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Biometric Recognition Used To Personalize Ads

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

In the film version of Minority Report, a personalized ad that knows about past purchases greets a character as he enters the Gap. Meanwhile, American Express ads tell Tom Cruise’s own character that he looks like he needs an escape as he’s chased by authorities.

Now Microsoft has filed for a patent that could eventually help make these advertising scenarios come true.

Microsoft has been investing heavily in advertising, including a $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive that should close this quarter, a new top ad exec at the company, and a new applied search and advertising research group.

“Techniques for the targeting of advertisements are meager,” the patent application said. “Some industry experts question how long the old world approach can last before the entire system becomes impossible to justify.”

The new Microsoft system, described in the patent application published last week, would be able to determine the identity of someone watching a display and deliver personalized ads to that person. Identification could come from biometric sensors, cameras, or more traditional login methods. A computer would then evaluate information that has been tracked about the person and the content and present a personally relevant advertisement.

The information being tracked could be very extensive, including but not limited to personal interests and hobbies, sex, age, location, profession, subscriptions, group membership, ethnicity, marital status, height, status in the family (i.e., parent or child), the viewer’s address book, calendar, e-mail inbox, notes, purchasing history, and advertising preferences.

So, for example, the system could know that a man watching TV has a wife whose birthday is tomorrow, that the man has bought flowers for her birthday before, and what her name is. The targeted advertisement might create a virtual, photorealistic bouquet based on preferences and ask the viewer if he’d like to buy this bouquet for Julie’s birthday tomorrow.

Such a system is bound to create privacy concerns, and Microsoft takes that into consideration, unlike in another recently published patent application regarding personalized ads for computer users. The new application mostly covers home devices, like cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, computer monitors, televisions, and projections, and does so with security of personal information in mind. “The tracking system may be located inside the person’s home or at some other trusted location, so that the personal information stored therein is protected,” it said. The system could also be tweaked so kids don’t receive targeted ads.

There also seems to be a limit on how much information would ultimately get back to advertisers. The personalization would take place on the local system, rather than with the advertiser. “While the tracking system may notify an advertiser of the opportunity and request advertiser data, the advertiser is not aware to which person the advertisement is going to be presented, and therefore cannot personalize the advertisement at its end,” the application reads.

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DNA swab brings us closer to a police state

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

The move to widen the UK genetic database is yet another example of a relentless desire to monitor every aspect of our everyday lives

Henry Porter
Sunday August 5, 2007
The Observer

An elderly lady called a BBC Wales radio phone-in programme on which I was a guest last week to say that she wouldn’t mind in the slightest if she was stopped and ordered to submit to a DNA test when her dog fouled the pavement. ‘Everyone should give their DNA to the police,’ she said before the discussion was cut short.There wasn’t time to talk about the sinister absurdity of sanctioning a law that compels old ladies to offer up a mouth swab, whether they want to or not. No time to state that the Home Office and police are engaged on a programme to introduce mass DNA testing by stealth. No time to wonder at the complete absence of parliamentary debate on this crucial issue of liberty. No time to ask whether we can truly trust the police; or to consider what the relatively new science of genetics may be used for in the future; or to wonder at the alarming disappearance of the liberal reflex in British political life.

The show ended and we were on to the news and traffic updates. People were more worried about a lorry blocking the M4. There were supermarkets to visit, jobs to be done, planes to be caught. But before we all shut up shop for the holidays, it is worth underlining one sentence that needs to be written in neon across every town centre: Britain is on the way to becoming a police state.

Writing about the crisis of liberty in Britain, I have been careful not to use these words, but today I see no other conclusion to draw. Taken in the context of the ID card database, the national surveillance of vehicles and retention of information about every individual motorway journey, the huge number of new criminal offences, the half million intercepts of private communications every year, the proposed measures to take 53 pieces of information from everyone wishing to go abroad, which will include powers to prevent travel, this widening of the DNA database for minor misdemeanours confirms the pattern of attack on us all. It is time to pay attention to what the government under Labour has done to British society and what may be awaiting us just a short distance down the road.

Some will say I am being alarmist, but they should consider what we have lost since the mid-Nineties. The inventory of freedoms is eroded every week with measures and laws that individually seem just about acceptable but which accrue to alter the nature of a society where rights and liberty were believed to be as natural as summer rain. People might be reassured by Gordon Brown’s talk of a constitutional settlement and a new Bill of Rights, but they should look at his statist views and what is happening in the Home Office, surely one of the most incompetent of the ministries, yet, with its vision for a totally controlled society, also one of the most malign?

Our liberal society is threatened because we don’t think it is. This crisis is a crisis because we have not yet acknowledged it.

Let me explain why extension of the database should worry us all. The taking of a swab from a person’s mouth - by force when necessary - and retaining that sample indefinitely, whether that person has committed a crime or not, is a very serious intrusion. The state owns and has access to the essence of that individual’s being. In the future, it may share the information with whom it likes, investigate the as yet unknown secrets of that sample and make deductions which are prejudicial to that individual or the individual’s blood relations. Once on the DNA database, a person is regarded as being in a pool of potential criminals and in an oblique way likely to be guilty of something or other.

