Department spokesman Kevin Madden could not say how common the issuance of a memo was, but noted that because GAO findings are nonbinding, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has final say over executive branch legal matters.

“We strongly disagree [with] and are very disappointed by the administration’s actions,” Walker says. “This is not just about what’s arguably legal; it’s about what’s right. Taxpayers have the right to know if and when the government is trying to influence them with their own dollars.”

Others were also caught off guard by the administration’s move to block the ruling. “I was surprised the Justice Department double-backed on the GAO,” says Laurence Moskowitz, chairman and CEO of Medialink, a multimedia communications firm that annually distributes nearly 1,000 video releases produced by commercial, nonprofit and government clients.

Last year, following the GAO’s ruling that news segments produced or distributed on behalf of the government should spell out their origin to viewers, Moskowitz wrote in PRWeek, “The GAO actually bestowed a great service to the PR industry by codifying simple guidelines for government disclosure and reinforcing the need for simple honesty.”

And despite the Justice Department memo, Moskowitz says, “we advise government clients to function under the current GAO rules, which include script identification. It’s prudent.”

The controversy arose after the airing of a pro-Medicare-reform video news release created by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency that is part of the Department of Health and Human Service. Seamlessly produced to look like a news report for local television stations, the agency’s video release was perhaps too realistic. When it aired in its entirety in nearly 40 local television markets between Jan. 22 and Feb. 12, 2004, viewers were never told the 90-second package had been created by the government. Adding to the confusion was the use of a hired narrator, who ended the spot with the sign-off: “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.”

Critics labeled the segment propaganda, saying its release went far beyond the usual goal of distributing information electronically, crossing the line into government-manufactured news. Revelations earlier this year that the administration had given lucrative contracts to at least three conservative columnists (who in turn championed White House policies) had already generated criticism that the administration was circumventing genuine media outlets to get its message out.

“Deceiving the American people about government policies and proposals is not the American way,” Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., wrote to President Bush after those revelations. “Propaganda should not be coming out of the White House.”

Democrats subsequently asked the GAO to investigate. Last May the agency, which serves as the investigatory arm of Congress, concluded that video news releases that don’t include as part of their on-air script a clear disclosure that they were produced by the government (for example, “John Jones, reporting for the Department of Education”) constitute propaganda and thus an illegal use of taxpayer dollars under the Consolidated Appropriations Resolution of 2003.

On March 11, the Justice Department informed agencies they could ignore that finding, advising them that the prohibition on propaganda “does not apply where there is no advocacy of a particular viewpoint, and therefore it does not apply to the legitimate provision of information concerning the programs administered by an agency.”

On Monday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan, when asked about the controversy over government video news releases, stressed the “importance of making sure that it is factual information and not crossing the line into advocacy.”

Both of the administration’s standards — that news releases be accurate and that they avoid advocating just one position — fall well short of industry norms. The Public Relations Society of America, for example, offers these instructions regarding video news releases:

“1. Organizations that produce VNRs should clearly identify the VNR as such and fully disclose who produced and paid for it at the time the VNR is provided to TV stations.

“2. Organizations that prepare VNRs should not use the word ‘reporting’ if the narrator is not a reporter.

“3. Use of VNRs or footage provided by sources other than the station or network should be identified as to source by the media outlet when it is aired.”

The now-famous Karen Ryan news release violated two of those three guidelines — by using the word “reporting” and by not identifying the source of the segment when it was aired in 40 markets.

In regard to that release, administration officials argue that the report could easily have been edited by local producers, who, for instance, could have stripped out Ryan’s audio, including the “reporting” tag, and inserted their own voice-over. If there was any confusion about the report, they say, it was the fault of the producers, who were told the newslike segment was made by the government. “TV producers who receive our material are clearly aware where it comes from,” says Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. “To hold us accountable for ethical news judgment is a bit difficult to understand,” he says.

Bud Veazey, assistant news director at WAGA in Atlanta, which last year inadvertently ran two Ryan news releases in their entirety, concedes the media “bears some responsibility.” In the cases in which the Ryan release aired unedited, station executives say it was mostly because of an inexperienced or hurried producer who was scrambling to fill airtime and who did not realize the satellite-fed release was in fact government produced. But Veazey agrees with the GAO that to avoid any further confusion video releases should be more clearly marked. “I want them identified in the script. I understand why people don’t want to do it, because stations would be reluctant to air it directly off the satellite. But you need honest disclosure.”

