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RINF Film Screening: Iraq for Sale - The War Profiteers

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

24 APRIL, 7:30PM, TRINITY COMMUNITY CENTRE, LANCASTER, FREE ADMISSION

IRAQ FOR SALE

Corporate Traitors Blackwater, CACI, KBR/Halliburton, and Titan
Stealing from American Taxpayers, Highlighted as War Profiteers in Film

LANCASTER - Robert Greenwald’s much anticipated film Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers will have a Lancaster screening Tuesday night, 24 April, 2007, organised by alternative news web site, RINF.com.

The documentary, Greenwald’s follow-up to his critically-acclaimed Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, is a searing indictment of the war profiteering perpetrated by four companies – Blackwater, CACI, KBR/Halliburton, and Titan – operating in Iraq

The screening, on Tuesday, 24 April, 2007, at 7:30 pm, will take place at the Trinity Community Centre and will be followed by a brief discussion. It joins thousands of other Iraq for Sale grassroots screenings around the world.

IRAQ FOR SALE takes you inside the lives of soldiers, truck drivers, widows and children who have been changed forever as a result of profiteering in the reconstruction of Iraq. From Army soldiers outsourced from their military jobs by contractors making five-times what they do, to truck drivers abandoned by their company to die in the dessert at the hands of insurgents. From the mother of a former NAVY SEAL who blames corporate negligence for his violent death in Fallujah, to the truck driver from Oklahoma who watched his employer literally burn brand new trucks to the ground in a bald attempt to rake in more money. IRAQ FOR SALE is a movie about corporate traitors stealing American money and spending American lives – exploiting the Iraq War to make a killing for themselves.

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Many Guantanamo detainees on hunger strike

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

More than a dozen detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are on hunger strike to protest their treatment and are being force-fed, a media report said on Monday quoting military officials and lawyers for detainees.

Lawyers for several hunger strikers told the New York Times that their clients’ actions were driven by harsh conditions in a new security complex to which about 160 prisoners have been moved since December.

There are 13 detainees now on hunger strike. They are monitored closely. Their persistence underscores how the struggle between detainees and guards at Guantanamo has continued even as the military has tightened its control, the Times said.

“We don’t have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said we had rights,” one hunger striker, Majid al-Joudi, told a military physician, the report said quoting medical records released recently. “If the policy does not change, you will see a big increase in fasting.”

A military spokesman at Guantanamo, Cmdr. Robert Durand of the Navy, the Times said, played down the significance of the current hunger strike, describing the prisoners’ complaints as “propaganda.”

But the paper says newly released Pentagon documents show that during earlier hunger strikes, before the use of restraint chairs, some detainees suffered sharp weight losses.

By comparison, the current hunger strike in which 12 of the 13 were being force-fed as of Friday seems almost symbolic. For instance, the medical records for Joudi, a 36-year-old Saudi, show that when he was hospitalised on February 10, he had been fasting for 31 days and had lost more than 15 per cent of his body weight.

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U.K. Bans Sailors From Selling Accounts of Iran Ordeal to Media

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

Scott Hamilton

The military personnel have been banned from selling stories to the media pending a review of the existing rules which allowed news organizations to pay two of the 15 naval crew freed by Iran for interviews.

Service personnel will not “be allowed to talk to the media about their experiences in return for payment” until the review is complete, Defense Secretary Des Browne said today in an e- mailed statement.

The 15 Britons were detained in Iran for 13 days after being seized by the country’s Revolutionary Guard in the Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq for allegedly trespassing into Iranian territorial waters. The British government said they were in Iraqi waters.

Lawmakers criticized the Ministry of Defense’s decision to allow the 15 personnel to be paid to talk about their ordeal. Faye Turney, the only woman in the group, sold the story of her captivity to News International Ltd.’s tabloid Sun newspaper, and to ITV Plc, which will televise an interview later today. Arthur Batchelor, 20, gave an interview to the Daily Mirror newspaper.