DNA is a very useful tool in solving serious crime, but to force people to give a sample because they are not wearing a seatbelt, have littered or let their dog foul a pavement is wrong because it is a measure designed to increase the database, driven by a bureaucratic rather than judicial imperative. In the words of Alex Marshall, deputy chief constable of Thames Valley Police: ‘Extending the taking of samples to all offences may be perceived as indicative of the increasing criminalisation of the generally law-abiding citizen.

That is exactly right. Any democratic society with a respect for rights must strike a balance between the needs of crime detection and the principle that a person’s privacy is inviolate and their basic innocence unaffected even when they have committed a minor misdemeanour. To compel the sampling of DNA from someone who has driven past a stop sign is a greater offence to society than driving past the stop sign.

The cynical minds of the Home Office concede that the DNA database is inadequate - that the proportion of young black men represented is unacceptable, that the presence of 90,000 innocent minors is regrettable. They argue that these ‘anomalies’ would disappear if everyone was on the database and DNA was taken at birth as matter of routine. Very well, let the matter of a compulsory national DNA database come before Parliament. Better still, let it become the subject of a referendum so that each party takes a clear stand one way or the other. This is a very important issue which we are letting slip from our grasp. It surely won’t be long before someone at the Home Office suggests a DNA sample is added to the information on the ID card database. Indeed, I would guess that is already part of their long-term planning.

Overall, our concern must be that we are allowing the state to accumulate too much power over the individual. The more that power is concentrated, the more likely it is to be abused. On the morning that the Home Office announced the proposals for extending the database, two police officers in Nottingham were found guilty of leaking intelligence to a gangster named Colin Gunn and in London the Independent Police Complaints Commission found that Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman had misled the public about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

These cases underline that police officers are not beyond unlawful or irregular behaviour. If DNA evidence was available during the 1974 Birmingham or Guildford bombings, it seems likely that the police would have used samples to clinch convictions, which would then have been that much harder to overturn. DNA evidence goes unchallenged in court and as the database expands clearly the opportunities to ‘fit up’ suspects will increase.

The vast majority of police officers are upstanding servants of the community, which is how I’d like them to remain. But too much power will change that.

As a nation, we need to have more confidence in people’s ability to determine the course of society during difficult times. In an excellent article in the Daily Telegraph, Janet Daley commented on the ingenuity of and the sacrifice made by ordinary people during the floods. She ended with a suggested sentence for David Cameron’s speech writers. ‘It is because of that faith we have in ordinary people and their ability to do the right thing that we want to entrust them with more power over their lives and communities.’

We begin by resisting this demonic move to criminalise us with this database.

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Specter, Leahy question use of 9/11 fund money

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

By KIMBERLY HEFLING

Two senators want to know why a $1 billion Sept. 11 insurance fund appropriated by Congress to help ailing ground zero workers has not been used to compensate those exposed to harmful substances.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and the committee’s ranking Republican, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said in a letter to the insurance company overseeing the Sept. 11 health-related claims that they are considering convening a hearing in September.

“Reports that the World Trade Center Captive Insurance Company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on salaries on administrators and over $45 million to private law firms are troubling,” the letter said.

The two also said they have concerns about the $74 million that reportedly has been spent on overhead costs and legal bills. The letter, dated Wednesday, was addressed to Christine LaSala, CEO of WTC Captive Insurance Co.

Michael A. Cardozo, New York City’s corporation counsel, said in a statement that Captive Insurance Company is an insurance company, not a compensation fund. He said the city has urged Congress to create a compensation fund for injured workers.

“Instead, Congress created an insurance company, and the Captive Insurance Company is obligated to defend all claims that have a reasonable and valid defense,” Cardozo said. “We would strongly welcome Congress, as we have repeatedly urged, to allocate funds for compensation without the need for litigation.”

The insurance company issued a statement saying it would respond to the letter once it is received. It says it has fulfilled its mandate, which is to insure the city of New York and its contractors and subcontractors.

Last month, attorneys representing thousands who became ill after working to clean up the site while breathing toxic trade center dust went to court to demand the insurance company spend money on their health care.

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California Limits E-Voting

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

Prorev

[The Times plays down the import of this story, but basically the California Secretary of State found that these machines, used to decide who won recent elections, are not to be trusted.]

NY TIMES - Expressing concern that several brands of electronic voting machines used in California were vulnerable to tampering, Secretary of State Debra Bowen late Friday ordered new security protections be added and limited the use of two types of machines that were to be used in next year’s elections in several Southern California counties. Bowen also withdrew state approval of the InkaVote Plus machines used in Los Angeles County, saying that the machines’ maker, Election Systems and Software, had failed to submit its equipment to her office in time to analyze its vulnerability to hacking. . .

Bowen ordered that some machines made by Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems be limited to one per polling place to limit the chances that they could be tampered with. The Sequoia machines are used in Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura Counties.

Bowen said the presence of the machines, though limited, would be helpful for disabled voters, though any voter could use the machines. Weir, however, said she was creating a “separate but unequal” voting system.

The security requirements Bowen imposed include: reinstalling the software before the Feb. 5. election to ensure it has not already been tampered with; placing special seals at vulnerable parts of the machines to reveal tampering; securing each machines at the close of each day of early voting; assigning a specific election monitor to safeguard each machine; and conducting a complete manual count of all votes cast.

