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Post codes help Big Brother keep an eye on us

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

By Roger Highfield and Nic Fleming

Post codes: not just for post anymore

Jason and Samantha, the “burdened optimists” of Chatham ME5, are young, ambitious and reckless. They are in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs and need two salaries to have any chance of affording a mortgage.

Meanwhile, Sebastian and Olivia, the “globally connected”, live in very expensive housing in Hampstead NW3, and are either wealthy foreigners or travel abroad a lot.

These fictional characters from a commercial database show how traditional class distinctions and stereotypes are being swept away as big business and government now control out lives based on where we live.

They are using post codes, cross-referenced with census data, marketing information, utility bills, and store cards to determine insurance premiums, where to locate shops, how to target a marketing campaign, and where we are placed in call centre queues.

Prof Roger Burrows of the University of York analysed four post codes in detail, talking to residents, estate agents and others, and found existing predictions made by the databases were “surprisingly accurate”.

Speaking at the British Association Festival of Science today, he said: “What is so amazing is the amount of work people do to give up data that marketing organisations have been trying to get out of them for years.

“I am not sure that people are aware that data they give up ever day is leading to the construction of very nuanced ‘data doubles’ and there is a whole range of organisations using this data.

“It has an impact on buildings insurance, contents insurance, increase in car insurance, the junk in letter box, how they are queued in call centres, and were we locate stores and services,”.

For one real example, W5 3PL, is the home of “Tim and Claudia” in Ealing, London, says one database. They are defined as “city adventurers”, well-educated, twenty something singles on extremely high salaries who spend little time in their smart studio flats.

Prof Burrows added that with the rise of GPS, insurers can track car movements, for instance to work, and this data ” will increasingly be used to determine car insurance.”

Using caller ID to call up a post code, company call centres can move you to the front of a queue if they think you are more likely to buy their goods, divert you to a call to a call centre in India, or let you hang on if you are likely to sap their profits.

Once classified this way, it is difficult to alter, Prof Burrows said. However, it is possible and it could be that, when people realise the power of their postcode, they could try to change it, for instance by gentrification.

While postcodes can help more efficiently distributed resources, it could mean, for example, that the wine lover who has eight lager louts in their post code could lose out when a chain of wine stores decided where to build a new local store. “The actions of other people who live next door or down the street contribute to how you are being characterised,” he said.

These classifications could reinforce stereotypes and generate ghettoes: they are increasingly used abroad, such in the US and Australia, to help people to match who they are to where they want to live. “You say I can afford £500,000 in Sydney, show me the geodemographic types I can life in.”

The influence of post codes adds a new twist to the old anxiety about “not wanting to be in Slough but in Windsor,” he said.

The most widely used system is the Mosaic classification owned by the global data corporation Experian. The Mosaic system classifies each of the 1.7 million postcodes in the UK to one of 11 different Mosaic Groups and 61 different Mosaic Types. “We also found that, for the most part, the characterisations on offer ‘rang true’ for us,” said Prof Burrows.

It seems that the nightmare vision of the sixties cult sci fi series The Prisoner has become true without most of us realising it. Episodes feature the imprisoned former agent, labelled “Number Six” by his captors who refuse to use names, failing to escape “the Village”, and declaring “I am not a number - I am a free man!”

Today, we are not numbers but postcodes, which give governments and big business a glimpse of our personal life that would impress Big Brother himself.

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Chair of 9/11 Commission admits official evidence was ‘far from the truth’

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Peter Tatchell

Even the chair of the 9/11 Commission now admits that the official evidence they were given was ‘far from the truth’.

Six years after 9/11, the American public have still not been provided with a full and truthful account of the single greatest terror attack in US history.

What they got was a turkey. The 9/11 Commission was hamstrung by official obstruction. It never managed to ascertain the whole truth of what happened on September 11 2001.

The chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, respectively Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, assert in their book, Without Precedent, that they were “set up to fail” and were starved of funds to do a proper investigation. They also confirm that they were denied access to the truth and misled by senior officials in the Pentagon and the federal aviation authority;
and that this obstruction and deception led them to contemplate slapping officials with criminal charges.

Despite the many public statements by 9/11 commissioners and staff members acknowledging they were repeatedly lied to, not a single person has ever been charged, tried, or even reprimanded, for lying to the 9/11 Commission.

From the outset, the commission seemed to be hobbled. It did not start work until over a year after the attacks. Even then, its terms of reference were suspiciously narrow, its powers of investigation curiously limited and its time-frame for producing a report unhelpfully short - barely a year to sift through millions of pages of evidence and to interview hundreds of key witnesses.

The final report did not examine key evidence, and neglected serious anomalies in the various accounts of what happened. The commissioners admit their report was incomplete and flawed, and that many questions about the terror attacks remain unanswered. Nevertheless, the 9/11 Commission was swiftly closed down on August 21 2004.

I do not believe in conspiracy theories. I prefer rigorous, evidence-based analysis that sifts through the known facts and utilises expert opinion to draw conclusions that stand up to critical scrutiny. In other words, I believe in everything the 9/11 Commission was not.

The failings of the official investigation have fuelled too many half-baked conspiracy theories. Some of the 9/11 “truth” groups promote speculative hypotheses, ignore innocent explanations, cite non-expert sources and jump to conclusions that are not proven by the known facts. They convert mere coincidence and circumstantial evidence into cast-iron proof. This is no way to debunk the obfuscations and evasions of the 9/11 report.

But even amid the hype, some of these 9/11 groups raise valid and important questions that were never even considered, let alone answered, by the official investigation. The American public has not been told the complete truth about the events of that fateful autumn morning six years ago.

What happened on 9/11 is fundamentally important in its own right. But equally important is the way the 9/11 cover-up signifies an absence of democratic, transparent and accountable government. Establishing the truth is, in part, about restoring honesty, trust and confidence in American politics.

