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Ohio voting machines have critical flaws
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
Report: Ohio voting machines have critical flaws, could undermine ‘08 election
CINCINNATI– All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned by the state’s top elections official has found.
“It was worse than I anticipated,” the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.”
At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.
Ms. Brunner proposed replacing all of the state’s voting machines, including the touch-screen ones used in more than 50 of Ohio’s 88 counties. She wants all counties to use optical scan machines that read and electronically record paper ballots that are filled in manually by voters.
She called for legislation and financing to be in place by April so the new machines can be used in the presidential election next November. She said she could not estimate the cost of the changes.
Florida, another swing state with a history of voting problems, is also scrapping touch-screen machines and switching to optical scan ones for the election. Such systems have gained favor because experts say they are more reliable than others and, unlike most touch screens, they provide a paper trail for recounts.
Ms. Brunner, a Democrat, succeeded J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who came under fire for simultaneously overseeing the 2004 election and serving as co-chairman of President Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio.
She ordered the study as part of a pledge to overhaul voting after problems made headlines for hours-long lines in the 2000 and 2004 elections and a scandal in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, that led to the convictions of two elections workers on charges of rigging recounts. Ms. Brunner’s office temporarily seized control of that county’s board of elections.
The study released Friday found that voting machines and central servers made by Elections Systems and Software; Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold; and Hart InterCivic; were easily corrupted.
Chris Riggall, a Premier spokesman, said hardware and software problems had been corrected in his company’s new products, which will be available for installation in 2008.
“It is important to note,” he said, “that there has not been a single documented case of a successful attack against an electronic voting system, in Ohio or anywhere in the United States.”
Ken Fields, a spokesman for Election Systems and Software, said his company strongly disagreed with some of the report’s findings. “We can also tell you that our 35 years in the field of elections has demonstrated that Election Systems and Software voting technology is accurate, reliable and secure,” he said.
The $1.9 million federally financed study assembled corporate and academic teams to conduct parallel assessments. A bipartisan group of 12 election board directors and deputy directors acted as advisers.
The academic team, made up of faculty members and students from Cleveland State University, Pennsylvania State, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Pennsylvania, said systemic change was needed. “All of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election,” the team wrote.
In addition to switching machines, Ms. Brunner recommended eliminating polling stations that are used for fewer than five precincts as a cost-cutting measure, and introducing early voting 15 days before Election Day.
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VIDEO: Faked 9/11 evidence
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
Mind boggling
No matter how often I look at this, it remains shocking.
There’s only one conclusion to draw from all this:
There is no real news reporting in the United States. There is no real law enforcement either.
It could not be clearer - or more ominous.
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/238.html
Excerpt from “Loose Change
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Brown suffers further poll slump
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
By David Clarke
LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party trails the Conservatives by the largest margin in more than 15 years, an opinion poll for the Sunday Times showed.
The poll by YouGov put Labour on 32 points, 13 percentage points behind the Conservatives on 45. Brown’s personal rating has also slumped since he took over from Tony Blair in June.
“At Westminster the sense of doom is growing, and no single analysis of Labour’s troubles seems entirely satisfactory,” Martin Bright, political editor of the left-wing weekly New Statesman, wrote in commentary published on Sunday.
Brown does not have to call an election until May 2010 and his advisers hope recent crises will pass, the economy will rebound and confidence in Brown and his policies will be restored before voters judge him at the ballot box.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband said it was the government’s job to take the difficult decisions needed to move the country forward, even if they aroused opposition.
“It doesn’t feel like meltdown at all,” he told the BBC. “In the end, what counts are not headlines but ideas. And it’s the ideas that this government in the end will live or die by.”
Brown was riding high in the polls after taking office. But the first run on a bank in more than a century, the loss of half of the country’s personal data in the post, allegations of sleaze and a downturn in house prices have all hit Labour.
Perceptions that Brown dithered over whether to call an early election or attend the signing of a new EU treaty, coupled with growing fears among voters of an economic recession have also undermined the former finance minister’s showing.
Brown’s personal rating — the gap between those saying he was doing a good job and those saying he was doing badly — has plummeted from plus 48 in August to minus 26 four months later.
With an election some years off, the only risk to the prime minister is if his Labour Party begins to have serious doubts about whether he can defeat the Conservatives next time round.
However Brown is now coming under fire from the left of the political spectrum, a natural ally in the past.
The New Statesman has run a series of hostile articles in recent weeks and columnists such as The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee have criticised Brown for a lack of vision and a “catastrophic” attitude towards Europe.
There are few signs Brown’s woes will end soon. The Bank lowered interest rates this month in the face of softer growth but its concerns about inflation picking up may prevent a series of cuts to boost the economy.
In the YouGov poll, 53 percent of voters said they were worried Britain might face a recession next year and a third said Brown’s government would carry most of the blame. YouGov surveyed 1,481 electors in an online poll on December 13-14.
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Inside the CIA’s notorious ”black sites”
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
A Yemeni man never charged by the U.S. details 19 months of brutality and psychological torture - the first in-depth, first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons.
WASHINGTON — The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated its network of secret prisons known as “black sites.” But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on — there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.
The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation — one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.
It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words “I am innocent” in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.
So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die.
On several occasions, when Bashmilah’s state of mind deteriorated dangerously, the CIA also did something else: They placed him in the care of mental health professionals. Bashmilah believes these were trained psychologists or psychiatrists. “What they were trying to do was to give me a sort of uplifting and to assure me,” Bashmilah said in a telephone interview, through an interpreter, speaking from his home country of Yemen. “One of the things they told me to do was to allow myself to cry, and to breathe.”
Last June, Salon reported on the CIA’s use of psychologists to aid with the interrogation of terrorist suspects. But the role of mental health professionals working at CIA black sites is a previously unknown twist in the chilling, Kafkaesque story of the agency’s secret overseas prisons.
Little about the conditions of Bashmilah’s incarceration has been made public until now. His detailed descriptions in an interview with Salon, and in newly filed court documents, provide the first in-depth, first-person account of captivity inside a CIA black site. Human rights advocates and lawyers have painstakingly pieced together his case, using Bashmilah’s descriptions of his cells and his captors, and documents from the governments of Jordan, Yemen and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to verify his testimony. Flight records detailing the movement of CIA aircraft also confirm Bashmilah’s account, tracing his path from the Middle East to Afghanistan and back again while in U.S. custody.
Bashmilah’s story also appears to show in clear terms that he was an innocent man. After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered.
“This really shows the human impact of this program and that lives are ruined by the CIA rendition program,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, an attorney for Bashmilah and a professor at the New York University School of Law. “It is about psychological torture and the experience of being disappeared.”
Bashmilah, who at age 39 is now physically a free man, still suffers the mental consequences of prolonged detention and abuse. He is undergoing treatment for the damage done to him at the hands of the U.S. government. On Friday, Bashmilah laid out his story in a declaration to a U.S. district court as part of a civil suit brought by the ACLU against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing accused of facilitating secret CIA rendition flights.
Bashmilah said in the phone interview that the psychological anguish inside a CIA black site is exacerbated by the unfathomable unknowns for the prisoners. While he figured out that he was being held by Americans, Bashmilah did not know for sure why, where he was, or whether he would ever see his family again. He said, “Every time I realize that there may be others who are still there where I suffered, I feel the same thing for those innocent people who just fell in a crack.”
It may seem bizarre for the agency to provide counseling to a prisoner while simultaneously cracking him mentally — as if revealing a humanitarian aspect to a program otherwise calibrated to exploit systematic psychological abuse. But it could also be that mental healthcare professionals were enlisted to help bring back from the edge prisoners who seemed precariously damaged, whose frayed minds were no longer as pliable for interrogation. “My understanding is that the purpose of having psychiatrists there is that if the prisoner feels better, then he would be able to talk more to the interrogators,” said Bashmilah.
Realistically, psychiatrists in such a setting could do little about the prisoners’ deeper suffering at the hands of the CIA. “They really had no authority to address these issues,” Bashmilah said about his mental anguish. He said the doctors told him to “hope that one day you will prove your innocence or that you will one day return to your family.” The psychiatrists also gave him some pills, likely tranquilizers. They analyzed his dreams. But there wasn’t much else they could do. “They also gave me a Rubik’s Cube so I could pass the time, and some jigsaw puzzles,” Bashmilah recalled.
The nightmare started for him back in fall 2003. Bashmilah had traveled to Jordan from Indonesia, where he was living with his wife and working in the clothing business. He and his wife went to Jordan to meet Bashmilah’s mother, who had also traveled there. The family hoped to arrange for heart surgery for Bashmilah’s mother at a hospital in Amman. But before leaving Indonesia, Bashmilah had lost his passport and had received a replacement. Upon arrival in Jordan, Jordanian officials questioned his lack of stamps in the new one, and they grew suspicious when Bashmilah admitted he had visited Afghanistan in 2000. Bashmilah was taken into custody by Jordanian authorities on Oct. 21, 2003. He would not reappear again until he stepped out of a CIA plane in Yemen on May 5, 2005.
Bashmilah’s apparent innocence was clearly lost on officials with Jordan’s General Intelligence Department. After his arrest, the Jordanians brutally beat him, peppering him with questions about al-Qaida. He was forced to jog around in a yard until he collapsed. Officers hung him upside down with a leather strap and his hands tied. They beat the soles of his feet and his sides. They threatened to electrocute him with wires. The told him they would rape his wife and mother.
It was too much. Bashmilah signed a confession multiple pages long, but he was disoriented and afraid even to read it. “I felt sure it included things I did not say,” he wrote in his declaration to the court delivered Friday. “I was willing to sign a hundred sheets so long as they would end the interrogation.”
Bashmilah was turned over to the CIA in the early morning hours of Oct. 26, 2003. Jordanian officials delivered him to a “tall, heavy-set, balding white man wearing civilian clothes and dark sunglasses with small round lenses,” he wrote in his declaration. He had no idea who his new captors were, or that he was about to begin 19 months of hell, in the custody of the U.S. government. And while he was seldom beaten physically while in U.S. custody, he describes a regime of imprisonment designed to inflict extreme psychological anguish.
I asked Bashmilah which was worse; the physical beatings at the hands of the Jordanians, or the psychological abuse he faced from the CIA. “I consider that psychological torture I endured was worse than the physical torture,” he responded. He called his imprisonment by the CIA “almost like being inside a tomb.”
“Whenever I saw a fly in my cell, I was filled with joy,” he said. “Although I would wish for it to slip from under the door so it would not be imprisoned itself.”