BRAD BLOG - The [review] had found that all electronic voting systems certified in California were easily accessible to hacking. A single machine, the testers discovered, could be easily tampered with by an election insider, voting machine company employee, or other individual in such a way that an entire election could be effected without detection. . .

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‘Torture flight’ airline sued by MI5 informer

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

David Rose
Sunday August 5, 2007
The Observer

Bisher al-Rawi, the British-based Iraqi and former MI5 source detained by America for more than four years, is suing the US private airline that transported him to Afghanistan on an illegal CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’ torture flight.Last week’s Observer revealed how MI5 failed to protect al-Rawi when US agents abducted him during a business trip to Gambia in November 2002, despite the fact that he had helped the Security Service keep tabs on the radical preacher Abu Qatada - Osama bin Laden’s ‘ambassador to Europe’ - when he was in hiding.

After a month being interrogated in Gambia, he was rendered to the CIA’s ‘dark prison’ in Kabul on a US charter plane, chained, immobilised and in nappies. Later he spent four years in Guantanamo Bay before being released in March, cleared of any connection with terrorism.

He has joined a legal action already filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three other detainees, including a UK resident, Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian. It claims that the aviation firm Jeppesen, a subsidiary of Boeing, ‘knowingly provided direct flight services to the CIA enabling the clandestine transportation of Bisher al-Rawi to secret overseas locations where he was subjected to torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.’

‘Being a victim of the CIA’s rendition programme was horrific beyond words,’ al-Rawi said yesterday.

Jeppesen this weekend declined to comment.

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Israel receives new British request over 2003 journalist killing

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

AFP

Israel said on Sunday it has been asked by Britain to reopen the case of the 2003 killing of a British journalist in Gaza by suspected Israeli fire.

A month and a half ago we received a new request from British justice authorities,” the justice ministry said in a statement, without elaborating.

“This request is being examined by organisations and institutions concerned and a response will be provided in accordance with the calendar in use by Israeli institutions,” it said.

The statement was released in the wake of a report by the liberal Haaretz daily, which said that the British attorney general had asked his Israeli counterpart to reopen the case of journalist James Miller, shot dead in the Gaza Strip in May 2003.

Haaretz said British Attorney General Peter Goldsmith, who has since been replaced in his post by Baroness Patricia Scotland, notified Miller’s family of his action in a letter.

In it, he said that a British coroner “wrote to me and invited me to consider instituting criminal proceedings in the United Kingdom against… members of the Israeli Defence Forces… for an offence of willful killing contrary to section I of the Geneva Conventions Act 1957.”

Haaretz said that if the British authorities decided to open such criminal proceedings, London could file an extradition request for the Israeli soldiers involved — a move that could sour relations between the two countries.

A spokesman for the attorney general’s office in London confirmed that a letter had been sent to the Israelis.

“We have not yet had a response from the Israeli attorney so we’re not really in a position to comment further,” a spokesman for the attorney general’s office said on condition of anonymity in line with government policy.

Any extradition would be a matter for the Home Office, he added.

Miller, an award-winning television journalist, was shot dead in the town of Rafah near the Egyptian border as he was filming a documentary on the Israeli army’s destruction of hundreds of homes in the Palestinian territories.

The 34-year-old’s crew said they were carrying a white flag and identified themselves as British media to troops in the area.

As they left a Palestinian home they were fired upon, and a bullet struck Miller in the neck between his helmet and bullet-proof vest, which was marked with the letters “TV.”

An autopsy carried out in Israel with a British doctor present found that the freelance journalist was hit by a bullet from an M-16 assault rifle fired by soldiers facing him.

In April 2005, the Israeli army cited lack of evidence in a decision not to take any action against the officer accused of responsibility over the fatal shooting, although it did chastise him for “allegedly firing his weapon.”

A year later, a coroner’s jury in Britain ruled that Miller had been murdered.

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The Dumbest Thing the Washington Post Could Print

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

By David Swanson

The Washington Post today published an article by Michael Tomasky called “The Dumbest Move the Dems Could Make.” With a lot of publications, this article itself would have been the dumbest thing they’d ever printed. Of course, we’re talking about the Washington Post, a newspaper that cheered in hundreds of articles and columns and editorials for a cakewalk in Iraq. Still, this was the single dumbest thing the Post could possibly have printed at this time.

The Democrats in Congress, already less popular than the least popular president in history, have just rolled over and legalized his illegal spying. That’s the only way they can “get things done.” They can pass bills that should not be passed. Any useful bills have been and will be vetoed. So, the Democrats have two options left to them. First, they can announce that there will be no more bills to fund the occupation of Iraq. Second, they can impeach Bush and Cheney. Impeachment would force Republicans to defend Bush and Cheney for the next year and a half, which ought to be deadly to any politician. In fact, if enough Republicans recognize that, a conviction in the Senate will be possible. But the point is to impeach in the House, to put Bush and Cheney on the defensive, and to pass bills at the same time with an increased chance of them actually becoming law.