In its 2004 ruling, the GAO took issue with the notion that if the government makes journalists aware that it is the source of information, then the government cannot be accused of illegally distributing propaganda. The GAO noted, “In our case law, findings of propaganda are predicated upon the fact that the target audience could not ascertain the information source.” Referring to a case involving the Small Business Administration in the 1980s, it said, “For example, we found government-prepared editorials to be covert propaganda; although the newspapers who would have printed the suggested editorials should have been aware of the source, the reading public would not have been aware of the source.” The SBA had created editorials to run on Op-Ed pages across the country in support of President Reagan’s proposal to transfer the SBA to the Department of Commerce. While newspaper editors may have been aware of the origin of the essays, the readers — the target audience — were not. Therefore, the GAO ruled, the SBA-prepared editorials violated the ban on propaganda.

The GAO found the same to be true of Ryan’s video news releases: “The story packages, similar to the SBA editorials, could be reproduced with no alteration, thereby allowing the targeted audience to believe that the information came from a nongovernment source or neutral party.”

Pierce at HHS declined to say whether future agency video news releases would include identification in the scripts, but insisted, “We’ve always been above board.”

But Walker at the GAO remains miffed. “I don’t understand why somebody would not try to comply with the guidance. Things like ethics should matter. Our job as public servants is to do what’s right with the taxpayers’ money.”

Well, a lot of things. For one, criminal cases for finance-related wrongdoing are hard and complicated to prosecute. The Justice Department is stocked with a lot of people with experience defending financial institutions — including Attorney General Eric Holder, a former partner at Covington & Burling, which represents many of the worst of the mega-banks. Plus, curiously, a lot of Goldman executives and other Wall Street types keep donating lots of money to Obama! (Though less money than they gave him in 2008.) The simple answer is that Holder, and Obama, seem to think that while Wall Street did a lot of stupid, venal things that ruined everyone’s lives, those things were largely … legal. Obama said as much to Rolling Stone: “In some cases, really irresponsible practices that hurt a lot of people might not have been technically against the law.” He might be not entirely wrong! Lots of horrible finance industry practices were and are perfectly legal. But we’ll never quite know whether the line was crossed until we … actually investigate.

So it’s all the odder that Wall Street is so damn mad at Obama, right?

In the only slightly oversimplified narrative of the financial crisis and subsequent recession as you and I and most non-billionaires understand it, Wall Street blew up the world economy, then got bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars, and then resumed being hugely profitable and irresponsible as everyone else suffered through foreclosures, massive debt and mass unemployment. In this narrative, the government, led at various points by members of both parties, did everything in its power to maintain the status quo on Wall Street, while offering primarily temporary relief and various ineffectual half-measures to everyone else. Eventually the Democrats passed some form of “financial regulation” that largely has not yet gone into effect and that will not do much to stem or reverse the financialization of our economy. (The SEC is way, way behind on implenting Dodd-Frank and seems in no great hurry to finish.) The president eventually began noting the existence of mass outrage toward the financial sector, but he did little to actually address that outrage beyond proposing a new tax bracket for millionaires.

So, based on all that, it is very hard to see what Wall Street is so mad about! But as I explained earlier today, most of these rich financial industry titans are also dumb, spoiled children. If anything, the president’s failure to treat the chicanery and fraud that led to the crisis as crimes worth prosecuting had the same effect that his failure to prosecute the architects of Bush’s torture regime had: It emboldened the wrongdoers, who are now convinced that they never did wrong. In this environment, the public’s real and justified outrage at Wall Street is wholly inexplicable to finance types, who blame it on the media and Obama’s occasional rhetorical populism. (He is making people hate bankers by pointing out that people hate bankers!)

Now, in lieu of subpoenas and indictments, we have mild criticism — Obama’s occasional off-message mentions of “fat cat bankers” or whatever — and those mild criticisms set off hysterical waves of paranoia and self-righteous fury. Because no one was hauled off in chains, the people who wreaked so much havoc think it’s actually been established that they did not do wrong.

So Obama has now not succeeded in cowing or placating Wall Street.