After a short car ride to a building at the airport, Bashmilah’s clothes were cut off by black-clad, masked guards wearing surgical gloves. He was beaten. One guard stuck his finger in Bashmilah’s anus. He was dressed in a diaper, blue shirt and pants. Blindfolded and wearing earmuffs, he was then chained and hooded and strapped to a gurney in an airplane.
Flight records show Bashmilah was flown to Kabul. (Records show the plane originally departed from Washington, before first stopping in Prague and Bucharest.) After landing, he was forced to lie down in a bumpy jeep for 15 minutes and led into a building. The blindfold was removed, and Bashmilah was examined by an American doctor.
He was then placed in a windowless, freezing-cold cell, roughly 6.5 feet by 10 feet. There was a foam mattress, one blanket, and a bucket for a toilet that was emptied once a day. A bare light bulb stayed on constantly. A camera was mounted above a solid metal door. For the first month, loud rap and Arabic music was piped into his cell, 24 hours a day, through a hole opposite the door. His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake.
Cells were lined up next to each other with spaces in between. Higher above the low ceilings of the cells appeared to be another ceiling, as if the prison were inside an airplane hanger.
After three months the routine became unbearable. Bashmilah unsuccessfully tried to hang himself with his blanket and slashed his wrists. He slammed his head against the wall in an effort to lose consciousness. He was held in three separate but similar cells during his detention in Kabul. At one point, the cell across from him was being used for interrogations. “While I myself was not beaten in the torture and interrogation room, after a while I began to hear the screams of detainees being tortured there,” he wrote.
While he was not beaten, Bashmilah was frequently interrogated. “During the entire period of my detention there, I was held in solitary confinement and saw no one other than my guards, interrogators and other prison personnel,” he wrote in his declaration. One interrogator accused him of being involved in sending letters to a contact in England, though Bashmilah says he doesn’t know anybody in that country. At other times he was shown pictures of people he also says he did not know.
“This is a form of torture,” he told me. “Especially when the person subjected to this has not done anything.”
In his declaration, Bashmilah made it clear that most of the prison officials spoke English with American accents. “The interrogators also frequently referred to reports coming from Washington,” he wrote.
After six months he was transferred, with no warning or explanation. On or around April 24, 2004, Bashmilah was pulled from his cell and placed in an interrogation room, where he was stripped naked. An American doctor with a disfigured hand examined him, jotting down distinctive marks on a paper diagram of the human body. Black-masked guards again put him in a diaper, cotton pants and shirt. He was blindfolded, shackled, hooded, forced to wear headphones, and stacked, lying down, in a jeep with other detainees. Then he remembers being forced up steps into a waiting airplane for a flight that lasted several hours, followed by several hours on the floor of a helicopter.
Upon landing, he was forced into a vehicle for a short ride. Then, Bashmilah took several steps into another secret prison — location unknown.
He was forced into a room and stripped naked again. Photos were taken of all sides of his body. He was surrounded by about 15 people. “All of them except for the person taking photographs were dressed in the kind of black masks that robbers wear to hide their faces,” Bashmilah wrote in the declaration.
He was again examined by a doctor, who took notations on the diagram of the human body. (It was the same form from Afghanistan. Bashmilah saw his vaccination scar marked on the diagram.) The doctor looked in his eyes, ears, nose and throat.
He was then thrown into a cold cell, left naked.
It was another tiny cell, new or refurbished with a stainless steel sink and toilet. Until clothes arrived several days later, Bashmilah huddled in a blanket. In this cell there were two video cameras, one mounted above the door and the other in a wall. Also above the door was a speaker. White noise, like static, was pumped in constantly, day and night. He spent the first month in handcuffs. In this cell his ankle was attached to a 110-link chain attached to a bolt on the floor.
The door had a small opening in the bottom through which food would appear: boiled rice, sliced meat and bread, triangles of cheese, boiled potato, slices of tomato and olives, served on a plastic plate.
Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. “I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,” Bashmilah wrote in his declaration.
He was interrogated more. Bashmilah recalls an interrogator showing him a lecture by an Islamic scholar playing on a laptop. The interrogator wanted to know if Bashmilah knew who the man was, but he did not. It was in this facility that Bashmilah slashed his wrists, then went on his hunger strike, only to be force-fed through a tube forced down his nose.
The CIA seems to have figured out that Bashmilah was not an al-Qaida operative sometime around September 2004, when he was moved to another, similar cell. But there was no more white noise. And while his ankles were shackled, he wasn’t bolted to the floor with a chain. He was allowed to shower once a week. He was no longer interrogated and was mostly left alone.
Bashmilah was given a list of books he could read. About a month before he was released, he was given access to an exercise hall for 15 minutes a week. And he saw mental healthcare professionals. “The psychiatrists asked me to talk about why I was so despairing, interpreted my dreams, asked me how I was sleeping and whether I had an appetite, and offered medications such as tranquilizers.”
On May 5, 2005, Bashmilah was cuffed, hooded and put on a plane to Yemen. Yemeni government documents say the flight lasted six or seven hours and confirm that he was transferred from the control of the U.S. government. He soon learned that his father had died in the fall of 2004, not knowing where his son had disappeared to, or even if he was alive.
At the end of my interview with Bashmilah, I asked him if there was anything in particular he wanted people to know. “I would like for the American people to know that Islam is not an enemy to other nations,” he said. “The American people should have a voice for holding accountable people who have hurt innocent people,” he added. “And when there is a transgression against the American people, it should not be addressed by another transgression.”
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Prison interrogation techniques in Israel
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
“We have to make you do a little sports,” the Shin Bet interrogator said, launching four successive days of questioning accompanied by brutal physical torture. The result: Luwaii Ashqar can no longer stand on his feet. He sits in his wheelchair, dressed in a fashionable quasi-military suit, super-elegant, new Caterpillar-brand shoes on his paralyzed feet.
“I love this color,” he says about his uniform. “It’s the color of the soldiers who came to arrest me for the interrogation that did all this to me.”
His smile is captivating, his Hebrew rich and incisive. He is a young man whose world fell apart. He entered prison sound of body and mind and emerged a broken man. For four days and four nights nonstop, he says, he was interrogated and subjected to torture of the most brutal kind. The result is the person we see before us in the wheelchair , in the elegant home high in the village of Saida, north of Tul Karm, which was placed at his disposal by a friend after he was released from Israeli prison a month ago.
Was there a judgment by the High Court of Justice? There was. It banned precisely the types of torture he underwent: the “banana posture,” the “shabah” (body stretching with hands tied to a chair), “invisible” blows and the “frog posture” (being forced to stand for hours on the toes in a crouching position) - all the way to a vicious kick to his chest that bent his body backward while he was tied to a chair with his arms and legs, and which was the probable cause of the partial paralysis of his legs.
Throwing up with the vomit entering his nostrils, losing consciousness and being given only saltwater to drink, relieving himself in his pants, not sleeping or resting - all of that for four consecutive days and nights.
What does the interrogator Maimon tell his children when he goes home? What do Eldad and Sagiv tell their wives about their daily labors before they turn in? That they tortured another helpless prisoner until they turned him into a cripple? That they beat this charming young man brutally and that at the end of the interrogation he was tried for only marginal offenses? And where is the Supreme Court, which in 1999 prohibited precisely the chain of torture that Luwaii Sati Ashqar, 30, who was married three years ago, underwent in the Kishon detention facility?
Ashqar is not alone. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel has just issued a new report containing the testimonies of nine torture victims (English version: www.stoptorture.org.il//eng ). As the authors of the shocking report say, the testimonies “paint a dismal picture in which can be discerned various categories of secret-keeping collaborators, who, in keeping silent, protect the [Shin Bet] system of torture.” …
On the wall is a picture, a fine drawing of a kneeling prisoner, his head between his knees. The caption: “I am in the darkness of the prison, living on your memory. I am far from you, lying in my bed, my spirit cruising your land all night. God will release all the prisoners, the strong will triumph.”
Ashqar is sitting in his wheelchair, his left leg completely enclosed in a cast, his right leg shaking nonstop. When he tries to get up and lean on his crutches, he threatens to topple over. “I was married in 2004, and I started to work in aluminum in the village to provide for my new household. On April 22, 2005, at 2:30 A.M., the soldiers came and started to throw grenades and to shout for everyone in the house to go outside. They blindfolded me with whatever they use and handcuffed me. I was taken in a jeep to prison and I was examined by an army doctor. He looked over my body - no operations, doesn’t take medication, no illnesses. Again I was taken in a military jeep, this time to Kishon. ‘Yehuda, incoming,’ the warder said and transferred me to the interrogation office. They opened my eyes: Good morning. An excellent morning. One of the interrogators, Maimon, told me: I am responsible for your file. What file? The one you were arrested for. This is the major, and this tall guy is the colonel, this is Sagiv and this is Eldad. Eight interrogators.
“They said: We have no time, it will soon be our Passover and you have to finish everything in a short time. Finish what? You have to tell us what you have. I don’t have anything to tell you. I begged. They said: We know all that nonsense. We are talking about security. Plans for terrorist attacks at Passover. I said: I don’t understand what you are talking about. They said: The suicide bomber was at your place. What suicide bomber?
“After two hours of talking they said to me: If you don’t give everything you have, we will have to take it by a different way. What is the different way? Did you hear of a military interrogation? You might leave here with your body battered or crippled. I was taken to a military interrogation. Here you pray to God that you will die, they said, but we won’t give you that. We will let you die only after you spill out what we are looking for. He gave me a prison uniform and I told him that if I was going to die, I preferred my own clothes.
“They sat me down on a square chair without a back, which was attached to the floor and had sharp metal ends [sticking up]. My legs were tied to the legs of the chair with metal cuffs and my hands were tied behind my back with metal cuffs. One interrogator sat behind me and the other in front of me. The interrogator opposite me said: We have to give you a little sports, so you will be able to hold out in the military interrogation. The sports was that they pushed me backward by the chest, a backward somersault, and I would hold myself so my bones would not break. After a minute or two I would automatically fall on the floor, but the interrogator behind me would put his foot on my chest and press, and the interrogator in front would grab my hands and pull and pull behind the chair. They kept on like that until I don’t know what happened to me, heat in every part of my body, puking everything I had in my stomach and it would go into my nostrils. I would wake up when they poured water on my face. When I woke up, we went back to the same situation. It went on like this 15-20 times an hour.