Tomasky’s claim, of course, is that impeachment would be the dumbest move the Democrats could make. By standing up for 54% of Americans and 76% of Democrats, Congressional leaders would, according to Tomasky, somehow hurt themselves. Tomasky makes no mention of the people who would die in Iraq and as a result of other Bush-Cheney policies while the Democrats wisely refrained from impeaching. Nor does he recall the last time they listened to arguments identical to his, when they took the impeachment of Ronald Reagan off the table. A pack of criminals got off easy, and the Democrats LOST the elections. Nor is there any mention of Richard Nixon, who was more popular than Bush and Cheney are, but whose popularity did not get any boost from Congress’s efforts to impeach him. In fact, the Democrats won the biggest victories in recent memory (well, apparently not recent enough for Tomasky).

Based on absolutely no evidence or anecdote of any sort, Tomasky simply asserts, as the Republican National Committee and Nancy Pelosi both initially did 14 months ago, that impeachment would “convert Bush from the figure of contempt and mockery he is now into one of vague sympathy.” Sympathy? People disapprove of Bush and Cheney in record numbers because they view them as criminals. Getting tough on crimes rarely creates sympathy for the criminals in the hearts of Americans.

“Just as bad,” says Tomasky, “it’s the one move that would definitively alienate nonideological voters and, therefore, harm the Democrats’ otherwise excellent chances for winning congressional seats and the White House in 2008.” Definitively? Clearly “definitively” should not be confused with “based on at least a shred of evidence.” Fewer than 5% of voters in 2004 ever planned to vote for Bush or Kerry and switched to the other. Isn’t a candidate’s relationship to the much greater number of voters who support their party going to prove much more important than how they play to that 5 percent?

But listen to this bit of fantasy from Tomasky: “One of the Democrats’ strongest arguments for 2008, regardless of their nominee, will be that it’s time for the country to set aside rampant partisanship and ideologically driven government. Impeachment would take away that argument.”

The fact that it didn’t work out this way for the Republicans after they impeached Clinton (they hung onto both houses and the White House) is something Tomasky dismisses by simply claiming that Republicans are different. But so would be a Democratic Party that finally stood up on its hind legs and impeached.

The Democrats’ strongest arguments will not include a promise to end partisanship, which most Democratic voters don’t give a rat’s ass about. The Dems strongest arguments will derive from whatever they do in the next year and a half to develop partisanship, to distinguish their party from the other one. Their strongest criticisms of the Republicans will include Bush and Cheney’s numerous crimes and abuses. Accusing people who are guilty of routine law-breaking, lying, detaining, torturing, and murdering, of “partisanship” misses the mark widely.

Tomasky claims to believe that impeachment would “pull the country apart.” Unlike, say, launching an unpopular illegal aggressive war on the basis of lies, jettisoning the Bill of Rights, and transferring massive wealth from the rest of us to the filthy rich? Anyone who believes this country is united, and united with the least popular president on record, had better acquire and keep a regular job with the Washington Post. Impeaching Nixon ended a crisis and healed a nation. As John Nichols says, calling impeachment a constitutional crisis is like calling aspirin a headache crisis.

What would Tomasky have Congress do instead of impeaching? Well, he says, “There are plenty of ways to hold the administration accountable that don’t carry so high a price. Last I looked, Democrats were doing a pretty aggressive job of it. According to Pelosi’s office, 13 high-ranking administration officials have resigned rather than face genuine congressional oversight.”

So, that’s the plan? Get subordinates to resign? What about all the subordinates, resigned and otherwise, who have refused to comply with subpoenas? Have they been held accountable? Has Bush? Has Cheney? These are serious questions, Mr. Tomasky, ones you should try to come up with an answer for out of your own head, rather than running to Pelosi to find out what the official line is.

Pelosi tends to feed her view of the world to astroturf groups like Daily Kos that do her bidding. But any group with enough people in it, is pro-impeachment whether permitted to be or not. Even the Washington Post reports that the high point of Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s speech today at the Yearly Kos convention was this: “‘With respect to Dick Cheney he should be impeached for lying.’ ‘Nuff said. In this audience Kucinich couldn’t have scored better if he announced he was handing out $100 bills after the forum.”

Impeachment is on the table outside the beltway, as even Tomasky admits. But, as the Washington Post has never reported and probably never will, impeachment is also alive and well in Congress. Forty-three Congress Members now stand in one manner or another for impeachment.

Seventeen have signed on as cosponsors of H. Res. 333, a bill proposing articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney. H Res 333 cosponsors include, Dennis Kucinich, Jan Schakowsky, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, Keith Ellison, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee, Albert Wynn, William Lacy Clay, Yvette Clarke, Jim McDermott, Jim Moran, Bob Filner, Sam Farr, Robert Brady, Tammy Baldwin, and Donald Payne.

Twenty-seven have signed onto H Res. 589, a bill proposing the impeachment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The cosponsors are Jay Inslee, Xavier Becerra, Michael Arcuri, Ben Chandler, Dennis Moore, Bruce Braley, Tom Udall, Earl Blumenauer, Peter DeFazio, Hank Johnson, Steve Cohen, Keith Ellison, David Wu, Yvette Clarke, Darlene Hooley, Betty McCollum, Timothy Bishop, Barney Frank, Carolyn Maloney, Ed Perlmutter, Tammy Baldwin, Shelley Berkley, Raul Grijalva, Ed Pastor, Ellen Tauscher, Rush Holt, and Jim McGovern.

