BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!

WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

Do we trust government on ID cards?

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Identity cards will have to be “reassessed” in the wake of the child benefits fiasco, a Government minister has said. (Really).

The data protection minister, said the loss of the personal details of 25million was “deplorable”.

He said a review will be carried out into the way officials store and use data - putting the future of the £5.6billion ID cards scheme under review.

The plans call for a database storing 49 pieces of personal information on every citizen.

Leading academics have rounded on the Government’s “fairytale view” of the technology needed to make the scheme work.

In a letter to MPs, Professor Ross Anderson and Dr Richard Clayton warned lives would be ruined if information from the ID database went missing.

“Once lost, it would be impossible to issue a person with new fingerprints. One cannot change one’s fingers as one can a bank account. Adding more data, like fingerprints, will make records even more valuable to fraudsters and thieves when - not if - they are lost and leaked.”

Can we trust the Government to look after the data?

And I’d like to ask, who will they be sharing this data with?

DANNY STOWELL

Have Your Say: Do we trust government on ID cards?
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Britain’s breach of honour over Iraq interpreters

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

More than half the Iraqi interpreters who applied to come to live in Britain have had their applications rejected, drawing accusations that the Government is “wriggling out” of its promise to help former Iraqi employees.

The Times has learnt that 125 of the 200 interpreters who took up the offer to resettle in Britain have failed to meet the strict criteria laid down for eligibility.

The revelation challenges Gordon Brown’s pledge in August that the Government would fulfil its “duty of care” to those who had served with British troops.

In three cases seen by The Times, former Iraqi employees were told that they were ineligible because of “absenteeism”.

The interpreters claim that they risked their lives to serve the British and are living in constant danger of reprisal from Shia militias. If they did not show up for work, it was because they were fleeing for their lives. They said that they now felt betrayed by the Government.

After a two-month campaign by The Times that highlighted the plight of the interpreters, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, promised to help them under a scheme launched in October.

Last night MPs urged the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to reconsider the decisions. The 200 interpreters are among a total of 600 Iraqis who have applied to come to Britain, all people who have worked for the British and who today face intimidation from Iranian-backed Shia groups.

Safa, 28, one of the rejected interpreters who worked for the British for more than two years, received a letter from the Locally Employed Staff Assistance Office in Basra which said: “We have considered your case very carefully but we are sorry to inform you that, because your service with the British Forces was terminated for absence, you do not meet the minimum employment criteria for this scheme.”

Safa told The Times that he had never resigned but had been forced to stop working after receiving two bullets and a written death threat at his house in Basra in April. Married with one child, he said that he was advised by an army liaison officer and intelligence officials to stay at home until he felt safe.

A few months later the interpreter contacted the military to see if he could return only to be told that he was not needed but would be called if an opening arose.

Safa thought back to when he had stood by the British troops during two and a half years of service since April 2004.

“Was I absent when they needed their lives saving?” he said, recalling the time that he took off his flak jacket and turned his T-shirt and trousers into a makeshift rope to help 12 soldiers out of an irrigation channel. They had been struggling to cross because of the weight of their body armour and weapons.

“Was I absent when the militias were mortaring us all the time? Was I absent when I had to sleep in the cold desert with the soldiers?”

Iraqis employed by the British have to prove “continuous” service for at least 12 months to be eligible to come to Britain. The interpreters have had the highest-profile jobs, but others who have worked at the Embassy in Baghdad, the consulate in Basra and with the Department for International Development have also faced threats.

The MoD yesterday insisted that if an Iraqi could prove that he had been absent from work because of intimidation, then he would still be considered. But it emerged that those who have now been turned down for British residency have no right of appeal.

The FCO refused to discuss individual cases but, in a statement, said: “Staff who terminated their employment as a result of intimidation are eligible for assistance. We fully recognise the difficulties of such staff and do not insist on official or formal notification, or staff working out their notice.”

David Lidington, a Conservative foreign affairs spokesman, said the Government should not try to “wriggle out” of commitments made to former Iraqi employees. “The test should be whether they are in danger because they worked for the British, not their record in the attendance register.”