There are dozens of 9/11 “truth” websites and campaign groups. I cannot vouch for the veracity or credibility of any of them. But what I can say is that as well as making plenty of seemingly outrageous claims; a few of them raise legitimate questions that demand answers.

Four of these well known “tell the truth” 9/11 websites are:

1) Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes academics and intellectuals from many disciplines.

2) 250+ 9/11 ‘Smoking Guns’ a website that cites over 250 pieces of evidence that allegedly contradict, or were omitted from, the 9/11 Commission report.

3) The 911 Truth Campaign that, as well as offering its own evidence and theories, includes links to more than 20 similar websites.

4) Patriots Question 9/11, perhaps the most plausible array of distinguished US citizens who question the official account of 9/11, including General Wesley Clark, former Nato commander in Europe, and seven members and staffers of the official 9/11 Commission, including the chair and vice chair. In all, this website documents the doubts of 110+ senior military, intelligence service, law enforcement and government officials; 200+ engineers and architects; 50+ pilots and aviation professionals; 150+ professors; 90+ entertainment and media people; and 190+ 9/11 survivors and family members. Although this is an impressive roll call, it doesn’t necessarily mean that these expert professionals are right. Nevertheless, their scepticism of the official version of events is reason to pause and reflect.

More and more US citizens are critical of the official account. The respected Zogby polling organisation last week found that 51% of Americans want Congress to probe President Bush and Vice-President Cheney regarding the truth about the 9/11 attacks; 67% are also critical of the 9/11 Commission for not investigating the bizarre, unexplained collapse of the 47-storey World Trade Centre building 7 (WTC7). This building was not hit by any planes. Unlike WTC3, which was badly damaged by falling debris from the Twin Towers but which remained standing, WTC7 suffered minor damage but suddenly collapsed in a neat pile, as happens in a controlled demolition.

In a 2006 interview with anchorman Evan Soloman of CBC’s Sunday programme, the vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, was reminded that the commission report failed to even mention the collapse of WTC7 or the suspicious hurried removal of the building debris from the site - before there could be a proper forensic investigation of what was a crime scene. Hamilton could only offer the lame excuse that the commissioners did not have “unlimited time” and could not be expected to answer “every question” the public asks.

There are many, many more strange unexplained facts concerning the events of 9/11. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to be puzzled and want an explanation, or to be sceptical concerning the official version of events.

Six years on from those terrible events, the survivors, and the friends and families of those who died, deserve to know the truth. Is honesty and transparency concerning 9/11 too much to ask of the president and Congress?

What is needed is a new and truly independent commission of inquiry to sort coincidence and conjecture from fact, and to provide answers to the unsolved anomalies in the evidence available concerning the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Unlike the often-stymied first investigation, this new commission should be granted wide-ranging subpoena powers and unfettered access to government files and officials. George Bush should be called to testify, without his minders at hand to brief and prompt him. America - and the world - has a right to know the truth.

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Castro says US lied about 9/11 attacks

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Mark Tran and agencies
Guardian Unlimited
Fidel Castro has accused America of spreading disinformation about an explosion at the Pentagon on September 11 2001. Photograph: AP
 

Fidel Castro today joined the band of September 11 conspiracy theorists by accusing the US of spreading disinformation about the attacks that took place six years ago.In a 4,256-word article read by a Cuban television presenter last night, the country’s leader asserted that the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers.

“Only a projectile could have created the geometrically round orifice created by the alleged airplane,” he said. “We were deceived as well as the rest of the planet’s inhabitants,” he said.

In fact, the remains of the bodies of the crew and passengers of American Airlines flight 77 were found at the Pentagon crash site, and positively identified by DNA.

As for the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, Mr Castro wrote that the way the passenger jets crashed into the twin towers on September 11 and the data from the plane’s black boxes “do not correspond with the criteria of mathematicians, seismologists, and information and demolition specialists”.

But in a glaring omission, Mr Castro’s conspiracy theory failed to mention Osama bin Laden, who this week issued a video praising one of the hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Centre, and his militant Islamist al-Qaida network.

In his article, Mr Castro said the truth behind the attacks with hijacked planes that killed nearly 3,000 people would probably never be known.

The Cuban government originally condemned the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington hours after they occurred.

Within days it had organised a rally to express solidarity with Americans and Mr Castro said Cuba offered to donate blood.

Mr Castro has not appeared in public since mid-2006, when he underwent intestinal surgery and ceded power to his younger brother Raul. In late March, he began writing occasional essays on mostly international themes.

Mr Castro himself was the target of several failed assassination attempts by the US after he took power in 1959.

He also claimed in his essay that Cuba tipped off US security services in 1984 about a plan to kill the then president, Ronald Reagan, while he was campaigning for re-election in North Carolina.

The information provided by Cuba led to the arrest of a group of would-be assassins and foiled the plot, he wrote.

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Paddy Ashdown was a spy

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

EX-LIB Dem leader Lord Paddy Ashdown has been outed as a spy by successor Sir Menzies Campbell.

Ashdown, a former Royal Marine who served with the elite Special Boat Service, was long suspected to have been a real life James Bond. Now Sir Menzies has confirmed he worked for MI6.

The North East Fife MP revealed: “Put it this way, when he was in the Foreign Office, I think he was in the more shadowy side of Foreign Office activity.”