Only Johnson, Ellison, Clarke, and Baldwin have signed onto both bills. (17 + 27 -4 = 40)

Congressmen Jesse Jackson Jr. and Maurice Hinchey have recently said that they support the impeachment of Cheney and Bush, but have not yet signed onto any bills. (40 + 2 = 42)

Other Congress Members have said privately that they favor impeachment but not these bills, even that they would only support impeachment if it included Bush. The lack of cross-over support between the two existing bills is an indication of the importance of petty personal politics within Congress, and the extent to which Congress Members will sign onto a bill based on who the sponsor and cosponsors are and who asks them, and whether anyone asks them, to sign on.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has opposed impeachment since May 2006, but this week said that if she were not the Speaker she would probably be backing impeachment, and that impeachment of Gonzales is clearly merited. (42 + 1 = 43)

And here’s some breaking news from YearlyKos about Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), a very progressive freshman who serves on the crucial Judiciary Committee.

Rep. Cohen could not get to Chicago but he sent a spokesman who announced, as reported by Bob Fertik:

Rep. Cohen is leaning strongly towards joining Rep. Kucinich’s bill to impeach Cheney. Congress needs hearings, but so much evidence has already been produced, and there is so much obstructionism from the administration. Congress does not have to wait months for procedural decisions to come down from the Supreme Court. If Congress can’t get to the root of the matter right quick it could be brought to a vote. All they need is a majority in the House.

Well, that and the wisdom not to believe really really dumb things.

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Psychologists and CIA torture

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

By Stephen Soldz

Last month Vanity Fair online published Katherine Eban’s account of the psychologist-designed torture of Abu Zubaydah, designed and conducted by CIA consultants Mitchell and Jessen, former Suvival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) psychologists. This week, the New Yorker publishes a companion piece by Jane Mayer on the CIA torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [The Black Sites]. In the course of a long piece, the article sheds more light on the role of psychologists in US torture.

Here are a few excerpts on the role of psychologists:

The C.I.A. program’s first important detainee was Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda operative, who was captured by Pakistani forces in March of 2002. Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”

The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, “Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.’ ” He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. “Behavioral scientists said, ‘Don’t even think about this!’ They thought officers could be prosecuted.”

Nevertheless, the SERE experts’ theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah’s interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”

As the C.I.A. captured and interrogated other Al Qaeda figures, it established a protocol of psychological coercion. The program tied together many strands of the agency’s secret history of Cold War-era experiments in behavioral science. (In June, the C.I.A. declassified long-held secret documents known as the Family Jewels, which shed light on C.I.A. drug experiments on rats and monkeys, and on the infamous case of Frank R. Olson, an agency employee who leaped to his death from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after he was unwittingly drugged with LSD.) The C.I.A.’s most useful research focussed on the surprisingly powerful effects of psychological manipulations, such as extreme sensory deprivation. According to Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, who has written a history of the C.I.A.’s experiments in coercing subjects, the agency learned that “if subjects are confined without light, odors, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked.”

Agency scientists found that in just a few hours some subjects suspended in water tanks—or confined in isolated rooms wearing blacked-out goggles and earmuffs—regressed to semi-psychotic states. Moreover, McCoy said, detainees become so desperate for human interaction that “they bond with the interrogator like a father, or like a drowning man having a lifesaver thrown at him. If you deprive people of all their senses, they’ll turn to you like their daddy.” McCoy added that “after the Cold War we put away those tools. There was bipartisan reform. We backed away from those dark days. Then, under the pressure of the war on terror, they didn’t just bring back the old psychological techniques—they perfected them.”

The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

Katherine Eban’s Vanity Fair articlerevealed the existence of a December 10, 2002 document — SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure — establishing certain of these SERE-derived torture techniques as standard Operating procedure for US abuse at Guantanamo. Mayer reveals a bit more of the contents of this chilling document which shows the degree to which torture became routinized and bureaucratically organized in American gulags:

A secret government document, dated December 10, 2002, detailing “SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,” outlines the advantages of stripping detainees. “In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.” The document advises interrogators to “tear clothing from detainees by firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” The memo also advocates the “Shoulder Slap,” “Stomach Slap,” “Hooding,” “Manhandling,” “Walling,” and a variety of “Stress Positions,” including one called “Worship the Gods.”

Mayer also reveals the important role of doctors in US torture:

In the process of being transported, C.I.A. detainees such as Mohammed were screened by medical experts, who checked their vital signs, took blood samples, and marked a chart with a diagram of a human body, noting scars, wounds, and other imperfections. As the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry put it, “It’s like when you hire a motor vehicle, circling where the scratches are on the rearview mirror. Each detainee was continually assessed, physically and psychologically.”

Mayer also makes clear that we are talking about “torture” here, not any supposed “torture-lite”:

Ramzi Kassem, who teaches at Yale Law School, said that a Yemeni client of his, Sanad al-Kazimi, who is now in Guantánamo, alleged that he had received similar treatment in the Dark Prison, the facility near Kabul. Kazimi claimed to have been suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully. “It’s so traumatic, he can barely speak of it,” Kassem said. “He breaks down in tears.” Kazimi also claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables.