Lynne Featherstone, a Liberal Democrat MP who has championed the cause of the Iraqi interpreters, said that the Government needed to use its imagination in a difficult case.

“If those Iraqis who have helped us are now being told that they can’t come here because their absence was regarded as a resignation, this is the world gone mad,” she said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3037418.ece

Have Your Say: Britain’s breach of honour over Iraq interpreters
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Homeland Security Wants All Ten Fingers

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Robert Longley

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has started collecting the prints from all 10 fingers, rather than just two, of international visitors to the U.S. arriving Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport.

DHS hopes the increased fingerprint count will enhance the accuracy of print-matching software, thus increasing security.

Apparently a fan of “CSI,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a press release, “Anyone who’s watched the news or seen crimes solved on television shows can appreciate the power of biometrics.” Chertoff suggested that improved biometrics would help speed legitimate travelers on their way, “while protecting their identity.”

“Biometrics tell the story that the unknown terrorist tries to conceal, and it causes them to question whether they’ve ever left a print behind,” said Chertoff. Nine other international ports of entry into the U.S. will initiate the 10-fingerprint collection process over the next few months.

In November, DHS and the Coast Guard reported that their biometrics-at-sea program has resulted in a nearly 50 percent reduction in the rate of illegal aliens entering the U.S. by sea from ports in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

Have Your Say: Homeland Security Wants All Ten Fingers
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Fingerprint first for new stadium

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Two sports venues in Fife have become the first in the UK to use fingerprint recognition systems on their doors. The Carnegie Leisure Centre and Pitreavie Stadium in Dunfermline have both been installed with hi-tech bio-metric security ID scanners.

Staff will have their fingerprints scanned into a computer which should recognise them on subsequent visits.

Managers believe the system, developed in Glasgow, will be more secure than conventional keys or Pin-coded doors.

They said doors requiring keys are often left unlocked and the security numbers for keypad operated entry points often become known to too many people.

No infringement

Fife Council’s sports and leisure manager, Wendy Watson, said: “One of our duty managers suggested biometrics because it eliminates anyone who is unauthorised to access the reception area and it is easy to use.

“Now our security is as good in the reception area as we can get it.”

The developers have insisted the system does not infringe human rights because whole fingerprints are not stored.

The system instead recognises key parts of the print.

Installation of the technology was carried out by Glasgow-based UK Biometrics.

Spokesman Scott Goldie said: “The Carnegie Leisure Centre and Pitreavie Stadium offer facilities comparable with any in Europe so installing a state-of-the art security system is an extension of that commitment to excellence.

“We are proud to be associated with a UK first for the biometrics industry.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7139951.stm

Have Your Say: Fingerprint first for new stadium
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

NYC Shuts 9/11 Remains Sifting Facility

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

AP

The city has closed a facility where debris was sifted for Sept. 11 victims’ remains, but the search won’t end until after the World Trade Center site is rebuilt, a city official said Tuesday.

Ongoing construction around ground zero — including the dismantling of a toxic skyscraper that caught fire in August — could put off a complete search of areas believed to contain human remains for years, according to a memo by Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler.

“At no point in the near future would it be prudent to declare this search `over,’” Skyler wrote to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The discovery of more than 80 bones in a manhole at ground zero in October 2006 prompted an expanded search of nearby rooftops, manholes and sewer lines for bone fragments of victims of the terrorist attacks. Hundreds of bones were found beginning in 2005 at the former Deutsche Bank tower across from the trade center site.

The city has found 1,772 bones and fragments so far. Seven victims have been identified from bones found in a service road at ground zero and on the roof of the bank building, Skyler said. More than 1,100 of the trade center victims have not been identified from the thousands of remains found after the attack.

The medical examiner’s office finished work Monday at a facility opened last year to hand-sift debris from around ground zero, but it will use a tractor-trailer and other equipment to continue sifting remains, Skyler said.

Have Your Say: NYC Shuts 9/11 Remains Sifting Facility
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Energy Source of Northern Lights Found

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Anne Minard in San Francisco, California

NASA spacecraft have revealed new insights into the forces that cause the northern lights, including giant magnetic “ropes” between Earth and the sun.

