The Foreign Service Journal, September 2008

such as this and other “misconcep- tions” in her testimony. “The Secre- tary of State remains the chief foreign policy adviser to the president, and the Secretary of Defense remains the chief adviser on defense matters. The creation of a single U.S. DOD point of contact for Africa will simply allow DOD to better coordinate its own efforts, in support of State Depart- ment leadership, to better build secu- rity capacity in Africa.” Whelan added, “The intent is not for DOD generally, or for USAFRI- COM at the operational level, to assume the lead in areas where State and/or USAID have clear lines of authority as well as the comparative advantages to lead.” The status of the AFRICOM initia- tive was also covered in a report in the July Government Executive magazine ( www.govexec.com ). — Susan B. Maitra, Senior Editor Government Documents: The Challenge of E-mail The Government Accountability Office has spotlighted gaps in federal processing and preservation of elec- tronic documents in a new report, “Federal Records: National Archives and Selected Agencies Need to Stren- gthen E-Mail Management” ( www. gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-08- 742 ). In view of the important role e- mail plays in documenting govern- ment activities, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Re- form’s Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and the National Archives directed the GAO to investi- gate the electronic records kept by 15 senior officials at four agencies: the Homeland Security Department, the Federal Trade Commission, the En- vironmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. GAO found that all four agencies used an inefficient and nonsecure process of “print and file” — e-mails are printed and stored in paper form. Only the EPA was converting the doc- uments to an electronic system. The GAO also noted that the National Archives and Records Ad- ministration, the federal agency charg- ed with management of government documents, had stopped making in- spections to ensure that departments properly store e-mail in 2000, although it has sponsored six studies of agency record-keeping since 2003. NARA officials told the GAO that the inspec- tions take too much time and money. The report was issued on the eve of a vote in the House of Represen- tatives on H.R. 5811, a bill sponsored by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., and two other Democrats, to modernize the Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act to ensure the preservation of the electronic records ( http://oversight.house.gov/story.as S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 11 C Y B E R N O T E S u O mar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir bears criminal responsibility for: the crime of genocide under Article 6(a) of the Rome Statute, killing mem- bers of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups; ... crimes against humanity under Article 7 (1) of the statute, committed as part of a wide- spread and systematic attack directed against the civilian population of Darfur; ... and war crimes under Article 8 (2)(e)(i) of the statute. — International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s July 14 indictment of Sudanese President Al Bashir, www.icc-cpi.int