This should be our Nuremburg, the defining trial of the 9/11 era and a fitting coda to it.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to be on the verge of squandering this opportunity, and with it, the best, and perhaps only, chance for the public to understand not only how the attacks came to be, but why Mohammed waged a relentless war against America and how we might stop the next would-be terrorist mastermind.

The problems lie within the reformed military-tribunal system that the Obama administration put in place after losing its fight for a civilian trial in New York. Political compromises have resulted in a flawed military commissions process that from outward appearances is not only rigged against the defense, but hyper-choreographed, censored and hermetically sealed.

“The process is designed to achieve a conviction, and to do it with as little revelation as humanly possible, but with the veneer of due process and justice,’’ said one participant who said restrictive gag orders prohibited him from talking publicly. “You’re talking about the most heinous crime ever, and we’re going to afford them less due process, less discovery, less of everything than we would the guy who shoplifted a pack of gum from CVS.’’

Obama administration officials say their reformed military commissions system is a vast improvement over the Bush administration’s version, which Obama moved to shut down on his first day in office in 2009.

Defense lawyers disagree, and insist they have been hamstrung in their efforts to mount the kind of aggressive defense needed to do their jobs including full and unfettered access to evidence, witnesses and even the accused themselves.

Four of the five legal teams had so few of their key players in place in recent months that they did not file the “mitigation submissions’’ that the government said it needed to decide which of the five men should face the death penalty and other key issues, such as whether to try them together or individually. They recently filed motions asking that the charges be thrown out because of fatal flaws in the system, which they say make it impossible for them to defend their clients.

“It’s window dressing,’’ Mohammed’s defense lawyer, David Nevin, said of the government’s improvements. “I am not all satisfied that it is a fair process. In fact, it is not a fair process.’’

Many of the defense lawyers have quit out of frustration or for other personal reasons stemming from the many delays in the process. Only a few have been there long enough to even begin to understand their clients’ case, not to mention the convoluted military commission process.

And they say they will be unable to effectively challenge confessions obtained when their clients were coercively interrogated in the CIA’s black site prisons, if they can broach the subject at all. This is important for the four men accused of helping Mohammed with the logistics of the plot. Several claim they have been wrongly accused, tortured into confessing, or both.

It is also important with regard to Mohammed, who confessed to dozens of plots while being waterboarded 183 times, and has said he may plead guilty even before the trial begins. Few U.S. counterterrorism officials believe all of his often boastful confessions, and it is important for the public to hear what, exactly, evidence the government has with regard to what he did and didn’t do, and whom he might have been protecting.

The team of Defense and Justice Department officials overseeing the military commission process, and the presiding judge, should quickly address the defense lawyers’ complaints, or a proceeding that some call “The Trial of the Century’’ will be delayed further by legal wrangling — and forever tainted by accusations of being unfair.

A full, fair and transparent trial, above all, will benefit the public. There is much the public doesn’t know about Mohammed, including the details of how he devised the plot, convinced bin Laden to let him do it and then orchestrated it “from A to Z,’’ to use his own words. It was Mohammed who masterminded dozens of other plots and attacks, some while staying a step ahead of the largest-ever criminal manhunt.

Mohammed, not bin Laden, was the one who traveled the world as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed’’ of terrorism, establishing alliances and creating a network of cells and lieutenants that in some cases remains today. And it was Mohammed who personally recruited young jihadist prospects much like a baseball scout, many of them Westerners, tapping into their grievances to turn them to his cause.

The U.S. government has kept the details of what Mohammed did — and how and why he did it — hidden in its most classified files since his capture in Pakistan nine years ago. The government should set the record straight on that, because there is an important lesson to be learned from the largely untold tale of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: It isn’t some monolithic group like al-Qaida that poses a continuing threat, it’s the one intelligent and energetic person who can emerge from nowhere and orchestrate a 9/11 while the world focuses elsewhere.

To that end, the government should declassify as much evidence as possible, and explain how it obtained it. It should call numerous witnesses to testify, especially since the one who has been publicly identified, Majid Khan, claims he was tortured while in CIA custody overseas.

Instead of limiting access to a few closed-circuit TVs, it should consider televising the proceedings. It should ensure that censorship is minimized, and used only to protect intelligence sources and methods, not to save the government from embarrassment. And it should let Mohammed and the others testify at length on their behalf if they so desire.

