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Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Monday, May 14th, 2007

[Robin Lindley is a Seattle attorney and writer who covers international affairs, human rights, politics, law, medicine, the media, and arts. He was a chair of the World Peace through Law Section of the Washington State Bar Association, and a staff attorney with the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations on the investigation of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.]

In the African-American community, a mistrust of doctors and medical research is widespread and deeply rooted in a history of involuntary, abusive and non-therapeutic experimentation on blacks documented since at least the eighteenth century.

In her acclaimed new book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, journalist and bioethicist Harriet Washington traces this mistrust in the first comprehensive history of the medical mistreatment of African Americans.

Publisher’s Weekly praised Washington as a “great storyteller,” and named Medical Apartheid one of the best books of 2006, finding it “even at its most distressing, compulsively readable.” PW, Kirkus and Booklist each honored the book with starred reviews, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association bestowed its Honor Nonfiction Award for 2007 on Medical Apartheid.

Washington’s book details horrific abuses by the guardians of health.

Africans found unfit by slave ship surgeons were routinely thrown overboard to die at sea en route to the Americas.

Physicians in the antebellum south believed that blacks were immune to pain and conducted hideous experiments on men, women and children without anesthesia.

More recent experiments include non-consensual and disproportionate sterilization of blacks like the “Mississippi appendectomy” performed on civil rights legend Fannie Lou Hamer.

Blacks were also the subjects of painful radiation and dermatological studies.

In the 1960’s, a neurosurgeon removed parts of the brains of black boys to regulate “behavior problems.”

And, from 1932 until 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service in its Tuskegee experiments promised to treat hundreds of black men for syphilis, but actually provided no treatment, and instead watched the men die slow, painful deaths.

Harriet Washington is a Visiting Scholar at DePaul University School of Law, and a former Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School and at Stanford University. She has written extensively on medicine and ethics for publications from USA Today to the New England Journal of Medicine and the Harvard Public Health Review.

Robin Lindley: What prompted your interest in bioethics, and your new book?

Harriet Washington: I was always interested in bioethics. I started as a pre-medical student, like a lot of medical writers. When I finished college, I ran a small poison center for the university, and stumbled across case files showing a dramatic disparity in the way black and white patients with the same pathology were treated. I was most struck by how differently blacks were treated in research. I knew that participating in medical research was inherently risky, but protections are in place to limit the risk and to assure that people know the risks. All these protections seemed eschewed when it came to black people. The more I learned, the more I realized it was not part of the historical canon—this aspect of health care disparities was all but ignored.

That piqued my interest. When I became a journalist, I knew I wanted to do [the book], but not until 2002 when I did the clinical ethics fellowship at Harvard did I feel I had the tools to do an ethical analysis so that I would end up with something meaningful.

RL: When you told physicians of your plans for the book, wasn’t there disbelief about the history of medical experimentation on African-Americans?

HW: Several physicians told me that, including physicians in the history of medicine, which I found staggering. There is a resistance to acknowledging these things, but there’s no question they transpired. In the book, I use as references mainstream medical articles and physicians’ own writings.

RL: Can you discuss scientific racism in the antebellum period?

HW: We call it scientific racism now, but back then it was only science. The people who studied black people in the antebellum period were southern physicians because then 90 percent of black people then lived in the south. Physicians supported the enslavement system, and it probably couldn’t have persisted without the physicians who said blacks were inferior and made by the Creator to be the workhorses of the white man. It was the physicians’ role to help the planter in keeping slaves not healthy, but fit for work, and in keeping slaves subjugated.

There was conflation between medical treatment and punishment. A physician would jocularly advise a planter that a slave needed “nine drops of essence of rawhide.” There were physicians who actually prescribed physical punishment as “treatment” for ‘black diseases’—slaves [who resisted slavery]—who ran away, or didn’t work, or were intractable.

RL: One southern physician you write about is Dr. James Marion Sims, an esteemed, one-time president of the American Medical Association, who performed horrific experiments on black women and children.

HW: I thought he was a wonderful benefactor, the father of American gynecology—until I read his own writings. Now I know he was also an abuser of unwilling black subjects. I was staggered by the things he described. Sims, the so-called benefactor of women, often used the metaphors of imprisonment and of controlling and imprisoning a woman for her own good. He wasn’t referring only to black women, but his perfect subjects were enslaved black women who he bought or otherwise acquired to perfect distressingly painful, invasive reproductive surgeries that made his fortune.

He used black women. He performed 30 surgeries on one slave woman and, after repeatedly slicing and suturing the genitalia for four or five years, he perfected a repair for vesicovaginal fistula, a horrible complication of childbirth, and made his medical fortune.

He went north, headed the American Medical Association, and even went to France to become the toast of the Second Empire where he treated Empress Eugenie. All across the world, he’s usually spoken of as a wonderful hero, and that’s the face he turned to white women. But black women, and black men, saw a different face. He forced surgery [without anesthesia] on a black male slave named Sam. Sims blithely wrote about it in a medical journal, and the editors chimed in that he’d done a wonderful thing: he proved it was possible to operate on people whether or not they were willing.

RL: And Dr. Sims experiment on many women and children?

HW: About 13 women by my best count. At any one time, [Sims kept] at least five women in the shack he called a hospital, [but was actually] a laboratory where he confined people.

