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VIDEO: Insanely Corrupt - “Mercury is good for you!”

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZArebYZzdc[/youtube]
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/280.html

Now I’ve seen it all

This is how insanely corrupt the United States has become.The pharmaceutical industry that has handicapped countless children with mercury-based vaccines is able to buy a study that says a known neuro-toxin is good for the brains of infants and small children and improves their behavior!

First, “behavior” is not quantifiable and is completely subjective. There’s no science here. Just corruption of science on an inconceivable scale.

Second, mercury is a poison, a neuro-toxin that destroys the functioning of the central nervous system. There is no conceivable justification for it to be mainlined into the bloodstream of anyone for any reason ever.

You may want to watch this twice so you can be sure you really heard what you thought you heard.

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McCain’s Other War Frauds

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

James Bovard

Amongst all the media teeth-gnashing over the question of whether McCain did special favors for his blondie lobbyist, his wife’s sweetheart deal for massive narcotics theft in the 1990s has been forgotten.

If a poor black woman from Anacostia had committed the crimes that Cindy McCain committed, the black woman might have been sent to prison for the duration of her life.

John McCain has never shown any courage on the drug war. As long as people like his wife don’t need to fear jail time for crimes, there is no reason to reform the law to cease the persecution of other Americans.

Here’s an excerpt on the case from an article I did for Playboy in 1997. (Full text of the piece, which details how many congressmen’s kin escaped hard time for drug offenses, is here).

* Cindy McCain, the wife of Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), admitted stealing Percocet and Vicodin from the American Voluntary Medical Team, an organization that aids Third World countries. Percocet and Vicodin are schedule 2 drugs, in the same legal category as opium. Each pill theft carries a penalty of one year in prison and a monetary fine. McCain stole the pills over several years. She became addicted to the drugs after undergoing back surgery.

But rather than face prosecution, McCain was allowed to enter a pretrial diversion program and escaped with no blemish on her record. McCain did suffer from the incident, though: Shortly after the scandal broke, a Variety Club of Arizona ceremony at which she was to receive a humanitarian of the year award for her work with the medical team was canceled because of poor ticket sales.

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The new invasion of Iraq

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Up to 10,000 Turkish troops launch an incursion which threatens to destabilise the country’s only peaceful region

By Patrick Cockburn

A new crisis has exploded in Iraq after Turkish troops, supported by attack planes and Cobra helicopters, yesterday launched a major ground offensive into Iraqi Kurdistan.

The invading Turkish soldiers are in pursuit of Kurdish guerrillas hiding in the mountains. They are seeking to destroy the camps of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) along the border between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. “Thousands of troops have crossed the border and thousands more are waiting at the border to join them if necessary,” said a Turkish military source.

“There are severe clashes,” said Ahmed Danees, the head of foreign relations for the PKK. “Two Turkish soldiers have been killed and eight wounded. There are no PKK casualties.” Turkish television said that the number of Turkish troops involved was between 3,000 and 10,000, and they had moved 16 miles inside Iraq.

But the escalating Turkish attacks are destabilising the Kurdish region of Iraq which is the one peaceful part of the country and has visibly benefited from the US invasion.

The Iraqi Kurds are America’s closest allies in Iraq and the only Iraqi community to support fully the US occupation. The president of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, said recently he felt let down by the failure of the Iraqi government in Baghdad to stop Turkish bombing raids on Iraqi territory.

The incursion is embarrassing for the US, which tried to avert it, because the American military provides intelligence to the Turkish armed forces about the location of the camps of Turkish Kurd fighters. Immediately before the operation began, the Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, called President George Bush to warn him.

The US and the Iraqi government are eager to play down the extent of the invasion. Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a US spokesman for Iraq, said: “We understand [it] is an operation of limited duration to specifically target PKK terrorists in that region.” The Iraqi Foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, claimed that only a few hundred Turkish troops were in Iraq.

But since last year Turkey has succeeded, by making limited incursions into Kurdistan, in establishing a de facto right to intervene militarily in Kurdistan whenever it feels like it.

Many Iraqi Kurdish leaders are convinced that a hidden aim of the Turkish attack is to undermine the Kurdish region, which enjoys autonomous rights close to statehood. Ankara has always seen the semi-independence of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Kurds’ claim to the oil city of Kirkuk, as providing a dangerous example for Kurds in Turkey who are also demanding autonomy.