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/news/tm_headline=ashdown-was-a-spy%26method=full%26objectid=19782904%26siteid=66633-name_page.html

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Government Did Not Take Action After Spinach E. coli Breakout

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Government regulators never acted on calls for stepped-up inspections of leafy greens after last year’s deadly E. coli spinach outbreak, leaving the safety of America’s salads to a patchwork of largely unenforceable rules and the industry itself, an Associated Press investigation has found. The regulations governing farms in this central California region known as the nation’s “Salad Bowl” remain much as they were when bacteria from a cattle ranch infected spinach that killed three people and sickened more than 200. AP’s review of data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act found that federal officials inspect companies growing and processing salad greens an average of just once every 3.9 years. Some proposals in Congress would require such inspections at least four times a year. In California, which grows three-quarters of the nation’s greens, processors created a new inspection system but with voluntary guidelines that were unable to keep bagged spinach tainted with salmonella from reaching grocery shelves last month. Despite widespread calls for spot-testing of processing plants handling leafy greens following last year’s E. coli outbreak, California public health inspectors have not conducted any such tests and are not required to under current regulations, the AP review found. And some farms in the fertile Salinas Valley are still vulnerable to bacteria-carrying wildlife and other dangerous conditions. “We have strict standards for lead paint on toys, but we don’t seem to take the same level of seriousness about something that we consume every day,” said Darryl Howard, whose 83-year-old mother, Betty Howard, of Richland, Wash., died as a result of E. coli-related complications. She was one of two elderly people to die in the outbreak that began in August 2006 and also included the death of a child and sicknesses reported from more than 200 people from Maine to Arizona. By mid-September, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a two-week nationwide warning not to eat fresh spinach. Authorities eventually traced the likely source of the E. coli to a cattle ranch about 40 miles east of Salinas. But a regulatory backlash never happened. State Sen. Dean Florez, a Central Valley Democrat who sponsored three failed bills to enact mandatory regulations for leafy greens earlier this year, said momentum faded as the E. coli case dropped from the headlines and the industry lobbied hard for self-regulation. “That legislation was held up waiting for this voluntary approach for food safety to see if it works,” said Florez, who is skeptical of that approach. “It only took one 50-acre parcel to poison 200 people and bring the industry to its knees,” he said. “We don’t get why the industry would be playing this game of roulette with our food.” Among the AP’s other findings: — Since September 2006, federal Food and Drug Administration staff inspected only 29 of the hundreds of California farms that grow fresh “stem and leaf vegetables,” a broad category the agency uses to keep track of everything from cauliflower to artichokes. Agency officials said they did not know how many of those grew leafy greens. — Since raw vegetables, especially leafy greens, are minimally processed, they have surpassed meat as the primary culprit for food-borne illness. Produce caused nearly twice as many multistate outbreaks than meat from 1990-2004, but the funding has not caught up to this trend. The U.S. Department of Agriculture branch that prevents animal diseases gets almost twice the funding as the FDA receives to safeguard produce. — California lettuce and spinach have been the source of 13 E. coli outbreaks since 1996. But if salad growers or handlers violate those new guidelines, they are not subject to any fines, are not punishable under state law and may be allowed to keep selling their products. Last year’s outbreak prompted a temporary downturn in sales of salad greens, but more than 5 million bags of salad are now sold each day nationwide, a number the industry says will grow as health-conscious consumers opt for more greens and vegetables. Much of those sprout near Salinas, where the fog lifted on a recent morning over fields of romaine and iceberg already wilting in the August sun. Men in sweat shirts and baseball caps cut heads of lettuce from the ground and loaded them into cardboard boxes to be taken to a nearby plant owned by Castroville-based packager Ocean Mist Farms. From there, they would be shipped out to supermarkets and buyers as far away as Japan. In an attempt to reassure wary customers, Ocean Mist’s vice president recently helped organize a group to police food safety, run entirely by the $1.7 billion leafy greens industry. Some 118 salad processors have signed on to the California Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement, which uses its own voluntary food safety guidelines. Public health inspectors can impose mandatory food-safety rules on the farm only after an outbreak, said Patrick Kennelly, chief of the food safety section at California’s Department of Public Health. Some scientists question the approach. “Mandatory measures give a level playing field and make sure everybody responds,” said Martin Cole, a food safety expert at the Illinois Institute of Technology. But in the absence of federal regulations, 10 auditors from the California Department of Food and Agriculture are monitoring the fields, including Roxann Bramlage, who tramped down the rows of lettuce with a checklist. “When somebody cuts their finger and it bleeds, what will you do?” Bramlage asked foreman Fernando Vasquez, standing next to a harvester machine rolling gently over the beds. “When he cuts his finger, even if it’s a small cut, I take him to the edge of the field,” Vasquez said in Spanish. “Then I put a border around the area where he was working and I don’t let anyone cut in it.” That was the right answer. Ocean Mist passed Bramlage’s field audit because the company could prove its growers protected their crops against pathogens, which gave them the right to use a state seal telling consumers the product was grown safely. Growers say that seal sends a powerful message to consumers. “Once they join, there’s nothing voluntary about the program,” said Scott Horsfall, who oversees the marketing agreement. “If a handler is decertified, buyers will definitely react.” The industry-led approach isn’t foolproof, however. On Aug. 29, Metz Fresh, a grower and shipper in King City, 30 miles south of Salinas, recalled 8,000 cartons of fresh spinach tainted with salmonella. Auditors had visited the company a few weeks before, but inspected a field where the produce was clean. So they noted nothing unusual in their report. No one knows how the bacteria got into the leaves. But the news rekindled fears among consumers and legislators who say they are skeptical of the government’s willingness to let the industry police itself. “Some will say the system is working and that we are catching the problem and recalling products, but the average consumer wouldn’t know that,” said U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who chairs the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. “Last year, it was E. coli; this year, salmonella.” Harkin and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., are both working on bills to develop a set of mandatory national guidelines to supercede the current patchwork of food safety regulations. Similar proposals were developed a year ago, but none have gone forward. In March, the Bush Administration issued a draft of its guidance to minimize microbial hazards of fresh-cut fruits and vegetables. Unlike the strict hazard-control program governing meat and poultry, the guidance included no new laws. Many growers and producers are either unaware of the guidelines or simply aren’t complying, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group.”Inspection alone isn’t going to fix the problem, unless the farmers utilize food-safety plans that are effective for controlling pathogens,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of the center’s food safety division. “They’re not getting at the source of the contamination: on the farm.”

http://www.ktvu.com/news/14101549/detail.html

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Guantanamo: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak At Last

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

The Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

In another resounding demonstration of the importance of legally constituted checks and balances on executive power in the United States, the Associated Press, after filing a request to the Pentagon under the Freedom of Information Act, has secured 58 transcripts from the latest round of annual Administrative Review Boards at Guantánamo, convened to assess whether the detainees still pose a threat to the US, or if they are still presumed to have ongoing “intelligence value.”