“After that they made me crouch on my toes, not letting me lean on the back of my foot. I was in that position for 40-50 minutes, maybe an hour - that was my estimate - until I felt my soles swelling and they turned blue and there was tremendous pain. After that, stand up, and they tied my hands and pressed as hard as they could on the metal handcuffs until the metal dug into my hand. Here are the signs, you can still see them. Because of the pressure, the key of the handcuffs didn’t always work and they would bring huge metal scissors, like they use in construction, and tear off the handcuffs and then bring new ones, to go on. The color of my hands changed to blue, and when they opened [the handcuffs] my hands shook. The interrogator stood on the table and pulled me with a chain of handcuffs. When I fell, they pulled me by the hair.
“I would cry, beg, shout, and they came back to me with words, that it was impossible to stop, only after you start talking about what we want. I said to them: Tell me what you want. Tell me I am responsible for the attack on the Pentagon, I am ready to confess to everything, just tell me what. I want to end this death.”
“There were always four interrogators and two rotated every four hours, day and night. The new ones would tell me they were stronger than the ones before, that the ones before were a joke, we are the strong ones. And that was true. The new ones tied me and started to beat me all over my body. One interrogator pressed hard on my testicles and on my feet with his shoes. When they slapped me and I tried to pull back, the major would say: What are you doing? If you move back, I will break your nose, and if you move forward I will rip off your ear. Be strong and take it sportingly, because you are a soldier and a fighter. They broke this tooth.”
Ashqar suddenly stops talking. He turns pale and his face is covered with beads of perspiration. His father, Sati, quickly wipes his face with a damp cloth. “Every time I try to remember I get dizzy, even when I am alone.” Quiet descends in the room. It will take Ashqar another few minutes to pull himself together.
“I was taken into detention on Friday morning, and that was the last light of day I saw before the interrogation. I came out for the first time on Monday night or before dawn on Tuesday morning. On those long days I sat in a chair and did not even go to the toilet. So you won’t kill yourself, they said. I urinated in my clothes, and a terrible stench started. For four days I didn’t eat anything. They told me: If we give you something to eat, something will happen to your stomach and your intestines. Maybe they will explode under the pressure of the food when we push you backward. You will drink only half a cup of saltwater. That is what they gave me every time after they bent me and I vomited. Why with salt? I asked. Give me without salt. No, so nothing will happen in your stomach and intestines. I would drink it and vomit.
“On Monday evening, they told me that five witnesses had testified that Luwaii had transported a wanted man. I told them that there was a famous wanted man named Luwaii Sadi, but my name is Luwaii Sati, and maybe they had mixed us up. He said to me: Are you saying the Shin Bet is that stupid? We know exactly what we’re doing, and it is all correct. I said: Put me on trial for whatever you want. He said: Ya’allah, sports again. He pushes me backward in the chair. I will help you become a story in Palestinian history. He is talking to me and my head is down below. He pushes strongly with his leg and presses on my chest. I felt something like an explosion in my body. Like something broke. After that I don’t know what happened. I woke up and they were pouring water on my face. Again they pushed me backward and again I fainted.
“He said to me: Stand on your feet. I felt that my legs were cold, like pins and needles in the legs. I said: I can’t. He said: Now you are paralyzed. I said: I guess I am. He said: That is what we promised you and that is what you want.”
“I discovered I had a wound in the back and it was bleeding - because of the sharp chair - and one of my bones was protruding. Because of the blood and because of the urine of four days there was such a stench that the interrogator could not come close to me. He said: Why do you stink like that? I told him: That is your perfume. A warder took me to the shower and threw me on the floor and said to me: Ya’allah, you have two minutes to shower. I looked at the faucet up above and I could not reach it. I pulled down my pants and the underpants stayed in place. I tried to pull them down - I could do it in front but behind it was stuck to my back. The two minutes went by and the warder started to pound on the door. Time’s up. I told him: Give me another two minutes, I can’t reach the faucet. He came in and asked: What do you have on your back? I said: I don’t know.
“He called the interrogator and said: Come and see the prisoner. The interrogator came and asked: What do you have, Luwaii? I said: I don’t know what I have on my back, I can’t pull the underpants down and I can’t reach the faucet. He said: Ya’allah, we will go up and finish the story and take you to the doctor.
“Two warders took me in a Prisons Service vehicle to Rambam [Medical Center in Haifa]. In emergency, my hands and feet were tied and a Russian doctor asked me: What hurts you? I told him: My whole body hurts from the interrogation. The Druze warder said: Shut up. The doctor turned me on the side and stuck a finger into my ass. I asked him: What are you doing? He said: I am checking whether you have hemorrhoids. Why didn’t you ask me first? I am a professional, he said. I said: What about the wound on the back? He put ointment there and dressed it. After 10 minutes I was taken back to interrogation. Again I was tied to the square chair. The bandage fell off and the wound started to bleed again. After that, they stopped the military interrogation.”
He was interrogated for another two months, but without physical torture. He was told that his wife had been arrested because of him - a complete fabrication - and he was given a lie detector test (”the falsehoods machine,” in his Hebrew). For two weeks he was placed in a cell with stool pigeons. In the end, he was indicted on only two counts, in Prosecution File 2157/05: assisting a wanted person to hide and using a forged document. No ticking and no bomb. Ashqar was sentenced to 26 months in prison and was released a month ago. In the meantime, his younger brother, Osaimar, disappeared. Soldiers came to the house looking for him, but he was not there. His family has not seen him since: He told them that he was not willing to undergo what Luwaii did.
Luwaii is now looking for a way to get medical treatment in Israel or abroad, after his physician told him that he would not be able to get rehabilitation in the West Bank. His lawyer told him that the Shin Bet will almost certainly prevent him from going anywhere.
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Bush and Cheney: All Dressed up and no Place to Go
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay
“The leader whose thinking process most resembles [Adolf] Hitler’s is our own president. —Like Hitler, (George W.) Bush’s ideological beliefs have blinded him to reality, and like Hitler, he seems impervious to advice that conflicts with his beliefs.”Charley Reese “When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. “Plato, (428/427-348/347 B.C.), ancient Greek philosopher “If the war is enlarged in the next 20 months to include Iran— if that happens—for the next 20 years the United States is going to be bogged down in a war which spans Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then you can forget about American global leadership.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter
For many months, the Bush-Cheney administration and its Neocon allies in Congress and in the media have been inching toward a fresh new war against Iran, possibly using nuclear weapons, under the same flimsy pretext that it had used, in 2003, to launch an illegal war of aggression against Iraq. The military gear had been positioned, with three full armadas in or around the Gulf of Hormuz, and the propaganda machine was running full time to persuade the American people that a state of perpetual war was in their interests. But something happened on the road to war. On December 3, Michael McConnell, Director of the National Intelligence Council, dropped a political bomb. His office—in close collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the fifteen other U.S. Intelligence agencies, regrouped under the umbrella of the United States Intelligence Community (IC)—issued a devastating report about the veracity of the claims made for months by the Administration that Iran was actively engaged in developing a nuclear arms program. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report said, “We judge that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program….We assess with moderate confidence Tehran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007.” The Director of the US National Council issued also a most unusual statement, saying that “the decision to release an unclassified version of the key judgments of this NIE [report] was made when it was determined that doing so was in the interest of our nation’s security. The Intelligence Community is on the record publicly with numerous statements based on our 2005 assessment on Iran. Since our understanding of Iran’s capabilities has changed, we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available.” In other words, even if the Intelligence Community felt that the disclosure would undermine a key Bush-Cheney policy, they were ready to go public with the damaging report for the sake of national interest.The very claim of a nuclear Iran has been used by President George W. Bush to push to the limit, at the United Nations and in Congress, to obtain some cover for a bombing campaign against Iran. In fact, as recently as October 17, the American president had used the apocalyptic term of a possible “World War III,” even raising the specter of a nuclear holocaust, to draw the darkest picture possible if Iran was not prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons, thus ending Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Vice President Dick Cheney has also claimed that Iran had a “fairly robust new nuclear program,” and that had to be stopped by all means. Indeed, for months, the person in the Bush administration who most wanted a hot conflict with Iran has been Vice President Dick Cheney. Well, it turns out that both Bush and Cheney knew, at least since last August, that the Director of National Intelligence had concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear arms program as far back as 2003, four years earlier. The report had the effect of pulling the rug out from under any plan for a preemptive attack against Iran that the Bush-Cheney administration intended to implement in the near term. This was good economic news. Immediately, the price of oil receded from its lofty level around $100 a barrel, an indication that the market had factored in some probability of supply disruptions early in 2008. Left naked, Bush is now uttering lies and absurdities. First, there was his claim that he had “only learned of the new intelligence assessment” the week before, when it is a fact that the President is briefed every morning by the Director of the United States Intelligence Community (IC). Quickly, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, contradicted him. Hadley said that “Bush was first told in August or September about intelligence indicating Iran had halted its weapons program.” And Senator Rockefeller confirmed that “the president knew, even as he was saying ‘World War III’ and all that kind of stuff.” And, second, Bush professed about not being deterred by mere facts: “The [National Intelligence Estimates that Iran has no nuclear weapons program] doesn’t do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world—quite the contrary.” I don’t know which of these two statements undermine the most President Bush’s credibility, if there is any left.Where does all this leave the warmongering Neocon crowd? They are scurrying in all directions with op-eds in far right media to discredit the U.S. Intelligence Community, trying to rekindle the flames of war against Iran. This a crowd that revolves around the pro-Israel Lobby in the U.S., led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and by some Washington-based pro-Israel “think-tanks” such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). They have been pushing for an illegal attack against Iran, using nuclear arms, for years. They have all the reasons now to be displeased. They have used their enormous influence within the Bush-Cheney administration and within the leadership of both Congressional parties to attack Iran, and all these efforts seem to have been made for nil.Indeed, the Israel Lobby, led in Congress by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (Ind-Conn.), has been strongly influencing some prominent so-called Bush Democrats to join in the war frenzy against Iran. As its point-man in Congress, Senator Joe Lieberman (Ind-Conn) has been calling for the U.S. bombing of Iran every other week, dutifully doing the round of Sunday morning public affairs TV shows. The Neocons have not been deterred by the fact that bombing another country without provocation is an international crime of high order. According to the Nuremberg Charter, it is even a crime punishable by death.So far, all U.N. resolutions about sanctions against Iran have been specifically framed under Article 41, which entails “measures not involving the use of armed force.“ It is most doubtful that China and Russia, two Security Council members, will ever accept a resolution that would impose sanctions against Iran under U.N. Article 42, which allows the use of military force “to restore international peace and stability,” now that official American intelligence assessments state that there is no Iran nuclear arms program. The United Nations is not going to serve as cover for military operations against Iran.And the U.S. Congress, especially the non-neocon Democrats, will be increasingly reluctant to give the Bush-Cheney administration a blank check to launch a war against Iran. Last September, the U.S. Senate came very close to handing the Bush-Cheney administration a blank check for military strikes against Iran, when 75 Senators voted in favor of the so-called Kyle-Lieberman non-binding resolution. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), voted in favor of the resolution. This was counteracted last November 1, by 30 U.S. Senators, none of them Republican, led by Senator Jim Webb, from Virginia, who sent a letter to President George W. Bush stressing that the Administration did not have the legal authority to attack Iran without congressional approval.
