his job-creation program “in small businesses, companies that begin when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream, or a worker decides its time she became her own boss.”

The other point was when he said, “While we’re at it, let’s also eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment; and provide a tax incentive for all businesses, large and small, to invest in new plants and equipment.”

The lusty cheering and applause were not based upon some belief on the part of the assembled legislators that this was about alleviating the pain and suffering of the one-in-five Americans who is out of work, or who is struggling to support a family on the income from some pathetic part-time job paying minimum wage. It was apparent that this was a cheer for the idea of giving more money to the capitalist class. Period.

In today’s America, those in power have completely disavowed one of the key goals–if not the key goal–of democratic government, which is, as the Constitution put it so admirably in its opening sentence, to “promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.”

There is nothing in that Preamble about promoting the welfare of the business classes. The only justifiable reason for doing so then would have to be in order to promote the general welfare. And yet decades of policies aimed at promoting the welfare of the corporate elite and to a lesser extent promoting the welfare of the business classes in general (what used to be called the “trickle-down theory”), have demonstrably not only not promoted the general welfare; they have worsened the general welfare.

By every measure, the tax policies, welfare policies, trade policies, labor law policies, and Wall Street deregulation policies of the government, whether in Democratic or Republican hands, have led to a declining standard of living, a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich, and a gradual increase in the underlying level of unemployment (the “acceptable” base level of unemployment which establishment economists consider to be “full” employment), not to mention to the extraordinary current level of unemployment.

“Trickle-down,” it turns out, really means “piss on.”

President Obama’s talk about jobs is bogus. Jobs are leaching away from the US at a prodigious rate, like water pouring through the holes of a sieve, thanks to trade policies that encourage companies to shut down US operations, move production abroad, and then sell the once locally-made goods back to increasingly impoverished Americans. Any new jobs created are lower wage, and prone to interruption, given that they are in services, and aren’t linked to any major capital investment.

Proposed programs like a $5000 tax credit for hiring a worker or revoking tax breaks for companies that shift production overseas are a joke, simply a rhetorical sop to the listening audience not meant to be taken seriously. (No employer will make a new hire just to snag a $5000 cut in taxes, and in any event, a credit is only useful to a company that is making profits and paying taxes, and such firms have no need of assistance to get them hiring. It’s the companies that are in trouble that would need encouragement to hire, and they aren’t paying any taxes.)

What is clear from the wild applause to these two lines in the State of the Union address is that government at this point is not about improving the general welfare at all (if it ever was). It is self-evidently about enriching the rich.

And at that point such a government has lost its reason for being.

This explains why the health “reform” bill has been such a farce. It was never about improving the health care of average Americans (something that could have been easily, quickly and efficiently accomplished by simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone). It was always about ensuring the enrichment of the various players in the health care industry, who already own 17.5 percent of the entire US economy.

It explains why we aren’t getting any kind of re-regulation of the predatory financial industry. The goal of de-regulation was never to make life better for average Americans. It was to enrich the financiers, and it did that very well. And no de-regulation is going to happen, because the goal of Washington politicians is to continue to enrich those financiers.

It explains why we’re at war in Afghanistan. There is no conceivable threat posed by this poorest of nations located, landlocked, in a part of the globe that is maximally remote from the US. Yet we are being committed to an endless war there, costing a nominal $100 billion a year (times two or three when you add in the financing of the debt, and the costs of care for the injured troops over their lifetimes), because that war enriches the munitions industry, and also provides justification for an annual $800 billion military budget–a staggering sum that sucks the very life out of any program aimed at “improving the general welfare.”

The whole government enterprise at this point is an ugly affront to the Preamble of the Constitution.

We will all be better served if and when the whole thing is brought down.

The way I see it, we’ve pretty much lost our government, and just voting in new politicians isn’t going to fix anything (we just demonstrated that!). Our best hope then is a popular groundswell for a new Constitutional Convention. Let’s roll the dice and try over, now that we’ve seen how our government can be stolen.