According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”

Under President Bush’s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.

In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that “longtime standing” was a common K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, “A Question of Torture,” he writes that the Soviets found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”

And:

Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the details of the detention and interrogation program, there was a tense debate about where to draw the line in terms of treatment. John Brennan, Tenet’s former chief of staff, said, “It all comes down to individual moral barometers.” Waterboarding, in particular, troubled many officials, from both a moral and a legal perspective. Until 2002, when Bush Administration lawyers asserted that waterboarding was a permissible interrogation technique for “enemy combatants,” it was classified as a form of torture, and treated as a serious criminal offense. American soldiers were court-martialled for waterboarding captives as recently as the Vietnam War.

But the psychological disorientation was paramount:

Some detainees held by the C.I.A. claimed that their cells were bombarded with deafening sound twenty-fours hours a day for weeks, and even months. One detainee, Binyam Mohamed, who is now in Guantánamo, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that speakers blared music into his cell while he was handcuffed. Detainees recalled the sound as ranging from ghoulish laughter, “like the soundtrack from a horror film,” to ear-splitting rap anthems. Stafford Smith said that his client found the psychological torture more intolerable than the physical abuse that he said he had been previously subjected to in Morocco, where, he said, local intelligence agents had sliced him with a razor blade. “The C.I.A. worked people day and night for months,” Stafford Smith quoted Binyam Mohamed as saying. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”

Some US interrogators with SERE training claim that this treatment can’t be torture because its nothing more than is done to US troops during SERE training. They can’t seem to distinguish a couple of days of abuse under known limited conditions from the never-ending tortures inflicted upon real detainees:

One of these former [CIA] officers defends the C.I.A.’s program by noting that “there was absolutely nothing done to K.S.M. that wasn’t done to the interrogators themselves”—a reference to SERE-like training. Yet the Red Cross report emphasizes that it was the simultaneous use of several techniques for extended periods that made the treatment “especially abusive.” Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been a prominent critic of the Administration’s embrace of harsh interrogation techniques, said that, particularly with sensory deprivation, “there’s a point where it’s torture. You can put someone in a refrigerator and it’s torture. Everything is a matter of degree.”

As Mayer makes clear, the US torture regime became more systematic, more routinized, more bureaucratic over time. Eventually Mohammed was moved to the US’s state-of-the-art secret torture facility in Poland:

But, according to well-informed sources, it was a far more high-tech facility than the prisons in Afghanistan. The cells had hydraulic doors and air-conditioning. Multiple cameras in each cell provided video surveillance of the detainees. In some ways, the circumstances were better: the detainees were given bottled water. Without confirming the existence of any black sites, Robert Grenier, the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, said, “The agency’s techniques became less aggressive as they learned the art of interrogation,” which, he added, “is an art.”

Mohammed was kept in a prolonged state of sensory deprivation, during which every point of reference was erased. The Council on Europe’s report describes a four-month isolation regime as typical. The prisoners had no exposure to natural light, making it impossible for them to tell if it was night or day. They interacted only with masked, silent guards. (A detainee held at what was most likely an Eastern European black site, Mohammed al-Asad, told me that white noise was piped in constantly, although during electrical outages he could hear people crying.) According to a source familiar with the Red Cross report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed that he was shackled and kept naked, except for a pair of goggles and earmuffs. (Some prisoners were kept naked for as long as forty days.) He had no idea where he was, although, at one point, he apparently glimpsed Polish writing on a water bottle.

In the C.I.A.’s program, meals were delivered sporadically, to insure that the prisoners remained temporally disoriented. The food was largely tasteless, and barely enough to live on. Mohammed, who upon his capture in Rawalpindi was photographed looking flabby and unkempt, was now described as being slim. Experts on the C.I.A. program say that the administering of food is part of its psychological arsenal. Sometimes portions were smaller than the day before, for no apparent reason. “It was all part of the conditioning,” the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said. “It’s all calibrated to develop dependency.”

The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”

“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”

The article also shows the moral complexity of America’s torture regime as a former CIA official insists the program is “safe” for the detainees but speaks of the psychological damage to the interrogators”:

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

This article again raises the issue of the centrality of psychology to America’s torture regime. It was the supposed knowledge, expertise, credentials, and legitimacy of psychologists that was important to the CIA torture-planners.The psychological profession will be stained by this association, and by its silence while these abuses occurred in our name. Not untill the profession fully investigates and condemns these abuses will the stain begin to be lifted. No simple “banning” of specific torture techniques by the American Psychological Association (APA) can possibly be an adequate reply to these horrors. The profession must loudly and collectively cry “Shame!” and “Never again!”

Further, the critical collaboration and silence of the APA leadership during this profound moral crisis cannot go unchallenged. In the interests of maintaining their ties to the military and the CIA, these leaders were more than willing to turn a blind eye to the torture being designed and conducted by our psychological colleagues. They never uttered a peep of concern for these abuses, but, rather, parsed words to try and evade responsibility. In the final accounting for US torture, the APA leadership will certainly bear a measure of the responsibility.