Until now, scientists haven’t had adequate tools to study how energy from the sun is captured by Earth’s magnetic field to trigger the awe-inspiring phenomenon.

“What it shows is promise,” said Vassilis Angelopoulos, researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles and principal investigator for a new NASA mission to study auroras.

“We’re coming up on a new era in space physics.”

The findings were presented at a teleconference today at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Perfect Storm

The latest discoveries began on March 23, when a “substorm” erupted over Alaska and Canada, producing vivid auroras for more than two hours. During such an event, the northern lights’ green and white streaks periodically build in intensity until they blast apart into multicolored, fragmented lights.

(Download a desktop photo of the northern lights.)

A network of ground cameras photographed the display from below while a series of five satellites, collectively called THEMIS, looked on from above.

(Read about the THEMIS mission and the probes’ launch earlier this year.)

“The auroras surged westward twice as fast as anyone thought possible, crossing 15 degrees of longitude in less than one minute,” Angelopoulos said.

“The storm traversed an entire polar time zone, or 400 miles [640 kilometers], in 60 seconds flat.”

The images revealed a series of staccato outbursts each lasting about ten minutes. Some of the bursts died out, while others reinforced each other.

The researchers likened the substorm’s power to a magnitude 5.5 earthquake.

Magnetic “Ropes”

NASA’s THEMIS probes are designed to unravel the mysterious dynamics that create such colorful displays.

Angelopoulos said the prime observation season for the northern lights hasn’t begun yet, but already the results are exciting.

“The satellites have found evidence of magnetic ‘ropes’ connecting Earth’s upper atmosphere directly to the sun,” said David Sibeck, project scientist for the mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

These ropes could serve as conduits for waves of charged particles from the sun called solar wind.

“We believe that solar wind particles flow in along these ropes, providing energy for geomagnetic storms and auroras.”

Spacecraft have detected hints of these ropes before, but a single spacecraft was insufficient to map their 3-D structure.

THEMIS’ identical micro-satellites were able to perform the feat.

The satellites have also glimpsed the evolution of heat waves and pressure blasts emitted from the northern lights’ substorm.

Angelopoulos likened THEMIS’ role to that of weather stations in our ability to predict atmospheric weather a century ago.

“These substorm processes are really helping us to understand and predict space weather,” Angelopoulos said.

Have Your Say: Energy Source of Northern Lights Found
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

CIA destroyed tapes despite court orders

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

CIA destroyed tapes despite court orders, but secret prison system could provide legal cover

The Bush administration was under court order not to discard evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics.

Normally, that would force the government to defend itself against obstruction allegations. But the CIA may have an out: its clandestine network of overseas prisons.

While judges focused on the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tried to guarantee that any evidence of detainee abuse would be preserved, the CIA was performing its toughest questioning half a world away. And by the time President Bush publicly acknowledged the secret prison system, interrogation videotapes of two terrorism suspects had been destroyed.

The CIA destroyed the tapes in November 2005. That June, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had ordered the Bush administration to safeguard “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.”

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued a nearly identical order that July.

At the time, that seemed to cover all detainees in U.S. custody. But Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the terrorism suspects whose interrogations were videotaped and then destroyed, weren’t at Guantanamo Bay. They were prisoners that existed off the books — and apparently beyond the scope of the court’s order.

Attorneys say that might not matter. David H. Remes, a lawyer for Yemeni citizen Mahmoad Abdah and others, asked Kennedy this week to schedule a hearing on the issue.

Though Remes acknowledged the tapes might not be covered by Kennedy’s order, he said, “It is still unlawful for the government to destroy evidence, and it had every reason to believe that these interrogation records would be relevant to pending litigation concerning our client.”

In legal documents filed in January 2005, Assistant Attorney General Peter D. Keisler assured Kennedy that government officials were “well aware of their obligation not to destroy evidence that may be relevant in pending litigation.”

For just that reason, officials inside and outside of the CIA advised against destroying the interrogation tapes, according to a former senior intelligence official involved in the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is under investigation.

Exactly who signed off on the decision is unclear, but CIA director Michael Hayden told the agency in an e-mail this week that internal reviewers found the tapes were not relevant to any court case.