I agree it’s a scary idea. Who knows what we Americans are really like? Maybe we are a nation of selfish imperialists and racists and sduch a convention would lead to a restoration of slavery or apartheid, a mass deportation of minorities, incarceration of gays and lesbians, and open endorsement of empire and a police state. But I like to think that we Americans are actually as good as our mythology tells us we are, and that a constitutional convention could lead to a new government that would really be of the people, by the people and for the people.

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

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair

The director of U.S. national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee the government has the right to kill Americans abroad.

Here are 10 problems with this:

1. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don’t cease to be crimes because you cross a border.

2. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don’t cease to be crimes because you engage in them frequently.  Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans.  The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder.

3. Killing people has nothing whatsoever to do with gathering so-called intelligence.

4. Even in this age in which senators and house members petition and write public letters to the president imploring him to obey laws, rather than introducing legislation, issuing subpoenas, holding impeachment hearings, or defunding agencies, the fact remains that Congress, above all, IS the government, and it is just not the place of the director of national thuggery to come in and dictate what the law will or will not be.

5. Having made the globe a battlefield and sanctioned crimes including lawless imprisonment, torture, warrantless spying, indiscriminant bombings, and the use of white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and other sickening weapons, on the grounds that all is fair and legal in war, preventing Americans from becoming the innocent victims of the war is becoming harder and harder.  If active military can be on duty here, if we can be spied on, kidnapped, and imprisoned here.  If our most prominent foreign death camp can be relocated here, by what logic — and for how long — can government assassinations of Americans (without trial) be confined to elsewhere?

6. Typically when we assassinate people abroad, a lot of other innocent people are killed in the process.  Those are all murders.  That too will come home if there is not resistance soon, major resistance to this madness.

7. We are being asked to trust extrajudicial decisions on whether or not to murder, not just to allegedly wise judges who are in too big a hurry or find it logistically unfeasible to hold a trial, but to the very people who lied us into the wars that are motivating most of the international hostility toward our country and draining most of the resources Americans need at home.

8. No republic has ever survived putting this kind of power in the hands of a single ruler, with no independent legislature, no independent press, and no independent popular resistance.  And we’re almost there.

9. These people usually only admit to believing they have the barbaric “right” to do things that they have already done.

10. What are the chances the Director of Intelligence will never consider a president a threat to national security?

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.

Jack Barouh of Golden Beach, Fla., pleaded guilty today to filing a false tax return, the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced. Sentencing has been set for April 16, 2010, before U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan in Miami. The defendant remains free on a $1 million bail pending sentencing. He faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison.

According to court documents and statements made in court, Barouh admitted to filing a false tax return for 2007 in which he failed to report that he had an interest in or a signature authority over financial accounts at UBS AG, one of Switzerland’s largest banks. He also failed to report income earned on his UBS Swiss bank accounts. The UBS accounts were opened in the names of Domilou S.A., a nominee Panamanian corporation, and Similen Investments Limited, a nominee British Virgin Island corporation. For years 2002 through 2007, the tax loss associated with the Domilou and Similen accounts at UBS is approximately $736,269.

In addition to the Domilou and Similen accounts, the defendant owned and controlled several additional offshore bank accounts located at banks other than UBS, including accounts in Switzerland and Hong Kong.

According to court documents, the defendant owned and operated several businesses that manufactured and sold watches. Beginning in 1976, the defendant skimmed income from his watch businesses and deposited the proceeds into his undeclared UBS bank accounts. The defendant also deposited unreported sales commissions into the accounts.

According to court documents, beginning in 2007, the defendant attempted to withdraw his funds from Switzerland and repatriate all of the money into the United States. However, a Swiss attorney persuaded the defendant to transfer the money from Switzerland to a newly created bank account in Hong Kong in the name of a nominee Hong Kong corporation. The Swiss attorney then told the defendant to pay himself an annual “consulting fee” until all of the funds were brought into the United States. The Swiss attorney knew the defendant was not going to perform any consulting work.