He also operated on several black children. He believed that a form of tetany, considered an infectious disease, could be treated in black children by re-arranging particular skull bones. He never explained how opening the skulls of infants and moving their bones around treated an infectious disease. Scientific racists believed that black people were less intelligent than white people [because] the skull bones of black children closed early, essentially trapping the brain before it could develop fully.

RL: Did any of these children survive these horrific operations?

HW: That’s a chilling thing. When these subjects are referred to, we rarely find out what happened. That wasn’t the point. He didn’t report if the slave infants recovered or died. In fact, with the surgery on captive women for vaginal fistula, he only records fixing a fistula of one woman, [and] never mentioned what happened to the others.

RL: And you write that researchers saw blacks as “clinical material,” and used the bodies of blacks for dissection in medical schools.

HW: When blacks were still enslaved, it was a simple matter because, as the property of the master, there wasn’t even a question of asking anyone else’s consent. Obtaining bodies for anatomical dissection was very difficult with a strong social sentiment against it. It was not only illegal, but socially reprehensible, to cut up a dead body. However, modes of practicing medicine were changing and people expected a physician to be familiar with the body. So whose bodies were used? Black people’s because they were so convenient. You simply went to someone who owned slaves and got their dead bodies.

Then the social landscape began changing. When slavery was abolished, you no longer could commandeer the bodies of black people with impunity—you had to be surreptitious, and there were several ways to do it. There were hospitals or wings of hospitals that were designated for blacks only where physicians would use black bodies with impunity. While they were alive, the people were used for clinical display—to display procedures or disorders. When they died, the bodies were simply moved to the anatomical laboratory.

However, this didn’t supply enough bodies, so physicians began taking fresh bodies from graveyards. After a while, laws banned this use of bodies, and medical schools became more circumspect. They began using black porters to obtain bodies. The Medical College of Georgia used Grandison Harris, a huge, strapping man. He was so strong, he could go to a black cemetery and pull bodies out with his powerful arms.

Fortunately for me, very specific documentation was kept on the bodies. In 1989, the Medical College of Georgia renovated an old laboratory. Construction workers found a cache of ten thousand human bones marked by anatomists in India ink and clearly discarded medical training material. Three-quarters of them came from the nearby black cemetery.

RL: So human remains were treated in effect as medical waste?

HW: Exactly. They found these bones jumbled together with broken test tubes and beakers, even with the bones of animals that had been used for medical research. There was no attempt to place them in any order, or invest the site with any dignity. This very sad scene was repeated at hospitals throughout the country.

RL: Can you describe the Tuskegee syphilis experiments?

HW: It started as a beneficent experiment in 1928 with Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, the founder of Sears Roebuck who had devoted himself to positive health initiatives to help black people—to start programs that they would take over. Unfortunately, the stock market crash in 1929 wiped out Rosenwald’s fortune so there was no money for that project.

The Public Health Service of the United States stepped in [in 1932], but public health physicians didn’t care about black self-sufficiency, and showed they didn’t care about black health either. They decided to take black people with syphilis and, instead of treating them, simply watched them. About 400 black men with syphilis were recruited under the guise that they would be treated. They were not told they had syphilis, but that they had “bad blood”—a folk term that could mean many things including venereal disease. They had 200 men as controls. For the next forty years, they watched these men die. The physicians were very open that their intent was to simply trace the progression of disease.

The physicians also wanted to validate their belief that syphilis treated blacks and whites differently. White people with syphilis were held to suffer horribly devastating neurological consequences [such as] deafness, blindness, paralysis, but [the researchers] said black people only had problems with their muscles and hearts, because the nervous systems of black people were so primitive and underdeveloped compared to whites. They took the data, manipulated it, and then falsely claimed they had proved that black people did not suffer any neurological consequences from syphilis, proving indirectly that black people had very inferior brains and nervous systems.

So the physicians were focused on everything except treatment. In the 1940’s, penicillin was found to cure syphilis. It was like a Holy Grail—as though scientists had now developed a shot to cure AIDS. The Surgeon General, Thomas Parran, had made finding a cure for syphilis his mission, so he and the Public Health Service were thrilled. Everyone got shots for syphilis, except for the men in the experiment. Most of the men died slow, lingering, painful deaths—and so did many of their wives, girlfriends and children.

In 1972, the study was stopped when Peter Buxtun, a young investigator for the PHS, discovered the study and told a journalist friend who wrote about it. When it hit the newspapers, and people in the United States—black and white—were horrified that the Public Health Service, the group that supposedly guards our health, would do this to a group of powerless, old black men.

In 1997, Bill Clinton issued an apology for the study. There were still a few survivors, and there was a dramatic and cathartic White House ceremony. It’s wonderful that he issued the apology, and it’s even better that part of the resolution was a bioethics center established at Tuskegee University. But all in all it’s very sad because subsequent events have shown that we didn’t learn what we should have. After the Tuskegee study—although historians speak as though it was the only important abuse of black people—there were many other abuses as bad or worse than Tuskegee.

RL: It seems you’ve done the definitive study of the Tuskegee experiment.

HW: It’s because like anyone who studies history, I had access to the work of earlier historians such as James Jones [author of Bad Blood] and Allen Brandt who had done good investigations. I took their work further by interviewing some important actors and addressing questions that had largely been ignored.

RL: Among the most chilling experiments you describe were the brain operations Dr. Orlando Andy performed on black children. Weren’t these fairly recent?