William Hague, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Conservative Party, said allowing former captives to quickly sell their stories would result in the loss of dignity and respect for U.K. forces, the New York Times reported yesterday.

“The Naval officers who had the responsibility of looking after the young people detained in Iran saw that the pressure on them and their families made it inevitable that some of them would accept media offers to tell their story in return for payment,” Browne’s statement said.

Review

In a televised news conference on April 6, six members of the group said they were kept in solitary confinement for much of the time.

It was reported the group may make up to 250,000 pounds ($490,163) in total, with Turney likely to get about 100,000 pounds, Agence France-Presse said. In an excerpt of the ITV interview, she declined to specify the amount and said some of it will be donated to naval families from her ship, HMS Cornwall.

The review would look at the consistency of the regulations across the different armed services, their clarity and whether they are right for the modern media environment, Browne said.

“All of us who have been involved over the last few days recognize we have not reached a satisfactory outcome,” Browne said. “We must learn from this.”

The ban “is a complete admission that the Ministry of Defence has completely mishandled the situation,” opposition Liberal Democrat defense spokesman Nick Harvey said in an e- mailed statement.

Browne had been “aware of the decision” to allow the personnel to strike deals with the media, the Royal Navy’s second sea lord, Vice Admiral Adrian Johns told the British Broadcast Corp. today. The Liberal Democrats will press for Browne to come before the House of Commons to explain the decision, Harvey said.

“This is nothing to do with the money at all,” Johns told the BBC. “It is allowing the individuals to tell their story in their own words, in their own way.”

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Bush hits new approval rating low

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

U.S. President George W. Bush is setting a new record for low job approval rating with 62 percent of Americans giving him a failing grade.

A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll telephone survey of 1,008 adults taken Monday through Thursday, shows Bush’s approval rating standing at 38 percent which has not changed for seven consecutive months.

Only two American presidents suffered more embarrassing poll results than Bush. Harry Truman’s popularity sank considerably during the last two years of his time in office. Richard Nixon was also in the lows for thirteen months before resigning over the Watergate scandal.

A Gallup Poll analyst Jeffrey Jones says “It’s pretty hard for a president to get ratings this low in general, and then to be in the position where you basically don’t budge - that’s been reserved for some of the least popular presidents during the worst times of the last 60 years.”

Jones believes President Bush is on the verge of joining Nixon and Truman as the only presidents to average approval ratings below 40 percent.

Gallup’s average approval rating for presidents is 55 percent. While former U.S. President Bill Clinton averaged 61 percent in his second term, Bush has a second-term average of 41 percent.

In light of the increase in violence in Iraq, Bush dipped below 40 percent in October, 2006 and his standing hasn’t risen above that level since then.

SO/HAR

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=5449&sectionid=3510203

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CCTV cameras get upgrade at police request

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

Via Bruce Schneier

Philip Johnston

Police and the Home Office are planning a significant upgrade of the CCTV network in a move that will deepen concern about a lurch towards a “surveillance society”.

Britain has by far the most cameras in the world - about one for every 12 people

New laws would require camera operators to ensure that their equipment produces images good enough for police investigations.

This follows an 18-month review carried out by the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) amid concern about the quality of evidence supplied by millions of cameras. The findings are due to be published within weeks.

Britain has by far the largest number of cameras in the world with an estimated five million in public and private hands - about one for every 12 people.

It was disclosed last week that a London council was placing cameras in baked bean cans to spy on householders leaving their rubbish out on the wrong day.

Last November, the Government’s privacy watchdog suggested that Britain was more snooped upon than almost any nation on earth.

An academic study concluded that within 10 years, surveillance will be all-pervasive, spurred on by Government claims that it is needed to fight terrorism.

This proliferation has so alarmed MPs that the Commons home affairs select committee will today announce the first major parliamentary inquiry into “Big Brother” Britain.

The committee will also take evidence about the growth in state information systems - including the DNA database, which now contains almost four million samples. There were 700,000 on the database when Labour took office in 1997.

MPs are also planning to take another look at ID Cards following changes to the way information is to be stored.