As part of his plea agreement, the defendant agreed to pay a 50 percent penalty for the one year with the highest balance in his offshore accounts in order to resolve his civil liability for failing to file Reports of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, Forms TD F 90-22.1. The highest balance of all of the assets the defendant owned and controlled offshore was approximately $10,017,613. The defendant also must pay any additional taxes, interest and penalties he may owe.

“Today’s guilty plea is the latest success in our crackdown on illegal offshore tax evasion,” said John A. DiCicco, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Tax Division. “The Justice Department and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices will continue our investigations and prosecutions of individuals who utilize offshore accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere.”

“Skimming from one’s business and placing the assets in a secret offshore bank account is a classic example of tax evasion,” said Jeffrey H. Sloman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. ”With tax day looming, today’s guilty plea is a reminder that those who violate the tax laws will be held accountable.”

“Hiding money in foreign bank accounts to evade paying taxes is a crime,” said Victor S. O. Song, Chief, IRS Criminal Investigation. “The IRS will continue our efforts to bring non-compliant taxpayers into the tax system either through the voluntary disclosure program or criminal prosecution.”

Acting Assistant Attorney General John DiCicco and U.S. Attorney Jeffrey H. Sloman commended the investigative efforts of the IRS agents involved in this case, as well as Senior Litigation Counsel Kevin M. Downing and Trial Attorney Mark F. Daly of the Tax Division, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Neiman, who are prosecuting the case.

In February 2009, UBS entered into a deferred prosecution agreement pursuant to which the bank admitted to helping U.S. taxpayers hide accounts from the IRS. As part of their agreement, UBS provided the United States government with the identities of, and account information for, certain United States customers of UBS’s cross-border business. Jack Barouh is the seventh former client of UBS to plead guilty to a tax felony.

U.S. citizens who have an interest in, or signature or other authority over, a financial account in a foreign country with assets in excess of $10,000 are required to disclose the existence of such account on Schedule B, Part III of their individual income tax return. Additionally, United States citizens much file a Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, or F-Bar, with the U.S. Treasury, disclosing any financial account in a foreign country with assets in excess of $10,000 for which they have a financial interest in or signature authority, or other authority over.

Detainees sit around the exercise yard in Camp 4, the medium security facility within Camp Delta at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In Camp 4, highly compliant detainees live in a communal setting and have extensive access to recreation. Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood

Congratulations to the Swiss Canton of Jura, which recently accepted the asylum claims of two Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, and to the Swiss federal government for agreeing to accept Jura’s decision on Wednesday.

The two men in question — Arkin Mahmud, 45, and his brother Bahtiyar Mahnut, 32 — were seized with 20 other Uighurs in December 2001. The US authorities realized almost immediately that all of these men, who are Turkic Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and had been seized (or bought) by mistake. However, although the majority of the men were cleared for release by 2005, the Bush administration accepted that it could not return them to China, because of fears that they would face torture or other ill-treatment, but then struggled to find another country that would take them instead.

In May 2006, Albania was persuaded to take five of these men, but the other 17 had to wait until October 2008, when Judge Ricardo Urbina, a US District Court judge, ruled on their long-delayed habeas corpus petitions, and ordered their release into the United States, because no other country had been found that would take them, and because their continued detention was unconstitutional.

Predictably, the Bush administration appealed, and in February 2010 the Obama administration, to its eternal shame, followed suit, backing a ruling by the Court of Appeals, which overturned the lower court ruling, and hurled the Uighurs back into limbo.

In June 2009, the State Department managed to find new homes for four of these men in Bermuda, and in November the Pacific island of Palau took another six. As a result, seven Uighurs remained in Guantánamo, but by taking the brothers, the Swiss government has not only dared to take on the might of the Chinese government, which threatens any country that dares to entertain the prospect of taking any of the men from Guantánamo, but has also helped President Obama out of what appeared to be an intractable problem.

In a statement, the Swiss Justice Ministry said, “Today the Federal Council decided to admit for humanitarian reasons two Uighurs with Chinese citizenship, who have been imprisoned in Guantánamo for years by the United States without being charged with a crime nor [convicted].” Brushing aside the threats that the Chinese government had made last month, when Chinese officials warned that Switzerland should avoid damaging “overall Sino-Swiss relations,” the Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf added that Switzerland has a “stable, good relationship with China, and we want to keep it that way.”