In the past, Senator and presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) has even accused Bush of playing down the threat of a nuclear Iran and has called for swift action at the United Nations to impose sanctions on the Iranian government. Similarly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ostensibly capitulated to Bush, after having attended AIPAC’s annual meeting, stripping from a war finance bill the provision that would have forced Bush to go to Congress before launching an attack on Iran.
Now, with the NIE report officially out, it will be increasingly difficult for the Democratic leadership in Congress to pussycat with the Bush-Cheney administration regarding any future unprovoked aggression against Iran.
Last February, Admiral William Fallon, the head the Central Command (CENTCOM), expressed strong opposition to an administration plan to increase the number of carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf from two to three, and he vowed privately there would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM. And last June, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said that an attack on Iran over its refusal to freeze programs that could make nuclear weapons would be “an Act of Madness.” For the time being, cooler-headed individuals have prevailed over the ideologues and the warmongers. As a result, the planned Bush-Cheney-Lieberman war against Iran has been sidetracked. With the subprime financial crisis scheduled to pick up steam in the first half of 2008, it is good news that a fabricated geopolitical crisis has so far been avoided. The main question now is to ask whether Bush and Cheney have the gall to ignore the official intelligence report and invent new lies to justify a war against Iran. Stay tuned for more on this incredible saga.Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.comHe is the author of the book ‘The New American Empire’Visit his blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog. Author’s Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
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The Dollar Fallback
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
Until late January this year, the hosiery town of Tirupur had been in a state of euphoria. Within days, its glee turned into a grimace.
Until late January this year, the hosiery town of Tirupur had been in a state of euphoria. Within days, its glee turned into a grimace. In February, the US dollar depreciated against the Indian rupee. The rupee value of the dollar slipped south from Rs 46 to Rs 44 and then to Rs 42 in June and the Tamil Nadu town’s euphoria evaporated. Ten months down the line, it is grappling with losses.
The performance of the 1,000-odd exporters in Tirupur, supported by 6,000 auxiliary units, including knitting units, dyeing and bleaching, fabric painting, garment-making and embroidery, had been impressive. From Rs 54 crore in 1984, exports had leapfrogged to Rs 11,200 crore in 2007. The Tirupur Exporters’ Association (TEA) gleefully set itself a target of Rs 25,000 crore by 2012, another five years hence—until its complacency was rudely shaken up by the dollar plunge.
Today, the dollar value hovers around Rs 39.50. With exports taking a big hit, and with jobs at risk, state Governments have already started writing to the Centre. They are a worried lot since the rupee’s hardening has begun having implications beyond textiles and handicrafts to aam aadmi sectors such as fisheries, plantations, cotton, jute, leather, plastic and linoleum.
While informing the Centre about the extent of job losses that have already taken place in their regions, Tamil Nadu, Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal have sought the Union Government’s intervention. Apart from the states, field reports have begun pouring in from other Central ministries and departments dealing with these sectors.
The misery will surely be felt by the 2 to 5 crore people who the Commerce Ministry expects will lose jobs by March 2008. ‘‘We have got letters from a large number of people about shutdowns and job losses. We had asked departments concerned to seek field reports,’’ a senior Ministry official said.
‘‘This is a crisis situation. Exporters never anticipated this. We have to prepare ourselves for it,’’ said A. Sakthivel, President of TEA, which has 600 members. Like him, all exporters are hunkering down for a tough time, devising means to staunch the bleeding.
Saktivel’s Poppys Knit Wear, a Rs 190-crore company that mostly exports its product, is now trying to reduce production cost and minimise the use of raw materials. ‘‘We are also trying to increase production by using skilled engineers and by using computer-aided designs,’’ said Sakthivel. Companies are now hectically negotiating with raw material suppliers and processing units to bring down the costs and make up the profit margins somewhat.
‘‘Industry has to improve its productivity and bring down costs, but the rupee’s appreciation has happened so fast that there’s been little time for adjustment. Contracts can’t be renegotiated overnight, neither can prices be increased unless you have big bargaining power,’’ the Commerce Ministry official pointed out.
The implications of the dollar fall are serious. ‘‘The biggest casualty has been capacity expansion,” said Rajeev Gupta, director of Ludhiana-based Venus Garments. Gupta’s group, owner of brands like Duke and Neva, exports garments worth Rs 180 crore, primarily to the US. “Companies that have a strong domestic presence can still cope with the losses. But the worst hit are standalone garment units executing bulk orders to buyers based in different parts of the world. When I say that capacity expansion has taken a hit, it means that a lot of jobs that could have been created have been lost.”
The loss hasn’t been restricted only in terms of new jobs. In fact, as the orders have dwindled, the companies haven’t been averse to laying off workers. The most-well known Ludhiana company, Oswal Woollen Mills, with annual exports of Rs 600 crore, has laid off around 500 workers in the past year. Executive Director Sandeep Jain says while software firms are better able to absorb the shock as they have margins of 30 per cent, even the most powerful textile firm cannot boast of margins beyond 10 per cent. This is serious because, unlike in the other sectors, competition is intense in textiles and a slight hike in prices leads the foreign buyer to turn to countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Taiwan, China, even Sri Lanka.
In a bid to cut his losses, Tirupur’s R. Sivaram, executive director of Royal Classic Mills, a Rs 225 crore company with exports worth Rs 125 crore, turned to “doubling” his company’s presence in the domestic market. It launched a premier trouser brand for men and increased the number of its showrooms across the country from 30 to 100 this year. A number of other companies, too, are looking at the domestic option and at new markets. Blue Mount Garments of Ludhiana, for instance, is planning outlets in the Middle East, which has a sizeable Indian population.
Living with diminishing margins is a prospect that exporters have to bravely face. ‘‘This is the new reality and we have to face it,” said A. Loganathan, who owns Victus Dyeings, a Tirupur-based Rs 85 crore company. ‘‘We are trying to reduce the turnaround time. My company achieved a delivery time of 45 days instead of the usual 75 days. This way, the cost of holding inventories is reduced. In fact, we are trying to reduce cost in all aspects…reducing stock holding periods and getting it right the first time with no quality issues and keeping to the delivery time.”
Devising his own strategy to bring down costs, Raja Shanmugam of the Rs 60 crore Warsaw International in Tirupur decided there would be no wastage henceforth. ‘‘Earlier, we would provide 5 per cent more fabric to provide for wastage and embellishments,” he said, adding that his company was “slowly stepping into hedging”.
Hedging, which many exporters are now using to cover losses, involves forward contracts and option dealing. The TEA has proposed to the Finance Minister that the hedging cost be compensated or that dual exchange rate be considered. The export body has pleaded that for exporters, the value of rupee should be frozen at Rs 42.
The Centre has announced two rounds of incentives, including additional subvention of 2 per cent in pre-shipment and post-shipment credit over and above the 2 per cent extended earlier. This is apart from the extension of the Technology Upgradation Fund Scheme (TUFS) which provides for 4-5 per cent interest reimbursement on investment by textile companies.
The Centre also hiked the duty drawback scheme from 7 per cent to 10 per cent with effect from April 1 to provide some succour. Exporters agree this has helped. ‘‘However, we would like it to go up to 15 per cent,” said Oswal’s Sandeep Jain.
‘‘We can export to countries like Italy and Germany, but there is a lot of competition and they are aware of our desperate situation. Hence they are negotiating very closely from a position of advantage,” says Sanjay Jain, whose company Blue Mount Garments exports shirts and womenwear to US-based retail giant Walmart and fashion major GAP. “In my 17 years in the business, I have never known such insecurity,” he added.
Tirupur’s exports are equally divided between the US and European markets. Unfortunately, however, many of the European companies continue to do their invoicing in dollars. While the US dollar lost 11 per cent value against the rupee in 2007, the euro and pound sterling lost only about 1.45 per cent and 6.9 per cent respectively but with no benefit to the exporters. ‘‘In fact, more European companies now want to do their invoicing in US dollars,” said Sakthivel.
But wouldn’t a decline in dollar also make imports cheaper? Also, isn’t it the right time, therefore, to modernise plants and increase capacity because getting machinery from outside is cheaper than ever before? Sandeep Jain replied, ‘‘Theoretically, these arguments are correct. But you need to get down to brasstacks to know the real situation. Who is interested in getting new machinery when capacity expansion itself is unviable? Why do we need to produce more when our existing goods are struggling to find markets?”
And if export margins have come down, import costs in certain sectors have escalated. Wool from Australia, for example. As Sandeep Jain pointed out, ‘‘The Australian dollar has appreciated. In the past year or so, it has gone up from Rs 32 to Rs 35. So here too our costs have gone up.”
With the dollar drop and the consequent escalation in production costs, the fear has been of losing clients to competitors like Bangladesh, the world’s largest exporter, and others like Indonesia and Turkey. ‘‘The biggest fight for exporters is to retain their clients. If they are not able to keep to time schedules and commitments, the buyers could well turn to our competitors and we will never get them back,” warns D.K. Nair, secretary general of the Delhi-based Confederation of Indian Textile Industry (CITI).
Amid all this chaos, there is a silver lining. ‘‘These are jolts that will make the hitherto somnolent industry into thinking fast on its feet,” said Rajeev Gupta. And for good measure, added, ‘‘You can whine perpetually. The Government is doing its bit. But these are the concomitants of global economy. If on the one hand you are asking for full capital account convertibility, then on the other hand you can’t complaint about declining currencies.”
Perhaps between these realities, exporters will learn to be leaner and meaner earners. That could be the lesson from the dwindling dollar.
http://www.indianexpress.com/sunday/story/250675.html
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Remains of toxic DU bullets
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
BAGHDAD – At a roadside produce stand on the outskirts of Baghdad, business is brisk for Latifa Khalaf Hamid. Iraqi drivers pull up and snap up fresh bunches of parsley, mint leaves, dill, and onion stalks.