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Bush beats Nixon for disapproval

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

George W. Bush has sunk below Richard Nixon and could break Harry Truman’s record for persistent unpopularity among modern U.S. presidents.

The latest Gallup Poll found that Bush’s popularity had been below 40 percent for six consecutive quarters, the Dallas Morning News reports. Nixon ended his five-quarter streak by resigning in 1974.

Truman’s approval ratings were below 40 percent for 10 months, the longest ever in the history of the Gallup Poll. Bush, with six quarters remaining in his second term, could surpass Truman.

Bush would like to see himself as a Truman, a president far more popular in retrospect with historians and even the public than he was while he was in office, but political observers aren’t so sure.

“If Iraq goes down, Bush joins the Nixon pantheon,” said Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas expert on presidential politics. “If it doesn’t, he may be able to live up to his hero Truman.”

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Science lab suspected in foot and mouth outbreak

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

· Research plant is near infected farm
· Ban on export of British livestock

Jo Revill, Juliette Jowit and Anushka Asthana
Sunday August 5, 2007
The Observer

An accidental leak of an experimental vaccine from a private research site was being investigated urgently last night as the likely source of Britain’s new foot and mouth disease outbreak. The news came as the government attempted to avert a full-scale crisis in farming and the tourism industry.Movement of all livestock has been banned, exports to Europe stopped and country fairs cancelled to minimise the risk of the country suffering a disastrous rerun of the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic which cost the nation £8.5bn.

Scientists made a breakthrough last night as they identified the strain of the virus as one which is not naturally occurring, but is a vaccine strain, and has never been seen before in Europe. This enabled investigators to link the outbreak to a company which lies less than three miles down the road from the source of the outbreak.

Merial Animal Health, a private pharmaceutical firm shares facilities with a government laboratory in Pirbright, and is commissioned by the European Union to formulate new vaccines for animal diseases. Both companies are expected to meet tight regulatory standards for biosecurity.

Investigators are now focusing on whether there was a lapse which meant that a batch of the vaccine, made last month, escaped the site. The company is believed to test its vaccines on animals, which may have been able to graze on the land. The virus may have been carried by the wind, or by people or vehicles down the road from the site to a rented field in the village of Normandy, near Guildford, where the outbreak happened.

By last night, dozens of vets and farm officials had been sent into a 10km ’surveillance’ zone around the outbreak centre at Woolfords Farm to start disinfecting equipment and vehicles, as well as testing sheep, cattle and pigs from other farms. Hundreds more cattle, sheep and pigs in the zone face slaughter amid fears that they may have been infected by an airborne strain of the virus escaping from a nearby research centre.

The news that this may be an isolated outbreak, caused accidentally because of human error, will come as a relief to many farmers, because it makes it far less likely that the disease has already begun to spread around Britain. It also alleviates fears that the disease could somehow have made its way into the animal food chain, as happened in 2001 when it was found to be contained in pigswill.

The fact that it is a vaccine strain - called 01 BFS67 - also means that the infected animals are likely to have had a more mild form of the disease, and are much less likely to be contagious to other cattle.

At a press conference in London, the government’s chief veterinary officer, Debby Reynolds, said one of her first acts was to review biosecurity at Pirbright.

She said earlier in the day, before the strain was known, that the government was ‘focusing on all possibilities: legal, illegal, lab-based, deliberate release - all those possibilities will be investigated and I wouldn’t want to put any undue emphasis on any of those’. A few potential cases had been reported in the wake of the discovery of infected cattle, some of which had already been found to be negative while others were still coming in, she added.

Yesterday Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, broke off their holidays to hold two emergency Cobra meetings to discuss the outbreak. Brown signalled his determination not to close off the countryside - which happened six years ago in the epidemic that ended in the slaughter of some 10 million animals.

A spokesman for Merial Animal Health said last night that it would co-operate fully with the government inquiry ‘to determine the source of the disease’. The company has agreed to voluntarily halt vaccine production.

Workers began culling infected cattle from Woolfords Farm where farmers were first told by vets on Thursday night that the herd might have foot and mouth. ‘We will be doing, night and day, everything in our power to make sure that what happens happens quickly and happens decisively in a way that can reassure people that everything is being done,’ said Brown.

‘Our first priority has been to act quickly and decisively. That is why we have a national ban already imposed on the movement of sheep and pigs and cattle. That is why we have acted to create exclusion zones that are already in existence. That is why also the culling of the herd in the infected area is already taking place.’

Conservative leader David Cameron also postponed his holiday in Brittany, France, to talk to farmers in his Oxfordshire constituency.

Richard Macdonald, head of the National Farmers’ Union, said the news was ‘pretty devastating’ but praised Defra’s quick response. He appealed to farmers to help contain the disease.

The case at Woolfords is the first in Britain since 2001, when the epidemic led to animal carcasses being burned on pyres countrywide. This time, ministers have decided, there will be no pyres. The bodies of the first infected cattle were sent instead to an incinerator.

Tomorrow, the European Commission will decide what steps to take to limit any spread of the disease, but an automatic ban on livestock imports from the UK is now in place, under trade rules. An emergency meeting will be held in Brussels to look at restrictions on movement of animals and dispatch of food products from the UK.