Remes said that decision raises questions about whether other evidence was destroyed. Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation helped lead investigators to alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Remes said Abu Zubaydah may also have been questioned about other detainees. Such evidence might have been relevant in their court cases.

“It’s logical to infer that the documents were destroyed in order to obstruct any inquiry into the means by which statements were obtained,” Remes said.

He stopped short, however, of accusing the government of obstruction. That’s just one of the legal issues that could come up in court. A judge could also raise questions about contempt of court or spoliation, a legal term for the destruction of evidence in “pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation.”

Kennedy has not scheduled a hearing on the matter and the government has not filed a response to Remes’ request.

Associated Press Writer Lara Jakes Jordan contributed to this report.

Have Your Say: CIA destroyed tapes despite court orders
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Nothing is Resolved in Iraq

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

What’s Really Happened During the Surge?

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Has the US turned the tide in Baghdad? Does the fall in violence mean that the country is stabilizing after more than four years of war or are we seeing only a temporary pause in the fighting?

American commentators are generally making the same mistake that they have made since the invasion of Iraq was first contemplated five years ago. They look at Iraq in over-simple terms and exaggerate the extent to which the US is making the political weather and is in control of events there.

The US is the most powerful single force in Iraq but it is by no means the only one. The shape of Iraqi politics have changed over the last year though for reasons that have little to do with ‘the Surge’–the 30,000 US troop reinforcements — and much to do with the battle for supremacy between the Sunni and Shia communities.

The Sunni Arabs of Iraq turned against al Qa’ida partly because it tried to monopolize power but primarily because it had brought their community close to catastrophe. The Sunni war against the US occupation had gone surprisingly well for them since it began in 2003. It was a second war, the one against the Shia majority led by al-Qa’ida, which the Sunni were losing with disastrous results for themselves.

“The Sunni people now think they cannot fight two wars–against the occupation and the government–at the same time,” a Sunni friend in Baghdad told me last week. “We must be more realistic and accept the occupation for the moment.”

This is why much of the non-al-Qa’ida Sunni insurgency has effectively changed sides. An important reason why al-Qa’ida has lost ground so swiftly is a split within its own ranks. The US military–the State Department has been very much marginalized in decision making in Baghdad–does not want to emphasize that many of the Sunni fighters now on the US payroll and misleadingly called ‘Concerned Citizens’ until recently belonged to al Qa’ida and have the blood of a great many Iraqi civilians and US soldiers on their hands.

The Sunni Arabs, five million out of an Iraqi population of 27 million and the mainstay of Saddam Hussein’s government, were the core of the resistance to the US occupation. But they have also been fighting a sectarian war to prevent the 16 million Shia and the five million Kurds holding power.

At first the Shia were very patient in the face of atrocities. Vehicles, packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers, were regularly detonated in the middle of crowded Shia market places or religious processions, killing and maiming hundreds of people.

The bombers came from al-Qa’ida, but the attacks were never wholeheartedly condemned by Sunni political leaders or other guerrilla groups. The bombings were also very short sighted since the Iraqi Shia outnumber the Sunni three to one. Retaliation was restrained until a bomb destroyed the revered Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra on 22 February, 2006.

The bombing led to a savage Shia onslaught on the Sunni which became known in Iraq as ‘the battle for Baghdad’. This struggle was won by the Shia. They were always the majority in the capital, but by the end of 2006 they controlled 75 per cent of the city. The Sunni fled or were pressed back into a few enclaves, mostly in west Baghdad.

In the wake of this defeat there was less and less point in the Sunni trying expel the Americans when the Sunni community was itself being evicted by the Shia from large parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Sunni leaders had also miscalculated that an assault on their community by the Shia would provoke Arab Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt into giving them more support but this never materialized.

It was al-Qa’ida’s slaughter of Shia civilians, whom it sees as heretics worthy of death, which brought disaster to the Sunni community. Al-Qa’ida also grossly overplayed its hand at the end of last year by setting up the Islamic State of Iraq which tried to fasten its control on other insurgent groups and the Sunni community as a whole. Sunni garbage collectors were killed because they worked for the government and Sunni families in Baghdad were ordered to send one of their members to join al Qai’da. Bizarrely, even Osama bin Laden, who never had much influence over al Qa’ida in Iraq, was reduced to advising his acolytes against extremism.