But Ms. Hamid’s stand is just four paces away from a burnt-out Iraqi tank, destroyed by - and contaminated with - controversial American depleted-uranium (DU) bullets. Local children play “throughout the day” on the tank, Hamid says, and on another one across the road.
No one has warned the vendor in the faded, threadbare black gown to keep the toxic and radioactive dust off her produce. The children haven’t been told not to play with the radioactive debris. They gather around as a Geiger counter carried by a visiting reporter starts singing when it nears a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser. It registers nearly 1,000 times normal background radiation levels on the digital readout.
The Monitor visited four sites in the city - including two randomly chosen destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles, a clutch of burned American ammunition trucks, and the downtown planning ministry - and found significant levels of radioactive contamination from the US battle for Baghdad.
In the first partial Pentagon disclosure of the amount of DU used in Iraq, a US Central Command spokesman told the Monitor that A-10 Warthog aircraft - the same planes that shot at the Iraqi planning ministry - fired 300,000 bullets. The normal combat mix for these 30-mm rounds is five DU bullets to 1 - a mix that would have left about 75 tons of DU in Iraq.
The Monitor saw only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away. There, a 3-foot-long DU dart from a 120 mm tank shell, was found producing radiation at more than 1,300 times background levels. It made the instrument’s staccato bursts turn into a steady whine.
“If you have pieces or even whole [DU] penetrators around, this is not an acute health hazard, but it is for sure above radiation protection dose levels,” says Werner Burkart, the German deputy director general for Nuclear Sciences and Applications at the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. “The important thing in any battlefield - especially in populated urban areas - is somebody has to clean up these sites.”
Minimizing the risk
Fresh-from-the-factory DU tank shells are normally handled with gloves, to minimize the health risk, and shielded with a thin coating. The alpha particle radiation emitted by DU travels less than an inch and can be stopped by cloth or even tissue paper. But when the DUmaterial burns (usually on impact; or as a dust, it can spontaneously ignite) protective shields disappear, and dangerous radioactive oxides are created that can be inhaled or ingested.
“[The risk] depends so very much on how you handle it,” says Jan Olof Snihs, of Sweden’s Radiation Protection Authority in Stockholm. In most cases dangers are low, he says, unless children eat toxic and radioactive soil, or get DU oxides on their hands.
Radioactive particles are a “special risk associated with a war,” Mr. Snihs says. “The authorities should be aware of this, and try to decontaminate places like this, just to avoid unnecessary risk.”
Pentagon officials say that DU is relatively harmless and a necessary part of modern warfare. They say that pre-Gulf War studies that indicated a risk of cancer and of causing harm to local populations through permanent contamination have been superseded by newer reports.
“There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq,” said Lt. Col. Michael Sigmon, deputy surgeon for the US Army’s V Corps, told journalists in Baghdad last week. He asserted that children playing with expended tank shells would have to eat and then practically suffocate on DU residue to cause harm.
But there is a growing chorus of concern among United Nations and relief officials, along with some Western scientific experts, who are calling for sites contaminated with DU be marked off and made safe.
“The soil around the impact sites of [DU] penetrators may be heavily contaminated, and could be harmful if swallowed by children,” says Brian Spratt, chair of the working group on DU at The Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific institution.
Heavy metal toys?
Fragments and penetrators should be removed, since “children find them fascinating objects, and can pocket them,” says Professor Spratt. “The science says there is some danger - not perhaps a huge danger - of these objects. … We certainly do not say that these things are safe; we say that cleanup is important.”
The British Ministry of Defense says it will offer screening to soldiers suspected of DU exposure, and will publish details about locations and quantities of DU that British troops used in Iraq - a tiny fraction of that fired by US forces.
The Pentagon has traditionally been tight-lipped about DU: Official figures on the amount used were not released for years after the 1991 Gulf War and Bosnia conflicts, and nearly a year after the 1999 Kosovo campaign. No US official contacted could provide DU use estimates from the latest war in Iraq.
“The first thing we should ask [the US military] is to remove that immediately,” says Carel de Rooy, head of the UN Children’s Fund in Baghdad, adding that senior UN officials need urgent advice on avoiding exposure.
The UN Environment Program last month called for field tests. DU “is still an issue of great concern for the general public,” said UNEP chief Klaus Töpfer. “An early study in Iraq could either lay these fears to rest or confirm that there are indeed potential risks.”
US troops avoid wreckage
During the latest Iraq conflict Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and A-10 Warthog aircraft, among other military platforms, all fired the DU bullets from desert war zones to the heart of Baghdad. No other armor-piercing round is as effective against enemy tanks. While the Pentagon says there’s no risk to Baghdad residents, US soldiers are taking their own precautions in Iraq, and in some cases have handed out warning leaflets and put up signs.
“After we shoot something with DU, we’re not supposed to go around it, due to the fact that it could cause cancer,” says a sergeant in Baghdad from New York, assigned to a Bradley, who asked not to be further identified.
“We don’t know the effects of what it could do,” says the sergeant. “If one of our vehicles burnt with a DU round inside, or an ammo truck, we wouldn’t go near it, even if it had important documents inside. We play it safe.”
Six American vehicles struck with DU “friendly fire” in 1991 were deemed to be too contaminated to take home, and were buried in Saudi Arabia. Of 16 more brought back to a purpose-built facility in South Carolina, six had to be buried in a low-level radioactive waste dump.
Television footage of the war last month showed Iraqi armored vehicles burning as US columns drove by, a common sign of a strike by DU, which burns through armor on impact, and often ignites the ammunition carried by the targeted vehicle.
“We were buttoned up when we drove by that - all our hatches were closed,” the US sergeant says. “If we saw anything on fire, we wouldn’t stop anywhere near it. We would just keep on driving.”
That’s an option that produce seller Hamid doesn’t have.
She says the US broke its promise not to bomb civilians. She has found US cluster bomblets in her garden; the DU is just another dangerous burden, in a war about which she remains skeptical.
“We were told it was going to be paradise [when Saddam Hussein was toppled], and now they are killing our children,” she says voicing a common Iraqi perception about the risk of DU. “The Americans did not bother to warn us that this is a contaminated area.”
There is a warning now at the Doura intersection on the southern outskirts of Baghdad. In the days before the capital fell, four US supply trucks clustered near an array of highway off-ramps caught fire, cooking off a number of DU tank rounds.
American troops wearing facemasks for protection arrived a few days later and bulldozed the topsoil around the site to limit the contamination.
The troops taped handwritten warning signs in Arabic to the burned vehicles, which read: “Danger - Get away from this area.” These were the only warnings seen by this reporter among dozens of destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles littering the city.
“All of them were wearing masks,” says Abbas Mohsin, a teenage cousin of a drink seller 50 yards away, said referring to the US military cleanup crew. “They told the people there were toxic materials … and advised my cousin not to sell Pepsi and soft drinks in this area. They said they were concerned for our safety.”
Despite the troops’ bulldozing of contaminated earth away from the burnt vehicles, black piles of pure DU ash and particles are still present at the site. The toxic residue, if inhaled or ingested, is considered by scientists to be the most dangerous form of DU.
One pile of jet-black dust yielded a digital readout of 9,839 radioactive emissions in one minute, more than 300 times average background levels registered by the Geiger counter. Another pile of dust reached 11,585 emissions in a minute.
Western journalists who spent a night nearby on April 10, the day after Baghdad fell, were warned by US soldiers not to cross the road to this site, because bodies and unexploded ordnance remained, along with DU contamination. It was here that the Monitor found the “hot” DU tank round.
This burned dart pushed the radiation meter to the far edge of the “red zone” limit.
A similar DU tank round recovered in Saudi Arabia in 1991, that was found by a US Army radiological team to be emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. Their safety memo noted that the “current [US Nuclear Regulatory Commission] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year.”
The normal public dose limit in the US, and recognized around much of the world, is 100 millirems per year. Nuclear workers have guidelines 20 to 30 times as high as that.
The depleted-uranium bullets are made of low-level radioactive nuclear-waste material, left over from the making of nuclear fuel and weapons. It is 1.7 times as dense as lead, and burns its way easily through armor. But it is controversial because it leaves a trail of contamination that has half-life of 4.5 billion years - the age of our solar system.
Less DU in this war?
In the first Gulf War, US forces used 320 tons of DU, 80 percent of it fired by A-10 aircraft. Some estimates suggest 1,000 tons or more of DU was used in the current war. But the Pentagon disclosure Wednesday that about 75 tons of A-10 DU bullets were used points to a smaller overall DU tonnage in Iraq this time.
US military guidelines developed after the first Gulf War - which have since been considerably eased - required any soldier coming within 50 yards of a tank struck with DU to wear a gas mask and full protective suit. Today, soldiers say they have been told to steer clear of any DU.
“If a [tank] was taken out by depleted uranium, there may be oxide that you don’t want to inhale. We want to minimize any exposure, at least to the lowest level possible,” Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official told journalists on March 14, just days before the war began. “If somebody needs to go into a tank that’s been hit with depleted uranium, a dust mask, a handkerchief is adequate to protect them - washing their hands afterwards.”
Not everyone on the battlefield may be as well versed in handling DU, Dr. Kilpatrick said, noting that his greater concern is DU’s chemical toxicity, not its radioactivity: “What we worry about like lead in paint in housing areas - children picking it up and eating it or licking it - getting it on their hands and ingesting it.”
In the US, stringent NRC rules govern any handling of DU, which can legally only be disposed of in low-level radioactive waste dumps. The US military holds more than a dozen NRC licenses to work with it.
In Iraq, DU was not just fired at armored targets.
Video footage from the last days of the war shows an A-10 aircraft - a plane purpose-built around a 30-mm Gatling gun - strafing the Iraqi Ministry of Planning in downtown Baghdad.
A visit to site yields dozens of spent radioactive DU rounds, and distinctive aluminum casings with two white bands, that drilled into the tile and concrete rear of the building. DU residue at impact clicked on the Geiger counter at a relatively low level, just 12 times background radiation levels.
Hot bullets
But the finger-sized bullets themselves - littering the ground where looters and former staff are often walking - were the “hottest” items the Monitor measured in Iraq, at nearly 1,900 times background levels.
The site is just 300 yards from where American troops guard the main entrance of the Republican Palace, home to the US and British officials tasked with rebuilding Iraq.
“Radioactive? Oh, really?” asks a former director general of the ministry, when he returned in a jacket and tie for a visit last week, and heard the contamination levels register in bursts on the Geiger counter.