Many Turkish companies carrying out construction contracts in the region have already left. And businesses that remain are frightened that Ankara will close Iraqi Kurdistan’s lifeline over the Harbour Bridge into Turkey.

During the 1990s the Turkish army carried out repeated attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan with the tacit permission of Saddam Hussein, but this is the first significant offensive since the US invasion of 2003. “A land operation is a whole new level,” said the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza, adding that the incursion was “not the greatest news”.

The Turkish army is unlikely to do much damage to the PKK, which has some 2,500 fighters hidden in a mountainous area that has few roads, with snow drifts making tracks impassable.

The Turkish ground offensive was preceded by bombing. “We were certain yesterday after this bombing that a military operation would take place and we got ready for it,” said Mr Danees, adding that bombing and artillery had destroyed three bridges on the Iraq-Turkish border as well as a PKK cemetery.

Another reason why Turkey has launched its offensive now has as much to do with Turkish internal politics as it does with any threat posed by the PKK. The PKK launched a military struggle on behalf of the Kurdish minority in eastern Turkey in 1984 which lasted until the PKK’s leader Abdullah Ocalan was seized in Kenya in 1999 and later put on trial in Turkey. The PKK has been losing support ever since among the Turkish Kurds, but at the end of last year it escalated guerrilla attacks, killing some 40 Turkish soldiers.

Limited though the PKK’s military activity has been, the Turkish army has used it to bolster its waning political strength. For its part, the mildly Islamic government of Mr Erdogan is frightened of being outflanked by jingoistic nationalists supporting the military. Mr Erdogan has pointed out that previous Turkish army incursions into Kurdistan in the 1990s all failed to dislodge the PKK.

The area which the Turkish army has entered in Iraqi Kurdistan is mostly desolate, with broken terrain in which bands of guerrillas can take refuge. The PKK says it has left its former bases and broken up into small units. The main bases of the PKK are along Iraq’s border with Iran, notably in the Kandil mountains, to the south of where the Turkish troops entered. At this time of year the villagers, many of them herders and shepherds, leave their houses and live in the towns in the plain below the mountains until the snow melts.

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The DNA database that will turn us into a Police State

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Daily Mail

We seem to be busily building the world’s first popular police state.

Opinion polls show high levels of support for identity cards, surveillance cameras, detention without trial - and now a national DNA database covering every individual, including those who have never had any dealings with the police.

Given the growing fear of crime, such attitudes are not surprising. Events in the past week have encouraged them further. Both Suffolk serial killer Steve Wright and Mark Dixie, murderer of Sally Anne Bowman, were caught largely through DNA samples. Police officers and victims’ relatives want the change. The case seems open and shut.

Britain already has the world’s largest DNA database. Anyone arrested in England and Wales is compelled to submit to a DNA swab and the record is kept whether he is convicted or not. In Scotland this rule is restricted to violent and sex offenders, and then for only three years unless an extension is applied for.

But the operation of the scheme south of the Border has led to the beginning of serious doubts. As so often with measures aimed at greater security, people are far less enthusiastic when they are affected personally.

Many entirely innocent citizens have been disturbed by the way they or their children have been registered - for life - as potential criminals. There have also been suggestions that police have abused their arrest powers to collect DNA samples.

The European Human Rights Court has been asked to rule next week on the case of two men from Sheffield who were arrested but not charged, and want their DNA records expunged.

But just because this annoying liberal court has poked its nose into our affairs, we should not necessarily dismiss these concerns.

Some types of DNA evidence have been questioned, particularly after the recent Omagh bombing trial.

Meanwhile, professional criminals are increasingly expert at destroying their own DNA traces or polluting crime scenes with false DNA trails.

It is not the magic bullet it first appeared to be.

There is another point. As the criminal justice system increasingly fails to deal with the low-level disorder that worries most people, it trumpets its rare successes in headline-making cases, such as those involving Wright and Dixie.

Yet it can be argued that old-fashioned close-to-the-ground police work might have caught these two just as quickly, if not sooner.

And - while it is essential that justice is done on such killers - the main job of the police is to prevent crime in the first place, and no DNA database can do that half as effectively as patrolling constables on foot.

Home Office Minister Tony McNulty is right to be cautious before treating the entire population as suspects.

He and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith should take the same view of equally worrying plans for ID cards, and for intrusive surveillance on travellers to Europe.