HW: It was in the 1960’s—not the antebellum past. Writing that part had me in tears, it was so upsetting. Dr. Orlando J. Andy of the University of Mississippi was performing lobotomies, which were done then, and it was disturbing because our understanding of the brain was cruder then. Andy presented it as therapeutic for boys with behavior problems. He used six-, seven-, eight-, nine-year-old boys who had been institutionalized. To say a boy had a behavior problem when you’re not a psychologist, when you don’t have psychological report, when you don’t have details, when the boy’s institutionalized and his parents are not part of the informed consent equation, it’s quite abusive.

What’s a behavior problem? Most six to nine-year-old boys are quite annoying at some time, but that doesn’t mean they should have parts of their brains taken out. One case Andy wrote up as an example of his best work was five repeated surgeries on the same black boy, precipitated by “a behavior problem” that nobody ever quantified.

When you look at the mores of the segregation-era south then, there was a very narrow range of behavior for black men and boys. Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was tortured and murdered on suspicion of whistling at a white woman. So for Andy, a non-psychologist, to say the boy had a behavior problem and that’s why he repeatedly went in and took out important areas of the brain is shocking. At that time, they didn’t understand all the functions of the amygdala, so he’d take out the amygdala, and when that didn’t help, he’d take out the fornix, and then he’d take out part of the frontal lobe. He notes what he removed, and how he tried to see what happened. It was very much research and not therapy, and very recklessly done.

And, by the end, these children who had lobotomies were barely functional. These children who had been functional could no longer walk or talk or had seizures. It was horrifying, and made worse by Andy saying he didn’t want his work restricted to young black boys. He felt that rioting blacks should have lobotomies, as did other neurosurgeons.

In the late sixties or early seventies, several physicians got a huge grant from the government to explore doing lobotomies. These lobotomies were actually performed on black prisoners, not white ones, in several state prisons. Here were doctors who had a very troubling agenda of performing lobotomies on black people whose politics they did not like, and this was done in prisons, which are civil rights deserts.

This mentality has not gone away. We saw it in New York City with the fenfluramine experiments where only blacks boys were allowed by protocol—no white boys were allowed—and they were given the toxic drug fenfluramine to monitor serotonin levels because researchers wanted to prove that these black boys had brain changes that would show them to be potential criminals.

The same thing happened in the 1970’s in Baltimore when a physician affiliated with Johns Hopkins looked for chromosomal abnormalities that he said could be tied to a propensity for violence. He looked at a pool of boys that was 85 percent black.

RL: Are there survivors of Dr. Andy’s haunting experiments?

HW: It’s likely there are survivors but, by the time of his writing, they had lost brain function and were institutionalized. They could still be lost in institutions. I am still haunted by this. It’s so frightening, especially when I see that the mentality that drove it has not gone away.

RL: And you describe research in prisons with captive pools of subjects.

HW: Yes. And last year, a government panel recommended reopening of prisons to research, and it’s almost certain prisons will be opened to research.

I’m very concerned about what’s happened recently with research in this country. We’ve got someone at the helm of NIH [National Institutes of Health] clinical trials who has adopted, in my opinion, a very cavalier attitude toward the rights of some research populations: prisoners seem to be one, and Third-World patients another. Subjects in Africa and other parts of the Third World have been treated horribly by American researchers. Things are done with them against their will, without their knowledge, and they’re offered much lower standards of research care and treatment—and this is justified as “practical ethics.” Practical ethics means we will do one thing in Guinea and another in Connecticut, that some people’s lives and rights mean more than others.

If you’re talking about the law, which gives minimal protections, a person has to give permission to participate in experiments. But in 1996, the law changed, and people can now be experimented on without their consent or their knowledge. If you’re unconscious and admitted to an emergency department, doctors can use you in a research protocol without asking your permission, without informing you. That 1996 federal provision has been used by companies that have devices to perfect and drugs to sell, and it’s been done with the blessing of some at NIH who are now at the helm. Things we don’t consider fair are now done with impunity, and legally. And ethicists use semantics to defend their actions.

RL: But non-consensual experimentation contravenes the Nuremberg protocols and other ethical protocols.

HW: The first sentence of the Nuremberg Code says, “The voluntary consent of the subject is absolutely essential.” But the Nuremberg Code is toothless, with no enforceable penalties for noncompliance. There are federal regulations that seek to legally constrain research institutions, but too often, the miscreants are never tried or punished. I’m not saying that the mass of physicians is amoral or bad. I believe the opposite is true. But I am saying they regard the Nuremberg Code as a good code for Nazi barbarians, but not anything to which they need to subscribe.

RL: What would you like your readers to take away from the book?

HW: Most of the change has been positive for black people and other research subjects. Most people are no longer forced into research or abused with impunity because they’re black. Research precautions do not perfectly protect people today, but the rampant abuse of yesterday does not exist anymore. That’s very positive, and I’m happy to acknowledge that.

The bad news is that our researchers use Third World and developing countries as their personal laboratory. There’s abuse very similar to what blacks went through in the early days of our republic. We have to demand that our researchers treat people abroad the same way they treat people here.

The other thing is for black people to understand that we have been abused, but that avoiding medical care and research is not something we can afford. It’s very dangerous for us, and is already harming us. For example, black people get hepatitis C more than white people, but the only conventional medication, Interferon, doesn’t work for black people. Part of the problem is that so few black people participate in research initiatives that we don’t know about problems soon enough.