This is just the latest in a series of important actions undertaken by the AP with regard to Guantánamo. Previously, the agency secured the right to reproduce 60 habeas petitions, and obtained the 517 Summaries of Evidence for the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) held at Guantánamo. Used to assess whether the detainees had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” these documents were analyzed by Mark and Joshua Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School to produce a ground-breaking report in February 2006, which demonstrated that, according to the government’s own allegations, only 8 percent of the detainees were accused of having any kind of affiliation with al-Qaeda, 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the US or its allies, and 86 percent were not captured by US forces, but by their Pakistan and Afghan allies, at a time when the Americans were making bounty payments, equivalent to an average worker’s lifetime salary, for the delivery of al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.

Subsequent revelations have done little to suggest that even these lowly figures are reliable, and the recent testimony of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, who was involved in compiling the “evidence” for the Tribunals, has been particularly damaging to the government’s case. Abraham declared that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, and frequently consisted of intelligence “of a generalized nature – often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” and concluded that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

In spring 2006, the AP secured its greatest victory, after taking the government to court over its refusal to reveal the names and nationalities of the Guantánamo detainees, as well as 8,000 pages of transcripts from their CSRTs and the first round of ARBs. A treasure trove of information (though not necessarily in the way that Donald Rumsfeld had in mind when he declared, in December 2001, that the first prisoners captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan “should be a treasure trove” of intelligence leads), these documents not only revealed – for the first time in four years, scandalously – who was actually held in Guantánamo, but also provided, through the transcripts, the first opportunity for the detainees to tell their stories to the world.

Although the tribunals and review boards were – and are – as monstrously illegal as the rest of the Guantánamo regime, with lawyers excluded from the hearings and decisions based largely on secret evidence obtained through torture, coercion and bribery, the information contained in the transcripts was so compelling that, when cross-referenced with the detainees’ names and arranged chronologically, it provided the basis for my forthcoming book The Guantánamo Files, which unveils the story of Guantánamo and the majority of its detainees for the first time.

The latest documents secured by the AP have just been released to the public by the Department of Defense, and it would, I think, be fair to say that they are the second most important set of documents relating to Guantánamo that have been released by the Pentagon (following the spring 2006 documents described above). As well as containing the 58 transcripts from the Second Round of the ARBs, the documents also include, for the first time, the ”evidence” – in the form of the Unclassified Summaries of Evidence so heavily criticized by Stephen Abraham – for all the Tribunals with the names of the detainees included (they were previously redacted), as well as all the Unclassified Summaries for both rounds of the ARBs. Also included are transcripts of the habeas corpus petitions of 179 detainees, and the whole set of documents is indexed so thoroughly that it appears, implausibly, to have been compiled as a testament to the importance of Freedom of Information legislation, with the aim of facilitating a greater understanding of Guantánamo and its detainees than has previously been possible.

These documents will provide lawyers, human rights activists and researchers with an invaluable base from which to gain at least a glimpse into the lives of the many dozens of detainees without legal representation, who have never taken part in any tribunals or review boards and whose stories were hitherto completely unknown. More crucially, perhaps, they will also enable critics of the regime to follow the ways in which additional allegations – produced under dubious circumstances in countless interrogations both at Guantánamo and in secret prisons – have mounted up against the detainees during the long years of their illegal imprisonment.

The only disappointment is that the documents relating to the decisions made by the review boards about whether to release detainees, or to continue to hold them, are so heavily redacted as to be all but useless, but even on this point other documents – the “Indexes to Transfer and Release Decisions” – provide invaluable, and previously concealed information about who has been released, and, more crucially, about the many dozens of detainees – at least 70, according to my first analysis – who have been cleared for release through the ARBs but are still held at Guantánamo because the US government cannot reach a satisfactory agreement with their home governments (as in the cases of the Yemenis), or is unwilling to return them to regimes where, ironically, after years of lawless and brutal detention in US custody, they face the prospect of torture or other ill-treatment. While information about who has been cleared is made available to individual detainees’ lawyers, the value of these documents is that they enable this information to be extended to those particularly vulnerable individuals without legal representation.

Of particular interest, for now, are the transcripts of the ARBs, especially as the AP trailed the release of the documents with a series of press releases over the weekend, picking out a few stories that contain important information. Chief amongst these is the transcript of the review board hearing of Mohammed al-Qahtani, one of several men presumed to be the intended “20th hijacker” on 9/11. Al-Qahtani’s story has been widely reported, particularly in 2005 when Time obtained a day-to-day transcript of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” to which he was subjected over a 50-day period from November 2002 to January 2003, when he was, amongst other things, interrogated and kept awake for 20 hours a day on most days, stripped naked, sexually humiliated, and forced to bark like a dog.