“Yesterday more than 1,000 employees came here, and they didn’t know anything about it,” the former official says. “We have started to not believe what the American government says. What I know is that the occupiers should clean up and take care of the country they invaded.”
US military officials often say that most people are exposed to natural or “background” radiation n daily life. For example, a round-trip flight across the US can yield a 5 millirem dose from increased cosmic radiation; a chest X-ray can yield a 10 millirem dose in a few seconds.
The Pentagon says that, since DU is “depleted” and 40 percent less radioactive than normal uranium, it presents even less of a hazard.
But DU experts say they are most concerned at how DU is transformed on the battlefield, after burning, into a toxic oxide dust that emits alpha particles. While those can be easily stopped by the skin, once inside the body, studies have shown that they can destroy cells in soft tissue. While one study on rats linked DU fragments in muscle tissue to increased cancer risk, health effects on humans remain inconclusive.
As late as five days before the Iraq war began, Pentagon officials said that 90 of those troops most heavily exposed to DU during the 1991 Gulf War have shown no health problems whatsoever, and remain under close medical scrutiny.
Released documents and past admissions from military officials, however, estimate that around 900 Americans were exposed to DU. Only a fraction have been watched, and among those has been one diagnosed case of lymphatic cancer, and one arm tumor. As reported in previous articles, the Monitor has spoken to American veterans who blame their DU exposure for serious health problems.
The politics of DU
But DU health concerns are very often wrapped up in politics. Saddam Hussein’s regime blamed DU used in 1991 for causing a spike in the cancer rate and birth defects in southern Iraq.
And the Pentagon often overstates its case - in terms of DU effectiveness on the battlefield, or declaring the absence of health problems, according to Dan Fahey, an American veterans advocate who has monitored the shrill arguments from both sides since the mid-1990s.
“DU munitions are neither the benign wonder weapons promoted by Pentagon propagandists nor the instruments of genocide decried by hyperbolic anti-DU activists,” Mr. Fahey writes in a March report, called “Science or Science Fiction: Facts, Myth and Propaganda in the Debate Over DU Weapons.”
Nonetheless, Rep. Jim McDermott (D) of Washington, a doctor who visited Baghdad before the war, introduced legislation in Congress last month requiring studies on health and environment studies, and clean up of DU contamination in the US. He says DU may well be associated with increased birth defects.
“While the political effects of using DU munitions are perhaps more apparent than their health and environmental effects,” Fahey writes, “science and common sense dictate it is unwise to use a weapon that distributes large quantities of a toxic waste in areas where people live, work, grow food, or draw water.”
Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the issue, Iraqis worry about DU.
“It is an important concern…. We know nothing about it. How can I protect my family?” asks Faiz Askar, an Iraqi doctor. “We say the war is finished, but what will the future bring?”
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Hacking the Mind
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
Intrusive Brain Reading Surveillance Technology
“We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain. ~~Dr José Delgado. Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974.
The Guardian newspaper, that defender of truth in the United Kingdom, published an article by the Science Correspondent, Ian Sample, on 9 February 2007 entitled:
‘The Brain Scan that can read people’s intentions’, with the sub-heading: ‘Call for ethical debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation”.
“Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall”, the scientists were reported as saying.
At the same time, London’s Science Museum was holding an exhibition entitled ‘Neurobotics: The Future of Thinking’. This venue had been chosen for the launch in October 2006 of the news that human thoughts could be read using a scanner. Dr Geraint Rees’ smiling face could be seen in a photograph at the Neurobotics website, under the heading “The Mind Reader”. Dr Rees is one of the scientists who have apparently cracked the problem which has preoccupied philosophers and scientists since before Plato: they had made entry into the conscious mind. Such a reversal of human historical evolution, announced in such a pedestrian fashion, makes one wonder what factors have been in play, and what omissions made, in getting together this show, at once banal and extraordinary. The announcement arrives as if out of a vacuum. The neuroscientist - modern-style hunter-gatherer of information and darling of the “Need to Know” policies of modern government - does little to explain how he achieved this goal of entering the conscious mind, nor does he put his work into any historical context. Instead, we are asked in the Science Museum’s programme notes:
How would you feel if someone could read your innermost thoughts? Geraint Rees of UCL says he can. By using brain-imaging technology he’s beginning to decode thought and explore the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind. But how far will it go? And shouldn’t your thoughts remain your personal business?
If Dr Rees has decoded the mind sufficiently for such an announcement to be made in an exhibition devoted to it, presumably somewhere is the mind which has been, and is continuing to be, decoded. He is not merely continuing his experiments using functional magnetic resolution scanning (fMRI) in the way neuroscientists have been observing their subjects under scanning devices for years, asking them to explain what they feel or think while the scientists watch to see which area lights up, and what the cerebral flow in the brain indicates for various brain areas. Dr Rees is decoding the mind in terms of conscious and unconscious processes. For that, one must have accessed consciousness itself. Whose consciousness? Where is the owner of that consciousness – and unconsciousness? How did he/she feel? Why not ask them to tell us how it feels, instead of asking us.
The Neurobotics Exhibition was clearly set up to make these exciting new discoveries an occasion for family fun, and there were lots of games for visitors to play. One gets the distinct impression that we are being softened up for the introduction of radical new technology which will, perhaps, make the mind a communal pool rather than an individual possession. Information technology seeks to connect us all to each other in as many ways as possible, but also, presumably, to those vast data banks which allow government control not only to access all information about our lives, but now also to our thoughts, even to our unconscious processing. Does anyone care?
One of the most popular exhibits was the ‘Mindball’ game, which required two players to go literally head-to-head in a battle for brainpower, and used ‘brainpower’ alone. Strapped up with headbands which pick up brain waves, the game uses neurofeedback, but the person who is calm and relaxed wins the game. One received the impression that this calmness was the spirit that the organisers wished to reinforce, to deflect any undue public panic that might arise from the news that private thoughts could now be read with a scanner. The ingress into the mind as a private place was primarily an event to be enjoyed with the family on an afternoon out:
Imagine being able to control a computer with only the power of your mind. Or read people’s thoughts and know if they’re lying. And what if a magnetic shock to the brain could make you more creative…but should we be able to engineer our minds?Think your thoughts are private? Ever told a lie and been caught red-handed? Using brain-scanning technology, scientists are beginning to probe our minds and tell if we’re lying. Other scientists are decoding our desires and exploring the difference between our conscious and unconscious mind. But can you really trust the technology?
Other searching questions are raised in the program notes, and more games:
Find out if you’ve got what it takes to be a modern-day spy in this new interactive family exhibition. After being recruited as a trainee spy, explore the skills and abilities required by real agents and use some of the latest technologies that help spies gather and analyse information. Later go on and discover what it’s like to be spied upon. Uncover a secret store of prototype gadgets that give you a glimpse into the future of spy technologies and finally use everything you’ve learnt to escape before qualifying as a fully-fledged agent!
There were also demonstrations of grateful paraplegics and quadriplegics showing how the gods of science have so unselfishly liberated them from their prisons: this was the serious Nobel Prize side of the show. But there was no-one representing Her Majesty’s government to demonstrate how these very same devices can be used quite freely, and with relative ease, in our wireless age, to conduct experiments on free-ranging civilians tracked anywhere in the world, and using an infinitely extendable form of electrode which doesn’t require visible contact with the scalp at all. Electrodes, like electricity, can also take an invisible form – an electrode is a terminal of an electric source through which electrical energy or current may flow in or out. The brain itself is an electrical circuit. Every brain has its own unique resonating frequency. The brain is an infinitely more sensitive receiver and transmitter than the computer, and even in the wireless age, the comprehension of how wireless networks operate appears not to extend to the workings of the brain. The monotonous demonstration of scalps with electrodes attached to them, in order to demonstrate the contained conduction of electrical charges, is a scientific fatuity, in so far as it is intended to demonstrate comprehensively the capability of conveying charges to the brain, or for that matter, to any nerve in the body, as a form of invisible torture.
As Neurobotics claims: ‘Your brain is amazing’, but the power and control over brains and nervous systems achieved by targeting brain frequencies with radiowaves must have been secretly amazing government scientists for many years. The problem that now arises, at the point of readiness when so much has been achieved, is how to put the technology into action in such a way, as it will be acceptable in the public domain. This requires getting it through wider government and legal bodies, and for that, it must be seen to spring from the unbiased scientific investigations into the workings of the brain, in the best tradition of the leading universities. It is given over to Dr Rees and his colleague, Professor Haynes, endowed with the disclosure for weightier Guardian readers, to carry the torch for the government. Those involved may also have noted the need to show the neuroscientist in a more responsible light, following US neuroengineer for government sponsored Lockheed Martin, John Norseen’s, ingenuous comment, in 2000, about his belief about the consequences of his work in fMRI:
‘If this research pans out’, said Norseen, ‘you can begin to manipulate what someone is thinking even before they know it.’ And added: “The ethics don’t concern me, but they should concern someone else.”
While the neuroscientists report their discovery (without even so much as the specific frequency of the light employed by this scanner/torch), issuing ethical warnings while incongruously continuing with their mind-blowing work, the government which sponsors them, remains absolutely mute. The present probing of people’s intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions is being expanded into the more complex and subtle aspects of thinking and feeling. We have, however, next to no technical information about their methods. The description of ‘shining a torch around the brain’ is as absurd a report as one could read of a scientific endeavour, especially one that carries such enormous implications for the future of mankind. What is this announcement, with its technical obfuscation, preparing us for?
Writing in Wired contributing editor Steve Silberman points out that the lie-detection capability of fMRI is ‘poised to transform the security system, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy’. He quotes Cephos founder, Steven Laken, whose company plans to market the new technology for lie detection. Laken cites detainees held without charge at Guantanamo Bay as a potential example. ‘If these detainees have information we haven’t been able to extract that could prevent another 9/11, I think most Americans would agree that we should be doing whatever it takes to extract it’. Silberman also quotes Paul Root Wolpe, a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, who describes the accelerated advances in fMRI as ‘ a textbook example of how something can be pushed forward by the convergence of basic science, the government directing research through funding, and special interests who desire a particular technology’. Are we to believe that with the implied capability to scan jurors’ brains, the judiciary, the accused and the defendant alike, influencing one at the expense of the other, that the legal implications alone of mind-accessing scanners on university campuses, would not rouse the Minister for Justice from his bench to say a few words about these potential mind weapons?