Having said that, because there are still inequities and research is still dangerous, we also must charge government and researchers to tighten protections. The institutional review board (IRB) system, which is designed to protect patient subjects, does not work well and needs to be fixed. There also should be a course for research subjects to explain their rights, and how to protect themselves. Except for emergent situations, no one should be permitted to be a research subject who has not taken that course. Today, medical research subjects know only what the involved researcher chooses to tell them about the research, and that’s not good enough.

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/38691.html

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Google searches web’s dark side

Monday, May 14th, 2007

One in 10 web pages scrutinised by search giant Google contained malicious code that could infect a user’s PC. Researchers from the firm surveyed billions of sites, subjecting 4.5 million pages to “in-depth analysis”.

About 450,000 were capable of launching so-called “drive-by downloads”, sites that install malicious code, such as spyware, without a user’s knowledge.

A further 700,000 pages were thought to contain code that could compromise a user’s computer, the team report.

To address the problem, the researchers say the company has “started an effort to identify all web pages on the internet that could be malicious”.

Phantom sites

Drive-by downloads are an increasingly common way to infect a computer or steal sensitive information.

They usually consist of malicious programs that automatically install when a potential victim visits a booby-trapped website.

“To entice users to install malware, adversaries employ social engineering,” wrote Google researcher Niels Provos and his colleagues in a paper titled The Ghost In The Browser.

“The user is presented with links that promise access to ‘interesting’ pages with explicit pornographic content, copyrighted software or media. A common example are sites that display thumbnails to adult videos.”

The vast majority exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser to install themselves.

Some downloads, such as those that alter bookmarks, install unwanted toolbars or change the start page of a browser, are an annoyance. But increasingly, criminals are using drive-bys to install keyloggers that steal login and password information.

Other pieces of malicious code hijack a computer turning it into a “bot”, a remotely controlled PC.

Drive-by downloads represent a shift away from traditional methods of infecting a computer, such as spam and email attachments.

Attack plan

As well as characterising the scale of the problem on the net, the Google study analysed the main methods by which criminals inject malicious code on to innocent web pages.

Spam e-mails are a common way to infect a computer

It found that the code was often contained in those parts of the website not designed or controlled by the website owner, such as banner adverts and widgets.

Widgets are small programs that may, for example, display a calendar on a webpage or a web traffic counter. These are often downloaded from third-party sites.

The rise of web 2.0 and user-generated content gave criminals other channels, or vectors, of attack, it found.

For example, postings in blogs and forums that contain links to images or other content could unwittingly infect a user.

The study also found that gangs were able to hijack web servers, effectively taking over and infecting all of the web pages hosted on the computer.

In a test, the researchers’ computer was infected with 50 different pieces of malware by visiting a web page hosted on a hijacked server.

The firm is now in the process of mapping the malware threat.

Google, part of the StopBadware coalition, already warns users if they are about to visit a potentially harmful website, displaying a message that reads “this site may harm your computer” next to the search results.

“Marking pages with a label allows users to avoid exposure to such sites and results in fewer users being infected,” the researchers wrote.

However, the task will not be easy, they say.

“Finding all the web-based infection vectors is a significant challenge and requires almost complete knowledge of the web as a whole,” they wrote.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6645895.stm?ls

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Billions in Oil Missing in Iraq, U.S. Study Says

Monday, May 14th, 2007

JAMES GLANZ

Between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq’s declared oil production over the past four years is unaccounted for and could have been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling, according to a draft American government report.

Using an average of $50 a barrel, the report said the discrepancy was valued at $5 million to $15 million daily.

The report does not give a final conclusion on what happened to the missing fraction of the roughly two million barrels pumped by Iraq each day, but the findings are sure to reinforce longstanding suspicions that smugglers, insurgents and corrupt officials control significant parts of the country’s oil industry.

The report also covered alternative explanations for the billions of dollars worth of discrepancies, including the possibility that Iraq has been consistently overstating its oil production.

Iraq and the State Department, which reports the numbers, have been under relentless pressure to show tangible progress in Iraq by raising production levels, which have languished well below the United States goal of three million barrels a day. Virtually the entire economy of Iraq is dependent on oil revenues.

The draft report, expected to be released within the next week, was prepared by the United States Government Accountability Office with the help of government energy analysts, and was provided to The New York Times by a separate government office that received a review copy. The accountability office declined to provide a copy or to discuss the draft.

Paul Anderson, a spokesman for the office, said only that “we don’t discuss draft reports.”

But a State Department official who works on energy issues said that there were several possible explanations for the discrepancy, including the loss of oil through sabotage of pipelines and inaccurate reporting of production in southern Iraq, where engineers may not properly account for water that is pumped along with oil in the fields there.

“It could also be theft,” the official said, with suspicion falling primarily on Shiite militias in the south. “Crude oil is not as lucrative in the region as refined products, but we’re not ruling that out either.”

Iraqi and American officials have previously said that smuggling of refined products like gasoline and kerosene is probably costing Iraq billions of dollars a year in lost revenues. The smuggling of those products is particularly feared because officials believe that a large fraction of the proceeds go to insurgent groups. Crude oil is much more difficult to smuggle because it must be shipped to refineries and turned into the more valuable refined products before it can be sold on the market.