By doing so, the Obama administration will be able to say it did its best to put on the kind of civilian trial it has wanted all along, and one with a similar outcome to that of the al Qaida members charged with blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

Those of us who witnessed that trial in Manhattan in 2001 saw the defendants squirm in their chairs as prosecutors introduced mountains of evidence against them. We saw eyewitnesses point the finger at the accused, and surviving victims glare at them from the pews.

We heard from the terrorists themselves, and learned a lot about why they did it, about how terrorist networks operate and about what might be done to stop people like them. And when the jury convicted them, there was no question that justice was done.

Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez threw down the gauntlet for Arpaio at Thursday’s press conference, giving him until Jan. 4, 2012,  to accept DOJ’s measures to take “clear steps toward reaching an agreement with the Division to correct these violations in the next 60 days,” or face a lawsuit.  Perez expressed DOJ’s willingness ”to roll up our sleeves and build a comprehensive blueprint for reform of MCSO,” adding, “if the will exists” on Arpaio’s end.

That’s a big if. Now a real clock may be finally ticking for the countdown of the nearly 20-year reign of America’s self-proclaimed “Toughest Sheriff.”

One federal department is not even waiting: Within hours of the DOJ announcement, the Department of Homeland Security terminated Maricopa County’s access to immigration status data under the federal Secure Communities program.

The announcement comes amid growing calls for Arpaio’s resignation, in the aftermath of allegations that his department mishandled hundreds of sex crime reports in the Phoenix area township of El Mirage.

Rep. Raul Grijalva was the first to call for Arpaio to step down.

“Mr. Arpaio might love headline-grabbing crackdowns and theatrical media appearances,” the Tucson Democrat said last week, “but when it comes to the everyday work of keeping people safe, he seems to have lost interest some time ago.”

A few days later Rep. Ed Pastor, who represents Maricopa County in Congress, endorsed a call for Arpaio’s resignation. So did nine state legislators. Even Cafe Con Leche Republicans, a national organization, released a statement this week that “Arpaio has disgraced his office and the Republican Party.”

On Monday, religious leaders from 14 mainline denominations called on the attorney general to release its findings and take “immediate action to quell the growing human rights crisis in Arizona,” a reference to Arpaio’s law enforcement regime.

Citizens for a Better Arizona, a new group, which organized the successful recall of Tea Party leader and former state Senate president Russell Pearce in November, organized a major turnout at the Maricopa County board of supervisors meeting on Wednesday to call for Arpaio’s resignation.

“This is a very important day for Maricopa County,” County  Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, a critic of Arpaio, told supporters following the release of the report. “It’s a day many of us have been awaiting. Let this be the end of Arpaio. Give us a better criminal justice system.”

The 79-year-old sheriff has rarely failed to express disdain for federal oversight, especially from the Obama administration. Last week, Arpaio couldn’t resist tweeting his glee about a dubious report in the Globe tabloid newspaper that his “Cold Case posse” investigation of President Obama’s birth certificate had the first lady “in a panic.”

Two years ago, after Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano had also announced her intentions to terminate the DHS cooperation with Arpaio’s office, Sheriff Arpaio appeared on the Glenn Beck show and openly mocked federal authority.  Arpaio claimed that local and state laws allow him to target “some people who have an erratic, scared … whatever … if they have their speech, what they look like, if they look like they come from another country, we can take care of that situation.”

The DOJ report concluded that Arpaio engaged in racial profiling.

“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of the kind identified by the Supreme Court in Arlington Heights,” the report noted, “showing that Sheriff Arpaio has intentionally decided to implement his immigration program in a manner that discriminates against Latinos.”

The report added a telling detail about Arpaio’s effectiveness as a law enforcement officer. While his operations involved “the most egregious racial profiling in the United States,” according to one expert, “enforcement actions rarely result in human smuggling arrests.”

Another law enforcement officer last week levied a similar charge against Arpaio on the botched sex crimes investigations. Bill Louis, former assistant police chief in  El Mirage, wrote an Op-Ed in the Arizona Republic declaring that ”Sheriff Joe Arpaio failed these victims. At this point there is little that can be done to undo the harm they have endured.”