The CCTV review was ordered after the July 7 bombings in London in 2005 which demonstrated the importance of the cameras by picking up the terrorists on the way from Luton to London.

But police found many of the images they acquired, especially those from private and commercial sources, were not good enough.

Police chiefs believe the system has developed in a ”piecemeal” way and the time has come to impose rules on the type of cameras used.

The growth of digital cameras has particularly alarmed officers. Computerised images using hundreds of different software systems are more difficult to access than analogue videos.

The review involved a huge consultation exercise with manufacturers, retailers, transport representatives, local authorities and police anti-terrorism units.

A draft report proposes regulations to require CCTV equipment to conform to police specifications, but this has to be agreed by Home Office ministers. Police want operators to take advantage of new technologies such as smart cameras that can automatically identify people and analyse their behaviour.

Graeme Gerrard, the deputy chief constable of Cheshire and the Acpo spokesman on CCTV, said: ”We have a very good infrastructure but we are not making the best use of it. This review is about where we should be in 10 or 15 years from now.’

”We want a generic technology that allows us to download images easily and quickly. All those who don’t conform would have to change.”

The move will alarm civil liberties groups who have questioned the proliferation of cameras and are sceptical at claims that they help cut crime.

Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, said: “Surveillance in Britain has now reached a level equivalent to Russia and Malaysia. If something is not done soon to reverse this trend privacy will be extinct within a decade.”

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Walmart Spied On Protesters

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

prwatch.org

In 2006, Wal-Mart “had a long-haired employee infiltrate an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine if it planned protests at the company’s annual meeting. … The company also deployed cutting-edge monitoring systems made by a supplier to the Defense Department that allowed it to capture and record the actions of anyone connected to its global computer network.” The system “could detect the degree of flesh-tone on a viewed Internet image, and alerted monitors that a vendor sharing Wal-Mart networks was viewing pornography.” The giant retailer “also directed its surveillance operations at critical shareholders.” These revelations come from internal memos and Bruce Gabbard, a former member of Wal-Mart’s “Threat Research and Analysis Group.” Gabbard was fired in March 2007, “for unauthorized recording of calls to and from a New York Times reporter and for intercepting pager messages”; his claims have been confirmed. After the revelations surfaced, Wal-Mart “apologized to several shareholder groups that the company had earlier evaluated as potential threats.” The retailer has apparently not apologized to Wal-Mart Watch, ACORN, or Up Against the Wal, groups also targeted by Wal-Mart’s “threat research” operations.

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Now you too can become Big Brother

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

VOLUNTEERS in Nantwich could be recruited to help monitor the town’s CCTV cameras to put more police back on the beat.

The town’s Labour group chairman Peter Cameron said: “The use of volunteers would help to assist when police personnel go out on patrol.

“Volunteers could provide extra manpower for council and police operated CCTV cameras, which operate in the town.”

He said the idea has been recently tested in Essex where the local police force runs an accredited scheme for CCTV volunteers.

People such as retired police officers, firefighters and community activists have been targeted as potential recruits.

Under the proposal volunteers would receive similar training to that of the Community Speed Watch scheme, which sees residents posing as traffic officers with speed guns.

Mr Cameron said a community crimewatch scheme’ could supply enough volunteers to allow the borough council to provide round-the-clock CCTV seven days a week, protecting shoppers and revellers from thieves and drunken yobs.

In practice, local volunteers would man the cameras during the quieter times of the day.

Mr Cameron added: “A community crimewatch scheme could provide extra manpower and release more resources to the front-line.

“People like retired police officers and fire-fighters could bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the role.

“We need CCTV cameras to be monitored all the time to give shoppers and partygoers protection they need, especially on events like the Nantwich Jazz and Blues Festival.

“Volunteers would receive training and, just like any job or volunteering role nowadays, potential recruits would need to pass a strict vetting procedure.

“I would like to see the idea piloted to establishe whether or not it would be viable in the long term.”

NewsQuest

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