The Shiite militia groups hold sway around the rich oil fields of southern Iraq, which dominate the country’s oil production, the State Department official said. For that reason, he said, the Shiite militias are more likely to be involved in theft there than the largely Sunni insurgents, who are believed to benefit mostly from smuggling refined products in the north.

In the south, the official said, “There is not an issue of insurgency, per se, but it could be funding Shia factions, and that could very well be true.”

“That would be a concern if they were using smuggling money to blow up American soldiers or kill Sunnis or do anything that could harm the unity of the country,” the official said.

The report by the accountability office is the most comprehensive look yet at faltering American efforts to rebuild Iraq’s oil and electricity sectors. For the analysis of Iraq’s oil production, the accountability office called upon experts at the Energy Information Administration within the United States Department of Energy, which has long experience in analyzing oil production and exports worldwide.

Erik Kreil, an oil expert at the information administration who is familiar with the analysis, said a review of industry figures around the world — exports, refinery figures and other measures — could not account for all the oil that Iraq says it is producing. The administration also took into account how much crude oil was consumed internally, to do things like fuel Iraqi power plants and refine into gasoline and other products.

When all those uses of the oil were taken into consideration, Mr. Kreil said, Iraq’s stated production figures did not add up.

“Either they’re producing less, or they’re producing what they say and the difference is completely unaccounted for in any of the places we think it should go,” Mr. Kreil said. “Either it’s overly optimistic, or it’s unaccounted for.”

Several analysts outside the government agreed that such a large discrepancy indicated that there was either a major smuggling operation in place or that Iraq was incapable to generate accurate production figures.

“That’s a staggering amount of oil to lose every month,” said Philip K. Verleger Jr., an independent economist and oil expert. “But given everything else that’s been written about Iraq, it’s not a surprise.”

Mr. Verleger added that if the oil was being smuggled out of Iraq, there would be a ready market for it, particularly in smaller refineries not controlled by large Western companies in places like China, the Caribbean and even small European countries.

The report also contains the most comprehensive assessment yet of the billions of dollars the United States and Iraq spent on rebuilding the oil and electricity infrastructure, which is falling further and further behind its performance goals.

Adding together both civilian and military financing, the report concludes that the United States has spent $5.1 billion of the $7.4 billion in American taxpayer money set aside to rebuild the Iraqi electricity and oil sectors. The United States has also spent $3.8 billion of Iraqi money on those sectors, the report says.

Despite those enormous expenditures, the performance is far short of official goals, and in some cases seems to be declining further. The average output of Iraq’s national electricity grid in 2006, for example, was 4,300 megawatts, about equal to its value before the 2003 invasion. By February of this year, the figure had fallen still further, to 3,800 megawatts, the report says.

All of those figures are far short of the longstanding American goal for Iraq: 6,000 megawatts. Even more dispiriting for Iraqis, by February the grid provided power for an average of only 5.1 hours a day in Baghdad and 8.6 hours nationwide. Both of those figures are also down from last year.

The story is similar for the oil sector, where — even if the Iraqi numbers are correct — neither exports nor production have met American goals and have also declined since last year, the report says.

American reconstruction officials have continued to promote what they describe as successes in the rebuilding program, while saying that problems with security have prevented the program from achieving all of its goals. But federal oversight officials have frequently reported that the program has also suffered from inadequate oversight, poor contracting practices, graft, ineffective management and disastrous initial planning.

The discrepancies in the Iraqi oil figures are broadly reminiscent of the ones that turned up when some of the same energy department experts examined Iraq’s oil infrastructure in the wake of the oil-for-food scandals of the Saddam Hussein era. In a United Nations-sponsored program that was supposed to trade Iraq’s oil for food, Mr. Hussein and other smugglers were handsomely profiting from the program, investigations determined.

In reports to Congress before the 2003 invasion that ousted Mr. Hussein, the accountability office, using techniques similar to those called into play in its most recent report, determined that in early 2002, for example, 325,000 to 480,000 barrels of crude oil a day were being smuggled out of Iraq, the majority through a pipeline to Syria.

But substantial amounts also left Iraq through Jordan and Turkey, and by ship in the Persian Gulf, routes that could also be available today, said Robert Ebel, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Any number of adjacent countries would be glad to have it if they could make some money,” Mr. Ebel said.

Mr. Ebel said the lack of modern metering equipment, or measuring devices, at Iraq’s wellheads made it especially difficult to track smuggling there. The State Department official agreed that there were no meters at the wellheads, but said that Iraq’s Oil Ministry had signed a contract with Shell Oil to study the possibility of putting in the meters.

The official added that an American-financed project to install meters on Iraq’s main oil platform in the Persian Gulf was scheduled to be completed this month.

As sizable as a discrepancy of as much as 300,000 barrels a day would be in most parts of the world, some analysts said it could be expected in a country with such a long, ingrained history of corruption.

“It would be surprising if it was not the case,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, which closely follows security and economic issues in Iraq. He added, “How could the oil sector be the exception?”

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Spitzer proposes DNA database expansion

Monday, May 14th, 2007

Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced yesterday he will submit legislation to expand the state’s DNA databank mandating the collection of DNA from every person convicted of a crime, as well as individuals on probation, on parole supervision, or registered as sex offenders.

The bill also extends the statute of limitations for crimes in which law enforcement has recovered the perpetrator’s DNA, but has not yet been able to match it to a known individual.