Not that criticism or outrage has ever moved Arpaio to veer from the style that has made him a hero to some conservatives: his high-profile immigrant sweeps, his order that prisoners had to wear pink underwear, or his reality TV exploits. Last spring, he simply shrugged off  calls for his resignation over allegations of his department’s misuse of $100 million.

Four aged right-wingers apparently plotted to carry out a mass murder based on the plot of a thriller written by frequent Fox guest Mike Vanderboegh. They planned to “save this country” by attacking Washington, D.C., and Atlanta with ricin and botulinium toxin. And they were targeting the government:

What was the ostensible purpose of all this killing? Saving the country of course. “There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: murder,” Thomas reportedly said. “When it comes time to saving the Constitution, that means some people have got to die.” The FBI also alleges that “Thomas, Roberts and others discussed the need to obtain unregistered silencers and explosive devices for use in attacks against federal government buildings and employees, as well as against local police.”

The group also had a “bucket list” of politicians and members of the media that they planned to kill, which seems to be a misreading of the “bucket list” concept. Two of the men bought “what they believed was a silencer and and unregistered explosive” from an FBI informant, as well. They also — with the informant — drove to Atlanta to “scope out” IRS and ATF buildings.

The “good news,” I guess, is that now the Justice Department is carrying out the same ridiculous stings on old Christian guys that it regularly carries out on young Muslim guys. Because let’s be honest, we have no way of knowing whether these four guys would’ve actually acted on their anti-government beliefs if they hadn’t been led to action by the “informants.” They met at a Waffle House and called themselves “the covert group.” They range in age from 65 to 73. How much of a real threat could they possibly have been? How much of a role did the “informant” play in pushing the men toward formulating an actual terror plot instead of just grumbling fantasies of revolution over omelets?

They may have been able to manufacture ricin — one of the men “used to work as a lab technician for a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency known as the Agricultural Research Service,” according to ABC News — but it’s unclear how practical ricin is as a chemical weapon. A terrorist needs tons of ricin to kill people through mass dispersal. Ricin is what terrorists turn to when they fail to make anthrax.

This looks like the same “entrapment in all but name” approach to fighting terror that the Justice Department has been pursuing against American Muslims for years. What will be interesting to see is whether the entrapment defense works any better for a gang of four elderly white guys than it does for teenagers with names like “Hosam Maher Husein Smadi.”

This is a big leap for Richard Cohen, a writer who hates democracy and defended Dick Cheney’s torture regime as recently as 2009. (2009!)

So he begins by pointing out that he cheered the death of Anwar al-Awlaki:

A little “yippee” emitted from me when I heard the news. Awlaki was a traitor to his country and its values. He was allegedly a senior recruiter for al-Qaeda and was linked to the Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Malik Hasan as well as other attempted terror acts. Awlaki was not shy about his activities, and so they, not to mention his allegiance, were not in question.

But! This whole targeted killing of an American citizen thing is sort of problematic, according to the Constitution and “our founding ideals.”

The American Civil Liberties Union has criticized Awlaki’s killing. But so far, the only politician of note to do so is Rep. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate with a touching reverence for the Constitution as written. “Al-Awlaki was born here; he’s an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes,” he exclaimed. Paul, though, gets dismissed as a constitutional kvetch.

I do not share Paul’s indignation, but I do his dismay. Something big and possibly dangerous has happened . . . in secret. Government’s most awesome power — to take a life — has been exercised on one of its own citizens without benefit of trial. A guy named Barron and another named Lederman apparently said it was okay. Maybe it was. But I’d sure like to hear the attorney general or the president explain why.

(This Barron guy and this Lederman guy are actually very prominent attorneys known, ironically, for their particularly sharp criticisms of the Bush administration’s abuses of presidential war powers, but I wouldn’t expect a man who’s had a political column at Washington primary newspaper for 35 years to actually know anything at all about what he writes about, ever.)

But the last line gives the game away: Richard Cohen finds the idea of the president having the power to unilaterally order the execution of an American citizen absurd on its face. This puts him in league with people like Ron Paul and the ACLU. He does not wish for that sort of company. So he is begging for some grown-up Washington person to explain why this is all totally OK. He would like the president to reassure him. Won’t somebody please reassure Richard Cohen that it’s OK for the president to assassinate people?