Yesterday, Northern Ireland banned movement of animals from mainland Britain. Three big agricultural shows in Scotland taking place this weekend are still going ahead - without cows, sheep and goats.

In the heart of the 10km surveillance zone is Oxenford farm, between Elstead and Milford, close to Pride’s home. Yesterday, the owners were waiting for news about what would happen to their livestock. Meanwhile, farmers were urged to look for symptoms in their animals, which include shivering, lameness and blisters on the foot and in the mouth.

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U.S. soldier sentenced to 110 years in prison for rape, murder

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

www.chinaview.cn

A U.S. soldier convicted of raping and murdering an Iraqi girl and killing her family last year has been sentenced to 110 years in prison, the military said Saturday.

Private First Class Jesse Spielman, 23, was convicted late Friday by a military court at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky of rape, conspiracy to commit rape, housebreaking with intent to rape and four counts of felony murder.

Spielman was among five soldiers charged in the March 2006 attack on the family in Mahmoudiya, a village about 32 km south of Baghdad. He received the longest sentence of four soldiers who have been convicted.

On March 12, 2006, five American soldiers, all from the 101st Airborne Division, based at Fort Campbell, saw 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi in Mahmoudiya, and conspired to rape the girl, prosecutors said.

They then broke into Janabi’s home, killed her parents and six-year-old sister, and raped and murdered her. Later, they put kerosene on the girl’s body and set it on fire to destroy evidence.

Spielman had pleaded guilty Monday to lesser charges of conspiracy to obstructing justice, arson, wrongfully touching a corpse and drinking, but not guilty of raping and murder. The 110-year sentence was said to be part of a plea agreement between his attorneys and the prosecutors.

One of the soldiers involved in the gang rape case, James Barker, was sentenced to 90 years in jail in November last year under a plea agreement, and has agreed to testify against the others in the case. Two other soldiers have also pleaded guilty and have been sentenced to jail terms ranging from five to 100 years.

The fifth defendant, former soldier Steven Green, has been charged in a federal court because he was discharged from the Army before the murder allegations surfaced. He has pleaded not guilty to charges including murder and sexual assault.

Prosecutors have said that they would seek death for Green, the mastermind of the crime. Two of his accomplices have testified that Green shot and killed Janabi’s parents and sister while they were gang-raping her. He then killed Janabi after their sexual assaults.

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House approves changes in terror spy program

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

Democrats under pressure from Bush vote for measure

By Carl Hulse and Edmund L. Andrews

Under pressure from President Bush, the House on Saturday gave final approval to changes in a terrorist surveillance program despite serious objections from many Democrats about the scope of the executive branch’s new eavesdropping power.

Racing to complete a final rush of legislation before a scheduled monthlong break, the House voted 227-183 to endorse a measure the Bush administration said was needed to keep pace with communications technology in the effort to track terrorists overseas.

The House Democratic leadership had severe reservations about the proposal and an overwhelming majority of Democrats opposed it. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said the measure “does violence to the Constitution of the United States.”

But with the Senate already in recess, Democrats confronted the choice of allowing the administration’s bill to reach the floor and be approved mainly by Republicans or letting it die.

If it stalled, that would have left Democratic lawmakers, who have long been anxious about appearing weak on national security issues, facing an August fending off charges from Bush and Republicans that they left Americans exposed to terror threats.

Despite the political risks, many Democrats argued they should stand firm against the president’s initiative, saying it granted the administration far too much latitude to initiate surveillance without judicial review. They said the White House was using the specter of terror to usurp the privacy rights of Americans and empower Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, an official Democrats said had proved himself untrustworthy. Under the bill, Gonzales would share authority with Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence.

“Legislation should not be passed in response to fear-mongering,” said Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey.

There was no indication that lawmakers were responding to new intelligence warnings. Rather, Democrats were responding to administration pleas that a recent secret court ruling had created a legal obstacle in monitoring foreign communications relayed over the Internet.

But the disputes were significant enough that they were likely to resurface before the end of the year. Democrats have expressed concerns that the administration is reaching for powers that go well beyond solving what officials have depicted as narrow technical issues in the current law.

Bush on Saturday urged the House to act promptly after the Senate approved changes Friday night in the terrorist surveillance program sought by the administration.

Other Republicans called for swift House action as well. “I can’t imagine they would take a monthlong vacation without fulfilling their obligation to keep America safe,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.

Administration officials have been quietly pushing Congress to pass a broad “modernization” of the existing law, arguing that technological changes - especially the expansion of telephone calls over the Internet - had made the current rules outdated.

One key issue, apparently raised in secret by judges overseeing the problem, is that many calls and e-mail messages between people outside the United States are routed over data networks that run through the United States. In principle, the surveillance law does not restrict eavesdropping on foreign-to-foreign communications. But in practice, administration officials contend, the path of those calls through this country means the government cannot monitor them without a warrant.

Democratic lawmakers have been deeply suspicious that the administration was seeking a broader and more controversial expansion of surveillance authority by making changes that were vague on important issues. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Friday that the administration-supported bill would allow wiretapping without warrants as long as it was “concerning a person abroad.” As a result, he said, the law could be construed as allowing any search inside the United States as long as the government claimed it “concerned” al Qaeda.

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