So what of the ethical debate called for by the busy scientists and the Guardian’s science reporter? Can this technology- more powerful in subverting thought itself than anything in prior history – really be confined to deciding whether the ubiquitously invoked terrorist has had the serious intention of blowing up the train, or whether it was perhaps a foolish prank to make a bomb out of chapatti flour? We can assume that the government would certainly not give the go-ahead to the Science Museum Exhibition, linked to Imperial College, a major government-sponsored institution in laser-physics, if it was detrimental to surveillance programs. It is salutary to bear in mind that government intelligence research is at least ten years ahead of any public disclosure. It is implicit from history that whatever affords the undetectable entry by the gatekeepers of society into the brain and mind, will not only be sanctioned, but funded and employed by the State, more specifically by trained operatives in the security forces, given powers over defenceless citizens, and unaccountable to them.
The actual technology which is now said to be honing the technique ‘to distinguish between passing thoughts and genuine intentions’ is described by Professor John-Dylan Haynes in the Guardian in the most disarmingly untechnical language which must surely not have been intended to enlighten.
The Guardian piece ran as follows:
A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act.The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists’ ability to probe people’s minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.
‘Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,’ said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.
We know therefore that they are using light, but fMRI has been used for many years to attempt the unravelling of neuronal activity, and while there have been many efforts to record conscious and unconscious processes, with particular emphasis on the visual cortex, there has been no progress into consciousness itself. We can be sure that we are not being told the real story.
Just as rats and chimpanzees have been used to demonstrate findings from remote experiments on humans, electrode implants used on cockroaches to remotely control them, lasers used to steer fruit-flies , and worms engineered so that their nerves and muscles can be controlled with pinpricks of light, the information and techniques that have been ruthlessly forged using opportunistic onslaughts on defenceless humans as guinea pigs - used for myriad purposes from creating 3D haptic gloves in computer games to creating artificial intelligence to send visual processing into outer space - require appropriate replication for peer group approval and to meet ethical demands for scientific and public probity.
The use of light to peer into the brain is almost certainly that of terahertz, which occurs in the wavelengths which lie between 30mm and 1mm of the electromagnetic spectrum. Terahertz has the ability to penetrate deep into organic materials, without (it is said) the damage associated with ionising radiation such as x-rays. It can distinguish between materials with varying water content – for example fat versus lean meat. These properties lend themselves to applications in process and quality control as well as biomedical imaging. Terahertz can penetrate bricks, and also human skulls. Other applications can be learnt from the major developer of terahertz in the UK, Teraview, which is in Cambridge, and partially owned by Toshiba.
Efforts to alert human rights’ groups about the loss of the mind as a place to call your own, have met with little discernible reaction, in spite of reports about over decades of the dangers of remote manipulation using technology to access the mind, Dr Nick Begich’s book, Controlling the human mind, being an important recent contribution. A different approach did in fact, elicit a response. When informed of the use of terahertz at Heathrow and Luton airports in the UK to scan passengers, the news that passengers would be revealed naked by a machine which looked directly through their clothes produced a small, but highly indignant, article in the spring 2007 edition of the leading human rights organisation, Liberty. If the reading of the mind met with no protest, seeing through one’s clothes certainly did. It seems humans’ assumption of the mind as a private place has been so secured by evolution that it will take a sustained battle to convince the public that, through events of which we are not yet fully informed, such former innocence has been lost.
Trained light, targeted atomic spectroscopy, the use of powerful magnets to absorb moisture from human tissues, the transfer of radiative energy – these have replaced the microwave harassment which was used to transmit auditory messages directly into the hearing. With the discovery of light to disentangle thousands of neurons and encode signals from the complex circuitry of the brain, present programs will not even present the symptoms which simulated schizoid states. Medically, even if terahertz does not ionise, we do not yet know how the sustained application of intense light will affect the delicate workings of the brain and how cells might be damaged, dehydrated, stretched, obliterated.
This year, 2007, has also brought the news that terahertz lasers small enough to incorporate into portable devices had been developed.
Sandia National Laboratories in the US in collaboration with MIT have produced a transmitter-receiver (transceiver) that enables a number of applications. In addition to scanning for explosives, we may also assume their integration into hand-held communication systems. ‘These semiconductor devices have output powers which previously could only be obtained by molecular gas lasers occupying cubic meters and weighing more than 100kg, or free electron lasers weighing tons and occupying buildings.’ As far back as 1996 the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board predicted that the development of electromagnetic energy sources would ‘open the door for the development of some novel capabilities that can be used in armed conflict, in terrorist/hostage situations, and in training’ and ‘new weapons that offer the opportunity of control of an adversary … can be developed around this concept’.
The surveillance technology of today is the surveillance of the human mind and, through access to the brain and nervous system, the control of behaviour and the body’s functions. The messaging of auditory hallucinations has given way to silent techniques of influencing and implanting thoughts. The development of the terahertz technologies has illuminated the workings of the brain, facilitated the capture of emitted photons which are derived from the visual cortex which processes picture formation in the brain, and enabled the microelectronic receiver which has, in turn, been developed by growing unique semi-conductor crystals. In this way, the technology is now in place for the detection and reading of spectral ‘signatures’ of gases. All humans emit gases. Humans, like explosives, emit their own spectral signature in the form of a gas. With the reading of the brain’s electrical frequency, and of the spectral gas signature, the systems have been established for the control of populations – and with the necessary technology integrated into a cell-phone.
‘We are very optimistic about working in the terahertz electromagnetic spectrum,’ says the principal investigator of the Terahertz Microelectronics Transceiver at Sandia: ‘This is an unexplored area, and a lot of science can come out of it. We are just beginning to scratch the surface of what THz can do to improve national security’.
~~~~~~
Carole Smith was born and educated in Australia, where she gained a Bachelor of Arts degree at Sydney University. She trained as a psychoanalyst in London where she has had a private practice. In recent years she has been a researcher into the invasive methods of accessing minds using technological means, and has published papers on the subject.
She has written the first draft of a book entitled: “The Controlled Society”.The ethical implications of building machines to read people’s minds, DISSENT, Issue 25, http://www.dissent.com.au/index.htm
From Carole Smith newcriteria@blueyonder.co.uk Dec 12/07. The Canberra-based magazine DISSENT is sold at selected bookshops and by subscription.
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Rules of War as Outlined in Geneva Conventions
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
1. Attacks may be made solely against military targets. Parties to a conflict must distinguish between civilians and combatants, and civilians may not be attacked.
2. Persons who do not or can no longer take part in the hostilities are entitled to respect for their life and for their physical and mental integrity.
3. It is forbidden to kill or wound an adversary who has surrendered or who can no longer take part in the fighting.
4. The wounded and sick must be cared for by the party that holds them. Medical personnel and facilities, identified by the Red Cross or Red Crescent symbol, must not be attacked.
5. Prisoners are entitled to respect for their life, their dignity, their personal rights, and their beliefs.
6. Torture, cruel or degrading corporal and other punishment is forbidden.
7. Weapons and methods of warfare likely to cause unnecessary losses or excessive suffering, or severe or long-term damage to the environment, may not be used.
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Guantanamo “Living like an animal living in a cage”
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
| By | Mohamed Vall in Khartoum, Sudan |
Adil Hassan Hamad can scarcely believe he is back with his family in Sudan, because only days ago he was still in the US’s Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
“I am very, very happy and not believing this,” Adil tells Al Jazeera, “That I am here with my family - even now I feel this could all be taken away at any moment.”
In 2002, Adil and another man, Salim Mahmoud Adam, were picked up from their homes in Peshawar, Pakistan, by Pakistani troops and were later handed over to the US.
Most of his children were babies when their father, who was then working as the director of a hospital in Afghanistan, was taken to Guantanamo.
His daughter, Rahma, now six, was only a few months old when he was taken and now her father seems like a stranger.
“She knows I am her father,” says Adil, balancing Rahma on his knee and holding her close. “But she’s not used to me.”
“Like a cage”
Since his release from Guantanamo, family, friends and neighbours have come to Adil’s home in Khartoum to greet a man many thought they might never see again.
Adil recounts stories of torture, interrogation and solitary confinement when speaks of his time in the prison.
“The cell was all made of iron on iron. You don’t see anyone or hear anything,” he says.
“It was a boring and miserable life… psychologically very tiresome. It was like a cage … like an animal living in a cage.”
Among those present to celebrate Adil’s return is Assim al-Haj, brother of Sami al-Haj, the Al Jazeera cameraman imprisoned in Guantanamo six years ago.
He listens to Adil’s story of his release from the prison, but knows that his brother’s health is deteriorating in captivity.
“Injustice and abuse”
More than 750 people have been held in Guantanamo since January 2002 and only three have been formally charged.
 |
| Despite international criticism, there are few signs the US will close the prison [GALLO/GETTY] |
Even with the recent releases, over 270 detainees remain in Guantanamo Bay.
The US supreme court has reviewed the legal status of Guantanamo prisoners on several occasions and found in favour of the inmates - that they should be allowed to have the legality of their detention examined by US courts.
The US administration, which argues that since the base is outside the country rights under the US constitution do not apply, has avoided following this judgment.
Amnesty International, the UK-based human rights group, has called Guantanamo “a symbol of injustice and abuse” and called on the US government to close the down the prison “in a transparent manner which fully respects the human rights of those detained and brings to fair trial all those who are accused of recognisable crimes”.
But though the US has drawn international criticism for holding foreign nationals captive in Guantanamo, there are few signs that the US has any plans to close the prison.
Adil and Salim were two of 15 people, the rest Afghan, recently released by the US. Neither have ever been told why they were imprisoned.
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Congressmen urge impeachment
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
US Vice President Dick Cheney (L)
Three senior US Democrats in Congress urge the immediate commencement of hearings on the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Democrats Robert Wexler of Florida, Luis Gutierrez of Illinois and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin have declared the issues of concern regarding the vice president to be ‘too serious to ignore’.
The three senior members of the House Judiciary Committee said the charges include “credible allegations of abuse of power that if proven may well constitute high crimes and misdemeanors under the constitution”.
“The charges against vice president relate to his deceptive actions leading up to the Iraq war, the revelation of the identity of a covert agent for political retaliation and the illegal wiretapping of American citizens,” the congressmen explained.
The House members added that the recent revelations regarding Iran’s nuclear program have shown that the Administration “may have again manipulated and exaggerated evidence’ in a bid to push the United States to yet another war”.
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Ron Paul: Bush no authority to rule world
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
Presidential hopeful Ron Paul says President Bush has started empire-building by invading Iraq and Afghanistan and beating the drums of war with Iran.
Presidential hopeful Ron Paul
The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 without a declaration of war by Congress was the most egregious violation of the Constitution in the last 20 years, Paul told Lahontan Valley News (LVN) prior to a campaign speech in Fallon.