Although al-Qahtani’s lawyer reported in March 2006 that he had recanted his confession, the transcript of his ARB hearing is the first time that he has denied the 9/11 allegations in person, telling his review board, “this is the first statement I am making of my own free will and without coercion or under the threat of torture,” and stating, “I am a businessman, a peaceful man. I have no connection to terrorism, violence or fighters.” Refuting allegations that he admitted traveling to Afghanistan in 2001, that he attended a training camp, and that met Osama bin Laden and agreed to participate in a “martyr mission” for al-Qaeda, al-Qahtani said that the statements were not true and that he had only admitted to them while he was being “tortured” at Guantánamo, and included his allegations of torture in a statement that was read out to the board.

In other press releases over the weekend, Andrew O. Selsky and Ben Fox of the AP focused on the story of Ayman Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor caught up in the failed Tora Bora campaign, in November and December 2001, when the US military allowed Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and numerous other senior figures in al-Qaeda and the Taliban to escape across the unguarded Pakistani border. Explaining that he was not a terrorist but had been caught up with al-Qaeda in the Tora Bora mountains, Batarfi said that he met Osama bin Laden in the mountains, to explain to him that the defense of Tora Bora was a lost cause, because “Most of all the total guns in the Tora Bora area was 16 Kalashnikovs and there are 200 people.” He noted, however, that bin Laden “did not prepare himself for Tora Bora and to be frank he didn’t care about anyone but himself. He came for a day to visit the area and we talked to him and we wanted to leave this area. He said he didn’t know where to go himself and the second day he escaped and was gone.” Abandoned in the mountains, Batarfi said that he struggled to tend to the wounded and dying, who were overwhelmed by American air power. “I was out of medicine and I had a lot of casualties,” he explained. “I did a hand amputation by a knife and I did a finger amputation with scissors, and if someone was injured badly I was just operating on the table.”

Batarfi’s story is not widely known, although I was able to cover it in depth in my book because he has taken part in previous tribunals and review boards. As a result, I was more interested in uncovering the stories of other detainees whose voices had, until these documents were released, not been heard at all despite having spent over five and half years in US custody. Although these men are not strictly “ghost” prisoners – because their names and nationalities were released under duress last year, as opposed to the thousands of unknown, unrepresented and unreported prisoners held in Afghanistan, Iraq and other undisclosed locations – there is still something deeply disturbing about the fact that, after all this time, in which they have been held without charge or trial, in conditions of almost total isolation that would be difficult for even the most hardened of convicted criminals on the US mainland to endure, the voices of these men are being heard for the first time.

They include Hani al-Khalif, a former Saudi soldier, who served with US soldiers during the first Gulf War, who maintained that he had traveled to Afghanistan in the winter of 2000 to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, and explained, “The Taliban government is the right side to belong to because the other side has come out of the Taliban which is wrong,” and another Saudi – who didn’t wish to be identified – who said that he “wanted to participate in jihad for religious purposes to help people in need of food distribution,” because this would “strengthen his relationship with God,” and described how he had made the decision “because of emotion, because I saw a picture of a little baby that had dirty clothes and her hair was not combed or cut.” He insisted that “his goal was to help for two months and then return home,” but said that on arrival in Afghanistan he was tricked into attending the al-Farouq camp (a camp for Arab recruits that was affiliated with al-Qaeda), where he was dismayed to discover that it was “a terrorist training camp with political motivations, not religious goals.”

Also included is the testimony of Hisham Sliti, a Tunisian client of the London-based legal charity Reprieve, which represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees. Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, reported Sliti’s story in his book  Men: Guantánamo and the Secret Prisons, in which he portrayed an affable former drug addict, imprisoned for many years in prisons in Italy and Belgium, who reminisced at length about the quality of the European prisons compared to Guantánamo. “In Italy the prison was wide open for six hours a day,” he explained. “You could have anything in your room – I had a little fornello, a gas cooker. Can you imagine the Americans allowing that? Here, we call a plastic spoon a ‘Camp Delta Kalashnikov,’ as the soldiers think we’re going to attack them with it.” In the first hearing that Sliti deigned to attend, he lived up to Stafford Smith’s character sketch, explaining at length his various exploits in Europe, and telling the board that he only ended up in Afghanistan because he had begun attending mosques in Belgium, where the country had been portrayed as “a clean, uncorrupted country where he could study Sharia and further his religious education,” but that what he found instead was that “I didn’t care for the country. It was very hot, dusty and [the] women were ugly. The atmosphere and environment didn’t agree with me.”

Another first-time testimony is that of Ravil Mingazov, the last of eight Russians in Guantánamo, who, it turns out, was actually born in Tajikistan. A former soldier in the Russian army, Mingazov explained that, although he had been honored for excellent service early in his career, he subsequently converted to Islam and fell out of favor with the KGB to such an extent that he deserted the army, left his wife and family, and fled to Afghanistan with the help of members of the Taliban-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Refuting allegations that he trained at al-Farouq, he said that he had made up these stories while imprisoned at the US airbase in Bagram, and added that he had in fact fled from the IMU, traveling to Pakistan, where he stayed at a center run by the missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi in Lahore. He explained that he was captured, with 16 other Guantánamo detainees, after moving to a guest house used by university students in Faisalabad, which was, unfortunately, owned – or otherwise connected to – the “high-value” al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah.

Sadly – given its undiluted focus on anti-American militancy – the only other first-time story, that of the Saudi Abdul Rahman al-Zahri, was the only one of the previously unheard voices picked up by the AP, which reported that he “proudly proclaimed himself a holy warrior and ‘an enemy of the United States.’” As the AP described it, al-Zahri “praised the Sept. 11 attacks and other terrorist strikes and said they were retaliation “for your criminal acts and your military invasion [of] the Islamic countries.” While this was a fair précis of his story – although it did not mention that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, stating instead that he would have been “honored” to have been chosen as a member – it was, as I have indicated above, unrepresentative of the majority of the stories reported in the transcripts.

