This evening's music features Chicago bluesman Eddie Taylor.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

TSA’s Secret Behavior Checklist to Spot Terrorists

Fidgeting, whistling, sweaty palms. Add one point each. Arrogance, a cold penetrating stare, and rigid posture, two points. ...

The checklist is part of TSA’s controversial program to identify potential terrorists based on behaviors that it thinks indicate stress or deception — known as the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT. The program employs specially trained officers, known as Behavior Detection Officers, to watch and interact with passengers going through screening. ...

The checklist ranges from the mind-numbingly obvious, like “appears to be in disguise,” which is worth three points, to the downright dubious, like a bobbing Adam’s apple. Many indicators, like “trembling” and “arriving late for flight,” appear to confirm allegations that the program picks out signs and emotions that are common to many people who fly. ...

Since its introduction in 2007, the SPOT program has attracted controversy for the lack of science supporting it. In 2013, the Government Accountability Office found that there was no evidence to back up the idea that “behavioral indicators … can be used to identify persons who may pose a risk to aviation security.” After analyzing hundreds of scientific studies, the GAO concluded that “the human ability to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance.”

This is a longish but must-read article. Here's a taste:

Don’t See Evil

As it turns out, the national security state has been involved with Google from the very beginning: even in those fabled grad school days when Google was nothing but a research project, as investigative reporter Nafeez Ahmed has shown. Founder Sergey Brin’s work at Stanford University on what would later become Google received funding and even oversight from the CIA and the Pentagon through a program created to seed and incubate technology research that could later prove useful for information warfare. ...

Google’s dominance of the online ad market is one source of its potential gatekeeping power. If a web site running its ads contains content that Google or its friends in the government find objectionable, it can simply pull its ads unless and until the content is removed: as long as it comes up with an excuse convincing enough to keep it from looking bad.

This may be what Google is doing right now to Antiwar.com, a long-running and popular daily news and commentary site that is strongly critical of US foreign policy.

On the morning of March 18, Eric Garris, founder and webmaster of the site, received a form email from Google AdSense informing him that all of Antiwar.com’s Google ads had been disabled. The reason given was that one of the site’s pages with ads on it displayed images that violated AdSense’s policy against “violent or disturbing content, including sites with gory text or images.” ...
They were the famous images of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib US military prison in Iraq. ...

War journalism and anti-war activism cannot be effectively pursued without war photography. This is true because such imagery conveys vital public information, and because one of the most effective ways of turning people against war is to vividly show them its horrors. Furthermore, independent web sites that cover war with small budgets and large traffic depend on ad revenue. So Google pulling ads on all of the AdSense customers who publish war photography amounts to a massive, debilitating boycott of independent online war journalism and anti-war activism.

NYT Publishes Call to Bomb Iran

If two major newspapers in, say, Russia published major articles openly advocating the unprovoked bombing of a country, say, Israel, the U.S. government and news media would be aflame with denunciations about “aggression,” “criminality,” “madness,” and “behavior not fitting the Twenty-first Century.”

But when the newspapers are American – the New York Times and the Washington Post – and the target country is Iran, no one in the U.S. government and media bats an eye. These inflammatory articles – these incitements to murder and violation of international law – are considered just normal discussion in the Land of Exceptionalism.

On Thursday, the New York Times printed an op-ed that urged the bombing of Iran as an alternative to reaching a diplomatic agreement that would sharply curtail Iran’s nuclear program and ensure that it was used only for peaceful purposes. The Post published a similar “we-must-bomb-Iran” op-ed two weeks ago.

The Times’ article by John Bolton, a neocon scholar from the American Enterprise Institute, was entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” It followed the Post’s op-ed by Joshua Muravchik, formerly at AEI and now a fellow at the neocon-dominated School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. [For more on that piece, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocon Admits Plan to Bomb Iran.”]

Both articles called on the United States to mount a sustained bombing campaign against Iran to destroy its nuclear facilities and to promote “regime change” in Tehran. Ironically, these “scholars” rationalized their calls for unprovoked aggression against Iran under the theory that Iran is an aggressive state, although Iran has not invaded another country for centuries.

Drone Proliferation: Three Things to Know

The spread of drone technology, which does not place human pilots at risk, could lead some states to opt for lethal force more often. If other countries use drones similar to the way the United States has done in recent years, "we are likely to see states carrying out cross-border attacks less discriminately," says Kreps. ... Washington should reflect on the precedent it is setting and clarify its targeted killings policy for other countries to consider, she adds.

Upset by Warren, U.S. banks threaten to cut off political graft to Democrats

Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, sources familiar with the discussions said.

Representatives from Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, have met to discuss ways to urge Democrats, including Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, to soften their party's tone toward Wall Street, sources familiar with the discussions said this week.

Bank officials said the idea of withholding donations was not discussed at a meeting of the four banks in Washington but it has been raised in one-on-one conversations between representatives of some of them. However, there was no agreement on coordinating any action, and each bank is making its own decision, they said.

The amount of money at stake, a maximum of $15,000 per bank, means the gesture is symbolic rather than material ...

The tensions are a sign that the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis - the bank bailouts and the fights over financial reforms to rein in Wall Street - are still a factor in the 2016 elections.

Citigroup has decided to withhold donations for now to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee over concerns that Senate Democrats could give Warren and lawmakers who share her views more power, sources inside the bank told Reuters.