He also rejected that there is any military threat to the US and said “to try to propose that the Iraqis were trying to attack us was ridiculous. Now they are doing it with the Iranians and they have proven wrong again.”
During his campaign speech the Republican presidential candidate affirmed that no country has the power to control the world.
“There’s no constitutional authority to rule the world,” he said.
Regarding the threats the US is facing the Texas congressman said that the Chinese could bring the US to their knees with or without any other nation by just rejecting our dollar.
Paul believes financial problems, Washington’s invasion of the US citizens’ privacy and taxation are the major threats to the US.
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Troops investigated over smuggling stolen guns
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
By Jonathan Owen and Andrew Johnson
British soldiers are under investigation over the theft of a weapons cache in Iraq. The Ministry of Defence launched an inquiry after troops attempted to smuggle the weapons back to Britain.
The discovery of the weapons, stolen from an Iraqi police station and believed to be one of the largest hauls uncovered, has fuelled growing concerns that weapons confiscated by British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are being brought back illegally to the UK and could get into the hands of criminals.
Fears that weapons from war zones could inflame Britain’s growing gun crime problems have prompted high-level talks between the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence. Customs and MoD police have stepped up inspections of military bases and convoys, with RAF bases and military ports being targeted as part of a fresh attempt by the Government to restrict the supply of guns.
Troops are permitted to bring back deactivated weapons as trophies for regimental museums and messes but not as individual mementoes.
Despite this, searches at UK bases have already uncovered live weapons hidden in the petrol tanks of military vehicles and even in the gun barrels of tanks and artillery pieces. Live ammunition including shells and mortar rounds has also been confiscated.
The new security measures are part of a package of policies implemented by a ministerial task force to tackle the problem of gangs and gun crime set up after the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool in August. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, are being personally briefed on a weekly basis by Deputy Chief Constable Jon Murphy, the Association of Chief Police Officers’ serious and organised crime co-ordinator, who heads the task force.
“There have been recent incidents where weapons have been stolen by military personnel in Iraq that have left Iraq, and we know that for a fact… unfortunately some of those weapons do leak back into the criminal market,” said Mr Murphy.
The number of guns involved in the latest investigation is understood to run into double figures, with several soldiers suspected of involvement. Mr Murphy admitted that it is a “live investigation with the MoD” which could result in courts martial.
He warns that while one shipment of guns has been stopped, others may have got through. “It is generally accepted that some military weapons are being brought back to Britain and ending up in the hands of criminals,” he said. “We are not really clear what the scale of that problem is and we are trying to get to the bottom of that by working with the Ministry of Defence. We’ve had meetings with them to try to get a handle on how big a problem it is.”
There has long been a culture of soldiers wanting to bring back personal souvenirs from war zones, which the MoD allows. But a worrying trend has developed in recent years with some military personnel seeking to profit from the thousands of pounds that a smuggled military weapon can fetch on the black market. Soldiers are even resorting to hiding weapons in the barrels of tanks, oil drums, or underneath vehicles, according to senior customs officials.
“You have to remember that these guys have lived with their guns for six months in theatre, and these things are bound to happen,” a MoD spokesman said. The RAF carried out routine searches of equipment and personnel as they come in, he added. “Everyone’s equipment at the port of embarkation is searched in the same way security at normal airports would take place. There is no evidence of illegal weapons being brought out through RAF air bases. We have no evidence that illegal weapons have been imported and none has been found during searches… but I have to accept that we have had a number of cases where soldiers have been caught in possession of firearms.”
Two soldiers who had smuggled stolen guns out of Iraq were jailed at a court martial last month. Prosecution evidence said the soldiers, from The Yorkshire Regiment, were part of a nine-man smuggling ring that served in Basra between October 2004 and April 2005. The weapons were discovered after some were sold on to fellow soldiers.
In September, Private Christopher Trussler, of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, was jailed for three years after he admitted stealing and possessing British Army 9mm ammunition which he attempted to sell to an undercover police officer. The court heard that Trussler also told the officer he could obtain an AK-47 but there was a wait for the weapon to be obtained and reactivated. The trial judge criticised military accounting procedures after hearing the ammunition came from a live firing exercise in Northern Ireland and was not returned.
In 2005 a Royal Marine from Lanarkshire, Scotland, was jailed for two years in December 2005 after bringing a captured Kalashnikov AK47 assault rifle back from Iraq. A rocket-propelled grenade launcher, rifles and even a 60mm mortar are among the weaponry that has been brought back to Britain since the start of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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US: Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
Eric Lichtblau, James Risen and Scott Shane
For months, the Bush administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program.
But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime. The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.
To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.
In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.
The federal government’s reliance on private industry has been driven by changes in technology. Two decades ago, telephone calls and other communications traveled mostly through the air, relayed along microwave towers or bounced off satellites. The N.S.A. could vacuum up phone, fax and data traffic merely by erecting its own satellite dishes. But the fiber optics revolution has sent more and more international communications by land and undersea cable, forcing the agency to seek company cooperation to get access.
After the disclosure two years ago that the N.S.A. was eavesdropping on the international communications of terrorism suspects inside the United States without warrants, more than 40 lawsuits were filed against the government and phone carriers. As a result, skittish companies and their lawyers have been demanding stricter safeguards before they provide access to the government and, in some cases, are refusing outright to cooperate, officials said.
“It’s a very frayed and strained relationship right now, and that’s not a good thing for the country in terms of keeping all of us safe,” said an industry official who believes that immunity is critical for the phone carriers. “This episode has caused companies to change their conduct in a variety of ways.”
With a vote in the Senate on the issue expected as early as Monday, the Bush administration has intensified its efforts to win retroactive immunity for companies cooperating with counterterrorism operations.
“The intelligence community cannot go it alone,” Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed article Monday urging Congress to pass the immunity provision. “Those in the private sector who stand by us in times of national security emergencies deserve thanks, not lawsuits.”
Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey echoed that theme in an op-ed article of his own in The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, saying private companies would be reluctant to provide their “full-hearted help” if they were not given legal protections.
The government’s dependence on the phone industry, driven by the changes in technology and the Bush administration’s desire to expand surveillance capabilities inside the United States, has grown significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks. The N.S.A., though, wanted to extend its reach even earlier. In December 2000, agency officials wrote a transition report to the incoming Bush administration, saying the agency must become a “powerful, permanent presence” on the commercial communications network, a goal that they acknowledged would raise legal and privacy issues.
While the N.S.A. operates under restrictions on domestic spying, the companies have broader concerns - customers’ demands for privacy and shareholders’ worries about bad publicity.
In the drug-trafficking operation, the N.S.A. has been helping the Drug Enforcement Administration in collecting the phone records showing patterns of calls between the United States, Latin America and other drug-producing regions. The program dates to the 1990s, according to several government officials, but it appears to have expanded in recent years.
Officials say the government has not listened to the communications, but has instead used phone numbers and e-mail addresses to analyze links between people in the United States and overseas. Senior Justice Department officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations signed off on the operation, which uses broad administrative subpoenas but does not require court approval to demand the records.
At least one major phone carrier - whose identity could not be confirmed - refused to cooperate, citing concerns in 2004 that the subpoenas were overly broad, government and industry officials said. The executives also worried that if the program were exposed, the company would face a public-relations backlash.
The D.E.A. declined to comment on the call-tracing program, except to say that it “exercises its legal authority” to issue administrative subpoenas. The N.S.A. also declined to comment on it.
In a separate program, N.S.A. officials met with the Qwest executives in February 2001 and asked for more access to their phone system for surveillance operations, according to people familiar with the episode. The company declined, expressing concerns that the request was illegal without a court order.
While Qwest’s refusal was disclosed two months ago in court papers, the details of the N.S.A.’s request were not. The agency, those knowledgeable about the incident said, wanted to install monitoring equipment on Qwest’s “Class 5″ switching facilities, which transmit the most localized calls. Limited international traffic also passes through the switches.
A government official said the N.S.A. intended to single out only foreigners on Qwest’s network, and added that the agency believed Joseph Nacchio, then the chief executive of Qwest, and other company officials misunderstood the agency’s proposal. Bob Toevs, a Qwest spokesman, said the company did not comment on matters of national security.
Other N.S.A. initiatives have stirred concerns among phone company workers. A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Jersey challenging the agency’s wiretapping operations. It claims that in February 2001, just days before agency officials met with Qwest officials, the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it.
The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency “could listen in” with unfettered access to communications that it believed had intelligence value and store them for later review. There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said.
“At some point,” he said, “I started feeling something isn’t right.”
Two other AT&T employees who worked on the proposal discounted his claims, saying in interviews that the project had simply sought to improve the N.S.A.’s internal communications systems and was never designed to allow the agency access to outside communications. Michael Coe, a company spokesman, said: “AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security.”
But lawyers for the plaintiffs say that if the suit were allowed to proceed, internal AT&T documents would verify the engineer’s account.
“What he saw,” said Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing the plaintiffs along with Carl Mayer, “was decisive evidence that within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans’ phone usage.”
The same lawsuit accuses Verizon of setting up a dedicated fiber optic line from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center. In an interview, a former consultant who worked on internal security said he had tried numerous times to install safeguards on the line to prevent hacking on the system, as he was doing for other lines at the operations center, but his ideas were rejected by a senior security official.
The facts behind a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco are also shrouded in government secrecy. The case relies on disclosures by a former AT&T employee, Mark Klein, who says he stumbled upon a secret room at an company facility in San Francisco that was reserved for the N.S.A. Company documents he obtained and other former AT&T employees have lent some support to his claim that the facility gave the agency access to a range of domestic and international Internet traffic.
The telecommunications companies that gave the government access are pushing hard for legal protection from Congress. As part of a broader plan to restructure the N.S.A.’s wiretapping authority, the Senate Intelligence Committee agreed to give immunity to the telecommunications companies, but the Judiciary Committee refused to do so. The White House has threatened to veto any plan that left out immunity, as the House bill does.
“Congress shouldn’t grant amnesty to companies that broke the law by conspiring to illegally spy on Americans” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.
But Bobby R. Inman, a retired admiral and former N.S.A. director who has publicly criticized the agency’s domestic eavesdropping program, says he still supports immunity for the companies that cooperated. “The responsibility ought to be on the government, not on the companies that are trying to help with national security requirements,” Admiral Inman said. If the companies decided to stop cooperating, he added, “it would have a huge impact on both the timeliness and availability of critical intelligence.”
Have Your Say: US: Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry
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