Defeat in Baghdad and the extreme unpopularity of al Qa’ida gave the impulse for the formation of the 77,000-strong anti al-Qa’ida Sunni militia, often under tribal leadership, which is armed and paid for by the US. But the creation of this force is a new stage in the war in Iraq rather than an end to the conflict.

Sunni enclaves in Baghdad are safer, but not districts where Sunni and Shia face each other. There are few mixed areas left. Many of the Sunni fighters say openly that they see the elimination of al Qai’ida as a preliminary to an attack on the Shia militias, notably the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which triumphed last year.

The creation of a US-backed Sunni militia both strengthens and weakens the Iraqi government. It is strengthened in so far as the Sunni insurrection is less effective and weakened because it does not control this new force.

If the Sunni guerrillas were one source of violence in 2006 the other was the Mehdi Army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist cleric. This has been stood down because he wants to purge it of elements he does not control and wishes to avoid a military confrontation with his rivals within the Shia community if they are backed by the US army. But the Mehdi Army would certainly fight if the Shia community came under attack or the Americans pressured it too hard.

American politicians continually throw up their hands in disgust that Iraqis cannot reconcile or agree on how to share power. But equally destabilizing is the presence of a large US army in Iraqi and the uncertainty about what role the US will play in future. However much Iraqis may fight among themselves a central political fact in Iraq remains the unpopularity of the US-led occupation outside Kurdistan. This has grown year by year since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A detailed opinion poll carried out by ABC News, BBC and NTV of Japan in August found that 57 per cent of Iraqis believe that attacks on US forces are acceptable.

Nothing is resolved in Iraq. Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of ‘The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq‘, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His forthcoming book ‘Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq’ is published by Scribner in April.

Have Your Say: Nothing is Resolved in Iraq
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Interrogation used by CIA is torture, ex-agent says

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

But simulated drowning got results, former interrogator says as Senate begins probe

Andy Sullivan, Reuters

WASHINGTON — U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday began investigating why the CIA destroyed videotapes that recorded al-Qaida suspects undergoing waterboarding, while a former interrogator said the controversial technique yielded important information but amounted to torture.

CIA Director Michael Hayden testified behind closed doors to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has launched one of several investigations to determine if the agency broke any laws when it destroyed the tapes in 2005.

“There are other people in the agency who know about this far better than I, and I have committed them to come on down and answer all the questions the committee might have,” Hayden said after the hearing.

Many countries, U.S. lawmakers and human rights groups have denounced the simulated drowning technique as torture. Reports of its use, as well as harsh treatment of terrorist suspects, have damaged the U.S. image around the world.

The full House of Representatives could vote as early as today to outlaw waterboarding. Drafted by negotiators for the House and Senate Intelligence committees, the measure would require U.S. interrogators to comply with the Army Field Manual, which bans interrogation methods seen as torture.

A former CIA interrogator said waterboarding has saved lives in the war against al-Qaida.

John Kiriakou, who now works in the private sector, told several U.S. news outlets that suspected al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Zubaida started cooperating after being waterboarded for less than a minute by CIA officials in 2002.

Kiriakou said he now believes waterboarding is torture.

Critics have charged that the CIA destroyed the tape of Abu Zubaida, along with that of another al-Qaida suspect, to hide illegal torture. The agency has said it destroyed the tapes in 2005 to protect the interrogators from possible retaliation.

It is believed that the CIA has not used waterboarding since 2003.

The Washington Post reported that a judge had ordered the tapes to be preserved as possible evidence in a lawsuit filed by prisoners at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, where the United States holds captured terrorism suspects.

Hayden is scheduled to testify to the House Intelligence Committee today.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

Have Your Say: Interrogation used by CIA is torture, ex-agent says
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

U.S. Commits, Lies About Human Rights Violations

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Human rights violations taint almost every social sector in the U.S.