On the sixth anniversary of 9/11, al-Zahri’s “confession” will no doubt assure some Americans that the Bush administration’s unprecedentedly lawless and brutal conduct over the last six years is justified, but I believe that what the majority of the documents reveal – both through some of the examples cited above, and through the many stories of wronged men betrayed by rivals or through false intelligence that are scattered throughout the transcripts – is exactly the opposite. From my particular perspective, as someone who has studied the stories of the detainees in depth for the last 18 months, the most heart-rending aspect of the transcripts is the confusion and despair shown by detainees who, year after year in their review boards, and often more frequently in their interrogations, have painstakingly repeated their stories ad nauseam, refuting wild and unsubstantiated allegations, and at a loss to understand why they, in particular, have been singled out for inclusion in a never-ending cycle of total isolation and evidence-free crimes. To give just one example, the Afghan Mohammed Zahir, a 54-year old teacher who had fled to Iran during the time of the Taliban, has been telling his captors, since he was seized in 2003, that he had returned to Afghanistan to serve the new government of Hamid Karzai by teaching in a secular school, but received threatening night letters from the Taliban, who betrayed him to the Americans. “You captured me because I am an Afghan or a Muslim,” he told his review board, “but I haven’t done anything. I was teaching the children under the tree.”

In conclusion, then, the release of these documents – which was perhaps contrived by the Pentagon to coincide with 9/11, in the hope that they would be conveniently brushed under the carpet – does not vindicate the government’s post-9/11 policy, when, as CIA director Cofer Black so memorably described it, “the gloves came off,” but hints rather at the true legacy of 9/11: torture, “disappearances” and a regime of secret prisons that should be anathema to those living in a country – the United States – that was founded on the rule of law, and that should only be able to regard itself unflinchingly as a beacon of civilized values if it returns to these foundations, insisting that those in charge of the country return to the rule of law that they have flouted so outrageously, with such damaging consequences for America’s reputation abroad, and a concomitant disregard for the rights of Americans themselves (as the hidden history of torture in the case of Jose Padilla recently showed).

In the reflected world in which America admires itself, the prisoners revealed in these transcripts should be charged with crimes and prosecuted in a recognized court of law, rather than being consigned to an extra-legal black hole, where men’s futures are dealt with in a paranoid and gullible atmosphere in which allegations obtained through torture, coercion or bribery are regarded as the truth, abuse is rife, and the presumption of innocence has been done away with completely. 9/11 was a crime – a monstrous crime – but it should not have provided an opportunity for the nation’s supposed defenders to embark on a counter-campaign that has ended up mocking the very values that it purported to defend.

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Senate Intelligence Panel Seeks CIA Nominee’s Withdrawal

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

By Joby Warrick

Members of the Senate intelligence committee have requested the withdrawal of the Bush administration’s choice for CIA general counsel, acknowledging that John Rizzo’s nomination has stalled because of concerns about his views on the treatment of terrorism suspects.

The decision followed a private meeting this week in which committee leaders concluded that the troubled nomination could not overcome opposition among Democratic members. It comes less than a month after a key member, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), announced his intention to block the nomination indefinitely.

Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer, has drawn fire from Democrats and human rights groups because of his support for Bush administration legal doctrines permitting “enhanced interrogation” of terrorism detainees in CIA custody.

Two U.S. officials familiar with the committee’s decision said the request for Rizzo’s withdrawal has been conveyed to Gen. Michael Hayden, the CIA’s director. The officials, who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the committee’s discussions, said lawmakers had hoped to avoid the formality of a negative vote on Rizzo’s nomination out of respect for his long service at the intelligence agency. Rizzo has served with the CIA since 1976 and acted as interim general counsel from 2001 to 2002 and from August 2004 to the present.

CIA officials declined comment on whether a formal request had been received, but a spokesman said Hayden continues to support Rizzo’s nomination. “Director Hayden believes Mr. Rizzo is a fine lawyer and is well-qualified for the post,” agency spokesman Mark Mansfield said. “This has been, and continues to be, his view.”

The White House also signaled its continued support for Rizzo. “We continue to support Mr. Rizzo’s nomination and believe he is well-qualified to serve in this important position,” spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said.

Wyden declined yesterday to discuss the status of Rizzo’s nomination but said he remains strongly opposed to it. “It is clearly not in the interest of the country and not in the interest of the many hardworking professionals at the CIA,” Wyden said in a phone interview. He said Rizzo’s views on interrogation are “light-years from what we need.”

During his confirmation hearing in June, Rizzo testified that he did not object to an administration memo in 2002 that deemed legal some extremely harsh interrogation techniques for CIA detainees. According to the memo, a technique was not considered to be torture unless it inflicted pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death.” Rizzo testified that the legal opinion “on the whole was a reasonable one.”

Rizzo also said the CIA does not condone torture, and stressed that the agency’s actions must remain “in full compliance with the Constitution, U.S. law and U.S. obligations under international treaties.”

Rizzo’s positions and his support for harsh interrogations conducted by the CIA at secret prisons have made him a target of human rights and civil liberties groups. On Tuesday, a coalition of organizations issued a statement urging the Senate to reject Rizzo’s nomination. “When Mr. Rizzo failed to object to legal arguments that defended torture, he failed to protect his clients — the president, his CIA colleagues and the American people,” said the statement signed by Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights and three other groups.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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FBI Official Charged With Abduction, Assault

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Man Accused of Terrorizing Woman; Defense Says Allegations ‘Out of Character’

By Daniela Deane

For nearly six hours, a senior FBI official terrorized his Arlington County girlfriend, at times holding her at knifepoint in her closet, dragging her around the apartment by her hair and forcing a gun into her mouth in a jealous, drunken rage, police allege in court documents.