Under current law, the state only collects DNA samples from about half of the defendants convicted of crimes, Spitzer said, which “severely limits available criminal evidence, and leads to difficulty solving serious crimes.”

Other provisions:
—Defendants who can make a proper showing of need will have the right to apply for DNA testing before trial, or after trial if necessary;—When there is new evidence that may exonerate a defendant, the prosecutor will be required to bring it to the attention of the court, and the court will be required to reach a prompt resolution of the issues—There will be a new office charged with the responsibility of studying cases in which defendants have been exonerated, and trying to identify the weaknesses in the system that allowed that to happen,

The bill also will:—Establish best practices for the collection and preservation of DNA evidence; and—Require defendants to bring all their post-conviction challenges in one motion at the same time, while simultaneously preserving an exception permitting additional post-conviction challenges based upon newly discovered evidence of innocence.—Expand the opportunity for innocent defendants who are exonerated to seek compensation from the State.

http://polhudson.lohudblogs.com/2007/05/14/spitzer-proposes-dna-database-expansion/

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Monday is Wiretap the Internet Day

Monday, May 14th, 2007

May 14th is the official deadline for cable modem companies, DSL providers, broadband over powerline, satellite internet companies and some universities to finish wiring up their networks with FBI-friendly surveillance gear, to comply with the FCC’s expanded interpretation of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

Congress passed CALEA in 1994 to help FBI eavesdroppers deal with digital telecom technology. The law required phone companies to make their networks easier to wiretap. The results: on mobile phone networks, where CALEA tech has 100% penetration, it’s credited with boosting the number of court-approved wiretaps a carrier can handle simultaneously, and greatly shortening the time it takes to get a wiretap going. Cops can now start listening in less than a day.

Now that speed and efficiency is coming to internet surveillance. While CALEA is all about phones, the Justice Department began lobbying the FCC in 2002 to reinterpret the law as applying to the internet as well. The commission obliged, and last June a divided federal appeals court upheld the expansion 2-1. (The dissenting judge called the FCC’s position “gobbledygook.” But he was outnumbered.)

So, if you’re a broadband provider (separately, some VOIP companies are covered too) … Hurry! The deadline has already passed to file an FCC form 445 (.pdf), certifying that you’re on schedule, or explaining why you’re not. You can also find the 68-page official industry spec for internet surveillance here. It’ll cost you $164.00 to download, but then you’ll know exactly what format to use when delivering customer packets to federal or local law enforcement, including “e-mail, instant messaging records, web-browsing information and other information sent or received through a user’s broadband connection, including on-line banking activity.”

There are also third party brokers who will handle all this for you for a fee.

It’s worth noting that the new requirements don’t alter the legal standards for law enforcement to win court orders for internet wiretaps. Fans of CALEA expansion argue that it therefore won’t increase the number of Americans under surveillance.

That’s wrong, of course. Making surveillance easier and faster gives law enforcement agencies of all stripes more reason to eschew old-fashioned police work in favor of spying. The telephone CALEA compliance deadline was in 2002, and since then the amount of court-ordered surveillance has nearly doubled from 2,586 applications granted that year, to 4,015 orders in 2006.

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Government has broken law to bury bad news on ID cards - Clegg

Monday, May 14th, 2007

The Government was yesterday accused of breaking the law in an attempt to bury bad news after waiting until the day of Tony Blair’s resignation to publish a report on ID cards that reveals the cost of the project has gone up by £640m since October

The Government had previously refused to publish the report despite the fact that it was breaking the law by doing so.

Section 37 of The Identity Cards Act says that a report on the costs of ID Cards must be put before Parliament every six months. However, the Government has ignored that deadline, which would have seen the report published on 9th April.

Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, Nick Clegg MP said:

“It is bad enough that the Government seeks to bury bad news behind the camouflage of Tony Blair’s announcement.

“Breaking the law to do so breaks new ground even for Tony Blair’s Labour Party.

“This bad news has been illegally postponed, and is only now published a full month beyond the statutory deadline. That shows the depths of cynicism and media manipulation to which ministers are now resorting to ram this increasingly unpopular scheme through.

“To add insult to injury, the statement itself is a laughable cocktail of statistical sophistry and contradictory claims.

“But beyond the smoke and mirrors, one simple statistic remains: the total cost of the ID card project by the Government’s own admission has gone up by £640m since October. The costs are now spiralling out of control. On the grounds of expense alone, the Government should do us all a favour and abandon this great white elephant before it is too late.”

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From radio telescopes to electromagnetic weapons

Monday, May 14th, 2007

A group of Russian scientists from Tomsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow have developed a series of unique compact generators capable of producing high-energy pulses of hundreds and even thousands of megawatts.

This compares with the capacity of a major Soviet hydropower station on the Dnieper or an energy unit at a modern nuclear power plant. The new generators are sources of electromagnetic radiation rather than electricity. Their main feature is a capacity to produce enormous power in a matter of nanoseconds. The impulses can be generated with a very high frequency.

Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) Gennady Mesyats recalled that the first high-current electron accelerators were developed in the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s. Ten years later, Soviet scientists learnt to generate powerful microwave nanosecond pulses. The current generators have no counterparts in the world. In effect, Russian scientists have made a breakthrough in what is called relativist high-precision electronics.