By Alex Jung

The Geneva conventions aren’t the only humanitarian standards the United States ignores. Under the Bush administration, the United States routinely commits human rights violations within its borders, according to a new report by the U.S. Human Rights Network.

The USHRN, a coalition of over 250 social justice and human rights organizations, published its report to challenge the findings of a self-assessment the U.S. government filed with the U.N. Committee on Ending Discrimination (CERD) last April.

The United States ratified human rights standards from the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) in 1994 (meaning they have the force of domestic law), but according to the USHRN, has failed to live up to them.

The picture of human rights within the United States is bleak. Blacks and Latino/as constitute over 60 percent of the incarcerated, while only making up a quarter of the general population. Youth of color are overrepresented in juvenile detention centers and are disproportionately tried and sentenced as adults. Once out of prison, formerly incarcerated persons are often denied access to public housing, voting rights and financial aid for post-secondary education — all crucial elements for reintegrating them back into community life.

Minorities also face rampant labor discrimination. Nonwhites are twice as likely as their white counterparts to be stuck in low-wage, dead-end jobs. People of color are likewise overrepresented in dirty or dangerous industries such as food service and manufacturing.

Such racial disparities taint almost every social sector. Public transportation, education, healthcare and even the housing market are all rife with abuse. For example, in housing disputes between landlords and tenants in New York, almost all landlords have legal representation, while only about one in eight tenants do. Most of these unrepresented tenants are low-income women of color who have limited resources to hire representation.

In stark contrast to these sad realities, the U.S. government’s report understates, skews or ignores the facts about domestic human rights abuses.

“Our analysis reveals that the Bush administration is utterly out of touch with the reality of racial discrimination in America,” said Ajamu Baraka, the executive director of USHRN, in a statement. “From failing to address the chronic persistence of structural racism to even acknowledging the disparate racial impact on people of color of Hurricane Katrina, the State Department report reads like a fantasy; unfortunately, a fantasy that is too often experienced as a nightmare for Americans of color.”

The U.S. report limits its analysis of Katrina to one paragraph beginning with:

“Concern has been expressed about the disparate effects of Hurricane Katrina on housing for minority residents of New Orleans. Recognizing the overlap between race and poverty in the United States, many commentators conclude nonetheless that the post-Katrina issues were the result of poverty (i.e., the inability of many of the poor to evacuate) rather than racial discrimination per se.”

The U.S. government’s argument is that as long as the law does not, on its face, mention race, then the law cannot be racist, even if its policies negatively affect communities of color.

USHRN’s report was released beside polling data from social justice organization The Opportunity Agenda, which showed that 80 percent of Americans see human rights as crucial to a healthy nation. According to the poll, the public considers specific areas such as a quality public education, healthcare, and a living wage as an integral part of human rights. These mundane aspects are what Lisa Crooms, professor of law at Howard University and an author of the USHRN report, called the “ordinary human rights” that the U.S. government ignores on a regular basis.

USHRN’s Baraka believes the human rights framework will yield success because it opens up the possibility of a “new kind of movement” that can “expose the contradictions of the system the way it’s presently organized.”

The USHRN report will be read alongside the U.S. government’s self-assessment by the Committee in February of 2008, when they will determine whether or not the United States is in compliance with the agreement. Baraka expects they will conclude “the U.S. is in noncompliance” but he also hopes that the report will “motivate the U.S. to identify the gaps in protections, and to monitor levels of compliance on every level of government.”

The strategy of holding the U.S. government accountable to international standards has deeper historical roots and perhaps also suggests the United States is not the vanguard of democracy that it purports to be. Professor Crooms said, “Back when Du Bois and Paul Robeson filed the first petitions before the U.N., they were positions that challenged Jim Crow in the U.S.” The use of international law as a means to empower domestically marginalized people has strong implications in a global community. Such a strategy links the human rights abuses the U.S. government inflicts overseas with those that occur within its borders.

Have Your Say: U.S. Commits, Lies About Human Rights Violations
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Related News

• Call to scrap ID cards plan
• No trust in keeping our data
• Assembly says no to ID card proposals
• Identities will never be safe
• Errors prompt call for end to ID card plans

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.