Carl L. Spicocchi, 54, a former head of the FBI’s Toledo office who was on a temporary assignment in Washington, is being held without bond at the Arlington jail on two felony counts — abduction with intent to defile and a firearms charge, police said.

Spicocchi, who ran the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Toledo, has also been charged with misdemeanor assault and battery in the alleged Aug. 23 incident at the luxury high-rise Buchanan apartment building in Crystal City.

“The allegations against agent Spicocchi are totally out of character,” one of his attorneys, Thomas Abbenante, said yesterday. “He has an unblemished record in law enforcement and has dedicated his life to law enforcement and service to his country.”

At a bond hearing last month, another attorney for Spicocchi said his client has never been in trouble and is an upstanding FBI agent whose wife attended the hearing to support him. The couple live in the Toledo area, where they own a home, property records show.

Prosecutors said bond should be denied because of Spicocchi’s access to firearms through his job and his knowledge of surveillance and because of the alleged terrorization.

The alleged domestic incident, which sources said started because the woman wanted to break up with Spicocchi, ended when a neighbor called Arlington police at 10:36 p.m. to report that a woman was screaming that someone was trying to kill her, according to an affidavit for a search warrant filed in Arlington Circuit Court. Spicocchi had called in sick to work days before that, the affidavit said. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case has not gone to trial.

Spicocchi was a supervisor in the Toledo office about 18 months ago, when he was temporarily transferred to FBI headquarters in Washington, said Special Agent Scott T. Wilson, a spokesman for the FBI office in Cleveland. Wilson said the FBI would investigate the allegations.

Spicocchi lived in a rented apartment in a luxury high-rise building in Crystal City around the corner from the woman.

According to the affidavit, the woman, who called herself his girlfriend, said the two had stayed at her place the night before the alleged assault and had gotten up at 6 a.m. She then made him lunch, and he left the apartment.

As she drove away from the building later in the morning, she saw Spicocchi ducking in his car at the corner, watching her. She confronted him, telling him that she didn’t want to see him again until the next day, according to court records. “He admitted to following her and said that he thought she had another boyfriend,” the affidavit said.

He called her repeatedly throughout the day — the last time sounding very drunk about 3 p.m., she told officers.

When she returned to the apartment at South 23rd Street about two hours later, he was hiding in the closet, a kitchen knife and tape in his hands, she told police. He held her in the closet for about an hour, thrusting the knife at her throat several times, according to records.

Another time, he held her in the bathroom, where he fired his gun and forced it into her mouth several times, she told police. He repeatedly slapped her and threatened to kill her, she said.

The woman told police that she got away after hours of being detained by Spicocchi, who, she said, had thrown her on the kitchen floor and tried to punch her. She told police that he had been following her and that he had told her he “had a file on her and was going to ruin her,” according to court documents.

She also told police that she thought he was recording the incident with a silver device and that he owned four guns.

Police found Spicocchi in a hallway of the building after the neighbor’s call, they said. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Oct. 18.

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Is Government ID the next Government IT failure?

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Now that the government has officially put the various contracts for the ID card project out to tender, the mutterings are starting to turn into a clamour: is the latest massive public sector IT project about to become the latest blank cheque from taxpayers to IT services giants?

After all, it’s not as if the government has a great history of successful IT procurement: the NHS electronic patient records scheme is the most high-profile example, but there are plenty of other examples, such as the Rural Payments fiasco, as reported by CUK on Monday. Taking on the job of Chief Executive of the Identity and Passports Agency cannot have been an easy decision for its latest incumbent, James Hall – after all, his last job was running Accenture’s now-defunct IT contract with the NHS. Talk about exchanging one poisoned chalice for another.

But in a way, there are few people more uniquely qualified to run a project with such similar scale and objectives. Apart, perhaps, from Richard Granger, the NHS IT chief due to depart from his post later this year. Granger has presided over what is possibly the most criticised IT project ever – and also unarguably the largest, at least in the civilian world.

And it appears that Hall has learned some lessons from his former client. The project will not rely on a brand-new centralised database, instead aggregating from existing databases. This development was announced in December 2006, just three months after Hall took on the role – perhaps a lesson learned from the NHS.

Nor will the project suffer from the NHS IT project’s primary problem – a central authority imposing unwanted solutions on local, autonomous trusts. Whilst there will be multiple suppliers, they will not be the regional monopolies imposed by the NHS. Instead, suppliers will bid for individual areas of responsibility – for example, designing the biometric systems used to uniquely identify people. Nor will suppliers have an automatic contract renewal from one phase of the project to another, so suppliers who seek to blame each other for failures will, it appears, be penalised. There will be no more ten-year, multi-billion dollar blank cheques, and the Home Office won’t have to resort to legal action to extract itself from contracts with failing contractors.

But it seems the system might not be free of the delays that have plagued the NHS. The government has already admitted the system will not launch in 2008, as originally planned, but in 2009 instead. It was originally planned to put the IT contracts out to tender in March last year, but that did not happen until last month. It is believed the tender was partly delayed to benefit from the ‘clean air’ of a new Prime Minister in Gordon Brown.

And the cloak of secrecy around the project cannot help public perceptions. In March, the Government entered into an Information Tribunal battle with the Information Commissioner to keep under wraps a so-called “Gateway” review of the business case for the ID card programme. The Office of Government Commerce, a branch of the Treasury, accused Information Commissioner Richard Thomas of “failing to live in the real world”. The case has now gone to the High Court after the Government lost its case in the tribunal.

But whether previous mistakes have been avoided or new ones have been made, it is clear there remains one battle that hasn’t been won – the battle of hearts and minds. Gordon Brown has a long way to go to make the British public identify with ID.