The pulse is primarily of interest for fundamental research. Reporting these results to the RAS Presidium at the beginning of this year, scientists emphasized that sources with super radiation effects can be broadly used in long-range high-resolution impulse-based radiolocation and in studies of non-thermal impact of powerful electromagnetic fields on radio electronic components and different biological species.

Super-powerful pulse generators can test the reliability of radio electronic devices and the immunity of energy facilities to different impacts. They can imitate the interference caused by a lightning and even by a nuclear blast. Their tiny size and unique physical properties make their sphere of application extremely wide.

The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a product of a nuclear explosion. It puts out of action even those electronic control systems that have withstood the shockwave and reduces expensive smart weapons to scrap metal. There are different ways of generating electromagnetic pulses - for example, it can be produced by explosion-induced pressure on a magnetic field.

Physicist Andrei Sakharov was the first to propose using this principle in a bomb in the 1950s. Today, records in the size of an induced magnetic field, maximum current and properties of such “radiators” belong to Russian scientists. They surpass foreign counterparts by 10 times. Depending on what facilities the EMP is directed at, the damage radius can be from several hundred meters to kilometers. Without creating a shock wave and inflicting visible damage, it destroys all enemy electronic equipment. Moreover, unlike electronic countermeasures, electromagnetic weapons are capable of damaging radio electronic components even if they are switched off.

At present, the infrastructure and troops of many countries are stuffed with electronic equipment. It will be the main target for electromagnetic weapons. The destructive effect is produced by the high acceleration of the magnetic and electrical components of the EMP. They induce voltage changes ranging from 100 volts to 10,000 volts in circuit networks and terminals of radio electronic equipment. The ensuing massive sparking of cable jackets, their contact to frame and the ground, and breakdowns in connectors put the equipment out of action and lead to fires and explosions. To understand this effect better, it is enough to imagine what will happen to your TV-set if there is a power surge - it will simply melt.

The Americans were the first to use such weapons in combat, for instance in Yugoslavia. Some analysts believe that electromagnetic bombs would have given the United States a vital advantage in the early stages of the war in Iraq. They could have disabled not only Baghdad’s control and communications systems, but also electronic components of missiles, even those located in deep bunkers. But the U.S. command chose not to use electromagnetic bombs for fear that they might disrupt its own radio electronic equipment in the area.

Today, many countries have electromagnetic weapons. Military experts predict a victory in future wars to those who will be ahead in electromagnetic radiation. In many cases, not only the military-industrial complexes but also different civilian organizations, research institutes and universities conduct studies in this field, thereby increasing the threat of radio electronic terrorism. For example, a broadband high-energy and compact wave source is sold without any restrictions. In several fractions of a second, it can burn down all electronic equipment at an electric power station, substation or control tower.

A short intensive pulse can instantly paralyze data bases, financial centers and industrial equipment.

Yuri Zaitsev is an academic adviser at the Academy of Engineering Sciences.

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Disappeared without a trace: more than 10,000 Iraqis

Monday, May 14th, 2007

Shashank Bengali
McClatchy NewspapersWhen her heart is heaviest, Sahira Kereem tries to think of the little things her husband did that annoyed her. She remembers times when she suggested they visit her parents, and he just rolled his eyes.

The mental trick rarely brings her comfort. The fact remains that Riyadh Juma Saleh, her husband of nearly 15 years, went missing one day nearly three years ago and Kareem has no idea what became of him.

Over the past four years, as sectarian kidnappings and killings have gripped Iraq and U.S. forces have arrested untold numbers in an effort to pacify the country, tens of thousands of Iraqis have vanished, often in circumstances as baffling as that of Kereem’s husband, a Shiite Muslim father of three.

There’s no accurate count of the missing since the war began. Iraqi human rights groups put the figure at 15,000 or more, while government officials say 40 to 60 people disappeared each day throughout the country for much of last year, a rate equal to at least 14,600 in one year.

What happened to them is a frustrating mystery that compounds Iraq’s overwhelming sense of chaos and anarchy. Are they dead? Were they kidnapped or killed in some mass bombing? Is the Iraqi government or some militia group holding them? Were they taken prisoner by the United States, which is holding 19,000 Iraqis at its two main detention centers, at Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca?

Since her husband disappeared with his taxicab on July 30, 2004, Kereem has made countless inquiries at hospitals, police stations, morgues and missing-persons centers throughout Baghdad. No record of him has turned up.

“My husband was a very simple, straightforward fellow,” said Kereem, 32, as she fought back tears during a recent interview in a Baghdad hotel. “He had no affiliations. He was an ordinary Iraqi man.”

In Saddam Hussein’s time, secret arrests and detentions were widespread, although families rarely dared to investigate. “If a person went missing, it was best not to draw attention to the fact, as it could affect the entire family,” said Fadhil Abdul Zahra, a spokesman for the human rights committee of Iraq’s parliament.

These days, U.S. and Iraqi forces maintain a prisoner database that’s available to Iraqi citizens. Military officials admit that the database is incomplete, but they say that unlisted prisoners in American custody don’t account for many of the missing Iraqis.

In February, nearly 3,000 families visited the National Iraqi Assistance Center, a U.S. military-run office in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, to search the prison records for missing relatives. That was more than three times the number from a year earlier, the center’s director said.