Not mentioned publicly was the fact that, until Jura accepted the men’s asylum claims, one of them, Arkin Mahmud, appeared to stuck at Guantánamo, his only way out being to hope that the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the Uighurs’ case last year, would overturn last February’s appeals court ruling, and allow cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated into the United States.

The problem is that Palau had refused to take Arkin Mahmud, because, as the Washington Post noted in an editorial in October, he “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement.” As a result, Bahtiyar Mahnut turned down Palau’s offer of a new home for himself, in order to stay with his brother, and, as the Post noted, “Unless another country accepts the brothers, they could remain in custody indefinitely — a prospect that is unconscionable and that no doubt informed the justices’ decision to hear the matter.”

As I explained in an article at the time:

[T]he Supreme Court was faced with a tricky legal decision, because the justices will be considering whether, in defense of habeas corpus, and in reference to the unique position in which the Guantánamo prisoners are held, they are being asked to decide whether a judge has the power to order the release of prisoners into the US, when all the precedents, as the Court of Appeals made clear, establish that the admission of foreigners into the US is a matter for the executive and legislative branches of government.

At the time, the Post reached a principled conclusion with profound implications for the government, arguing that the “moral and ethical imperatives” were “clear and compelling,” and that the government should introduce “narrowly crafted legislation that would allow Mr. Mahmud and Mr. Mahnut into the United States, where they could remain together and Mr. Mahmud could get the medical help he needs.”

This “narrowly crafted legislation” will not now be needed, but it remains to be seen if the imminent release of Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut will affect the Supreme Court’s planned deliberations about the remaining five Uighurs.

The Supreme Court has scheduled argument for March 23 to decide whether to overturn the precedents regarding the admission of foreigners into the US, when, as in the cases of the Uighurs, these men are held in Guantánamo because it is not safe to repatriate them, and no other nation will take them.

The men’s lawyers will argue, as they have consistently, that the Supreme Court ruling in June 2008, granting constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights to the prisoners, is meaningless if a judge cannot actually order prisoners to be released.

As the Associated Press explained on Wednesday, the government could now try to argue that the Supreme Court should drop the case, because the remaining Uighurs were apparently offered new homes in Palau but turned down the offer. Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel at The Constitution Project, told the AP that she feared this outcome. “I would not be surprised,” she said, “if the administration says that the Uighurs themselves are at fault that they have not been resettled to Palau.”

However, Sabin Willett, an attorney who has represented the Uighurs for many years, was more hopeful, telling the AP by email that he “expects the case to go forward.” I tend to share Willett’s optimism, but not, of course, if the remaining five men are miraculously resettled in some other country, perhaps just days before the March 23 deadline.

If there is one thing we have learned from the Obama administration, since the President shelved plans made last April by his counsel, Greg Craig, to bring the Uighurs to live in the US, it is that, regardless of whether senior officials may agree in private that resettling the Uighurs in the US would be the right thing to do, they are not prepared to tackle their critics — and the Bush administration’s poisonous legacy — head-on. Instead, senior officials prefer not only to avoid confrontation, but also, sadly, to avoid doing anything that would demonstrate to the American public that enormous mistakes were made at Guantánamo, and that the rhetoric of Dick Cheney and his thriving acolytes is disturbingly mistaken.

I can think of no finer way to demonstrate this than to allow the Uighurs to walk free on the streets of, say, Washington D.C., but it remains clear that this is not something that the administration will undertake willingly, and in the meantime, the people of Bermuda and Palau have been learning this instead, and are soon to be joined by the people of Switzerland.

President Obama is fortunate to have such kind allies, but he himself is the loser, the longer he refuses to tackle those who insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that everyone who was held at Guantánamo was a “terrorist,” and that it is somehow appropriate to continue to deprive innocent men of their liberty in Guantánamo, rather than giving them new homes in the country that, through cruelty and incompetence, deprived them of so many years of their lives.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

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