Graham Taylor

http://www.contractoruk.com/news/003444.html

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US troops who criticised Iraq war strategy killed in Baghdad

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

· Article claimed Bush’s policy was total failure
· Deaths reported on eve of presidential address

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Thursday September 13, 2007
The Guardian

Two US soldiers who helped write a critique from the front saying America had “failed on every promise” in the war have been killed in Iraq, it was reported yesterday.Staff Sergeant Yance Gray, 26, and Sergeant Omar Mora, 28, were among a group of seven soldiers serving in Iraq who wrote a piece excoriating America’s conduct of the war. The piece was published in the New York Times last month.

The men were killed in Baghdad when the cargo truck in which they were riding rolled over, the Associated Press and local news outlets reported yesterday. The Pentagon had yet to confirm their deaths early yesterday.

The criticism caused a flurry of public debate because of the candour with which the men, all serving in the 82nd Airborne, described the situation in Iraq.

There was also speculation they could face severe penalties for being so openly critical of the war. Another US soldier, Private Scott Beauchamp, who wrote a shocking account in New Republic magazine about a soldier treating a piece of a child’s skull as a souvenir, had his mobile phone and laptop confiscated.

“Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise,” the seven wrote. “When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages.”

The peril of service in Iraq was underlined during the course of writing the article: one of the co-authors, a Ranger, was shot in the head and flown to the US for treatment.

The men directly challenged official claims of progress in the war, calling the debate in Washington “surreal”.

They also skewered the military’s only real success story from the war - much discussed this week in congressional hearings on the war - the decision by Sunni groups in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, to join the fight against al-Qaida. “Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence,” the men wrote.

“We operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies.”

The men’s deaths were reported the day before George Bush is due to give a televised address in which he will try to persuade a war-weary public to support the war at least until the middle of next year. Mr Bush is expected to announce the withdrawal of 30,000 troops over the next nine months, which will bring US force strength to the levels earlier this year. But he is also expected to say he does not envisage the bulk of US forces leaving Iraq before he leaves the White House in January 2009.

In their testimony to Congress this week, General Davis Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador, accused Iran of arming and training Shia militias to fight a “proxy war” that risks further destabilising Iraq.

Yesterday, Gen Petraeus told a press conference that Iran was attempting to create a Hizbullah-like force that was trying to exert influence in Iraq.

Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, amplified that warning.

“Iran is a very troublesome neighbour,” she told NBC television yesterday, warning that Tehran would try to fill any power vacuum created by the withdrawal of US forces. “What we are prepared to do is to complete the security gains that we’ve been making, to create circumstances in which an Iraqi government and local officials can find political accommodation, as they are doing in Anbar, and to be able then, from Iraq, with allies in the war on terror, to resist both terrorism and Iranian aggression.”

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Rudy Giuliani accused of exploiting 9/11 role

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

James Bone

(Chip East/Reuters)
Rudy Giuliani was criticised for giving a reading at the 9/11 memorial event yesterday

Rudy Giuliani risked a controversial appearance at Ground Zero in New York yesterday as rival presidential candidates battled over the legacy of the September 11 terror attacks. The Republican presidential contender, hailed as “America’s Mayor” for his leadership during the 2001 attacks that almost buried him, made a brief statement at the sixth anniversary ceremony that critics claimed could give him an unfair boost in his political campaign.

“On that day six years ago and on the days that followed in the midst of our grief and turmoil we also witnessed strength and resilience as a people. It was a day with no answers but with an unending line of those who came forward to help one another,” Mr Giuliani said, before reading a short passage from the Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel.

The former New York Mayor has spoken at the commemoration every year, but his appearance at yesterday’s ceremony provoked a furious reaction from some firemen and victims’ families. They accuse him of trying to exploit the event for political gain in the presidential race, and are angry about their treatment for illnesses that they say resulted from the attacks and prolonged clean-up.

“They should have every other single presidential candidate then, because this is outrageous,” Sally

Regenhard, whose fireman son was killed, complained before the ceremony. “This is going to be seen across the country as a blanket endorsement from us. It is totally inappropriate.”

Mr Giuliani responded: “I was there when it happened and I’ve been there every year since then. If I didn’t, it would be extremely unusual. As a personal matter, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. That’s personal, that’s not political. I will do that for as long as they have a ceremony out there.”

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, also attended the ceremony but did not speak.

None of the victims’ relatives attending the commemoration made any conspicuous protest against Mr Giuliani’s presence, and many voiced support. “He is here as an American. This is not closed to anybody. There is enough blame to go around,” said John Napolitano Sr, a former police officer who lost his fireman son, John, in the attack. “You have to remember the Clintons were in office for eight years and there were terrorist attacks and we did not take action.”

Lenny Crisci, also a former policeman, who lost his fireman brother, Johnny, said: “Giuliani needs to be here because he was part of this. When Clinton was in office the World Trade Centre was bombed \ and Clinton did not even show up because only six people died.”

It is a measure of the symbolism of 9/11 in the 2008 presidential campaign that leading candidates in both parties hail from New York, which was long considered to be outside the mainstream of American politics.

Mr Giuliani insists that he is not running for the presidency based on his record during 9/11, but he has made the attacks a theme of his campaign — and is therefore particularly vulnerable to criticism. He got into trouble this summer, however, by suggesting that he had been “exposed to exactly the same things” as the firemen who claim they are suffering from respiratory ailments because of toxins at the burning site.

The New York Times did a detailed analysis of Mr Giuliani’s presence at Ground Zero — excluding the chaotic first six days after the attack — and found he had spent 29 hours there from September 17, 2001, to December 16, 2001, while rescue workers were routinely working 12-hour shifts.

On the campaign trail with his wife in recent weeks, former President Bill Clinton has taken aim at Mr Giuliani by criticising the treatment of firemen who suffered respiratory ailments after 9/11. The strategy is seen as an effort by Mrs Clinton to knock Mr Giuliani off his 9/11 pedestal.

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