Few families find satisfaction there. Fewer than 3 out of 10 inquiries find a prisoner. Inquiries with Iraqi authorities are also usually fruitless. “Unfortunately, the number of the names found is much smaller than the number of those not found,” Zahra said.

Kereem described Saleh, a broad-shouldered 44-year-old, as the love of her life. He’d met her right after completing military service, when she was a shy teenager with fair skin and brown hair that cascaded down her back. They were married right away and had a son and two daughters.

Shortly before he disappeared, they’d celebrated their 12th wedding anniversary with a small party at her sister’s home. Baghdad was quieter then, and that night they stayed out until a quarter past 2 in the morning, drinking and dancing.

A few days later, he didn’t come to pick her up after a wedding and failed to turn up at their home in the Zafaraniya section of southeastern Baghdad. She and several relatives fanned out to hospitals and police stations, and later to the missing persons office in the Green Zone, in a desperate search that grew more frantic each week.

“It became like any job,” she said. “Twice a day to look in the hospitals, twice a day in the morgue.”

As Baghdad became more violent, the numbers of the missing mounted, and Kereem began to think that Saleh had been carjacked and left for dead somewhere. Three times, she watched as armed men commandeered passing cars, dragged the drivers into the street, shot them dead and drove off.

Her children became inconsolable. Once, a distant relative greeted her and asked, “Is there any news about Saleh, Allah yirhama?” The phrase translates to “God have mercy on his soul,” and it’s usually used to refer to the deceased.

“Why did she say that?” one of Kereem’s daughters screamed. “Is he dead?”

Money became tight. Saleh had a second job as a government security guard, and a co-worker brought Kereem his paychecks for a few months. But a supervisor put a stop to that eventually. Kereem was forced to move the family to her parents’ cramped home, where they sleep under a makeshift shelter on the roof.

A few months ago, through a family connection, she met an Iraqi who worked for the U.S. military at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad’s airport. He offered to look secretly for Saleh’s name on the roster of some 2,000 prisoners.

In dozens of visits to the Green Zone she’d never found Saleh on any list, but when this man entered her husband’s name, he told Kereem, five matches appeared.

The family was skeptical, but the man wasn’t asking for any money. Kereem asked him to enter Saleh’s license plate number, in case he’d been arrested with his car. Several days later the word came: There was a match. There was reason to think that Saleh was at Cropper.

For now, however, there’s nothing the family can do to confirm this. U.S. officials in the Green Zone continue to tell Kereem that coalition forces aren’t holding Saleh.

Lt. Col. Kathy Brill, the director of the National Iraqi Assistance Center, said many families told stories of relatives who they believed were imprisoned but who weren’t in the database. The military stands by the database, she said.

“If they got that information from someone inside the system, that person isn’t authorized to do that, so you have to wonder about where that information came from,” Brill said. “I guess it’s possible, but I’m not aware of any programs that keep some people out of the database.”

Every day, dozens of families line up at the center, a collection of slate-gray trailers inside a fortified blast wall. They clutch the photographs and identification papers of their loved ones. There’s a quiet solidarity among these broken families.

Kereem watched once as security guards turned away a frail woman in her 60s from entering the center, apparently for not having the proper identification. The woman, who was holding a cheap homemade sack, broke down in tears as she told the guards she was looking for her son.

Kereem asked for the son’s papers so that she could look for him in the system. The guards wouldn’t allow it - only immediate family members can search the records, they said - and the woman was left outside in the sun, alone.

“I am consoled by this,” Kereem said, “because when I go and I ask and I look, I find that so many other people’s tragedies are worse than mine.”

McClatchy special correspondent Sahar Issa contributed to this report.

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Israel to continue assassinations

Monday, May 14th, 2007

The security cabinet favoured assassination

Israel’s security cabinet has approved more assassinations of suspected Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip.

Officials say the decision is necessary to stop rocket attacks on southern Israel, but the operations have been condemned by human rights groups for putting Palestinian civilians at risk.

The move comes after the Israeli army said Palestinian groups fired five rockets from the Gaza Strip on Sunday, but reported only one impact inside Israel.

Yitzhak Herzog, the welfare minister, said: “For several hours the security cabinet discussed the very complex security situation in the Gaza Strip and its implications in Egypt’s Sinai and in the West Bank.

“We devoted considerable attention and a number of analyses during this discussion… The cabinet will be attentive about stopping rocket fire from this territory and weapons smuggling from Sinai,” he told local media.

Eli Yishai, the trade minister and a member of the security cabinet, said before the meeting: “We should concentrate on bringing order through targeted killings, the destruction of infrastructure and of military headquarters.”

Military officials said about 300 rockets have been fired into Israel since a November ceasefire.

Despite constant aerial surveillance and regular ground incursions into launch areas, the Israeli military has failed to prevent rocket attacks from sites within striking distance.

Damage control

Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the national infrastructure minister, said: “It was decided there will be more liquidation fire against terrorists and I think this will limit the damage [on Israel from the rocket attacks].”

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, affiliated to the Fatah party led by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, said it was ordering its Gaza fighters to go on alert over a “threatened” Israeli operation.

Last week Israel’s top public watchdog, State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss, condemned the army for failing to tackle Palestinian rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

Armed groups in Gaza fired some 1,025 rockets in 2006, according to Lindenstrauss’s report.

Thousands of projectiles have been fired over the past six years, killing 10 people in Israel and causing damage.

Agencies

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