We are not all guilty, and we will lose much more than we gain if we submit ourselves to Big Brother.

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It’s official: Blair’s government set out to deceive us

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

The New Statesman

In July 2003, in the week following the death of David Kelly, a reader contacted the New Statesman and suggested that the media were missing the obvious. The Commons foreign affairs committee had just cleared the government of “sexing up” the September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - a claim, first made by Andrew Gilligan on the BBC’s Today programme, for which Dr Kelly may or may not have been the source.

Our caller pointed out that although the Commons committee had said it was satisfied the “first” draft dossier, produced on 10 September for a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), was the unspun work of intelligence, it had missed the true significance of a meeting the day before, chaired by Alastair Campbell.

Our caller was Chris Ames, whose name will for ever be etched on the memory of all those in government, particularly in the Foreign Office, who have resisted making public what has become known as the Williams draft (after John Williams, the Foreign Office press officer who wrote it). Using the Freedom of Information Act, Ames has doggedly pursued the evidence that he believed would show that the September dossier was the work not of intelligence experts, but of spin doctors whose intention was to “sex up” the known intelligence.

From denying that the document existed, to seeking to have it withheld because publication threatened government confidentiality, to claiming that the Williams draft was an uncommissioned activity by a bored press officer (who just happened to come up with conclusions similar to those of the JIC), the government has ducked and dived and done its utmost to obstruct Ames in his pursuit of the truth.

Now, almost five years after he first contacted us, Ames’s efforts have borne fruit. On 18 February, just two days before the deadline set by the Information Tribunal, the Foreign Office released the Williams draft.

Interpretations of its contents will differ, but on many counts the document speaks for itself. From it we learn that the draft was, without question, intended as part of a process of producing a dossier that would persuade the British people and parliament of the case for war. And, importantly, it shows us how much of the final dossier was the work of a spin doctor. Let’s not forget that the Blair government lied repeatedly about this. The draft also reveals the extent to which Williams reworded and rewrote - and occasionally invented - intelligence assessments that were later presented to the public as the work of intelligence experts and “judgements of the JIC”.

We have also learned how raw intelligence was pumped up to make a strongly worded “executive summary”. Thus, a draft report from the JIC which claimed that Iraq had “sought to develop” mobile facilities to produce a biological agent becomes, in Williams’s draft, “has developed transportable laboratories”. The strengthened Williams version fed into the 10 September dossier (still being claimed as the unspun work of intelligence) and the final document. Williams does not attempt to disguise the fact that his task is to produce a document which will persuade. Judge for yourself whether the following is driven by spin or intelligence:

The bombs that fell on Halabja that Friday morning were equipped with (what chemical?). (what does the chemical do to the body - how does it kill? Sorry to be grisly, but this will have real impact on real people, not journalists who take it as read).

As our political editor, Martin Bright, argues on page 10, the release of the Williams draft leaves no room for doubt that the Blair government set out to deceive us. Cynics may shrug. Governments lie. But the consequences of this deception have been catastrophic and tragic. The roll-call of victims runs into tens of thousands and includes that early casualty in July 2003, the government scientist whose suicide started an angry debate over whether the case for war had been “sexed up”.

Thanks to Chris Ames, we at last have an unequivocal answer. And it shames all those involved in the process.

The saints stop marching in

You can’t get to heaven,” went the old song, “in a limousine,/ ‘Cause the Lord don’t sell no gasoline.” Perhaps not, but under the last pope some felt that transport to the upper echelons of heaven was a little too swift. So many saints were created by John Paul II that it did seem as though he was running some form of celestial limo service, or “saint factory”, as others put it: 482 people were canonised and 1,338 beatified (the first stage to sainthood) by the pontiff - more than all his predecessors put together since the current procedures were laid down in 1588.

So news that Benedict XVI is to tighten the rules is to be welcomed by those who take such matters seriously. It may also be a relief, however, that the new rigour is not to be applied retrospectively. It is just possible that not all the “miracles” performed by or attributed to some saints would withstand modern scientific scrutiny.

What, say, are we to make of the Belgian shrine to the 11th-century St Godeliva? Drinking from her well is said to have a powerful, yet curiously specific, effect on sore throats. Or the 15th-century St Francis of Paola? Fame of his miracles spread in his own lifetime, yet they were occasionally of a rather prosaic nature. One involved setting a pot of broad beans boiling: handy if you’d run out of kindling, no doubt, but surely a power more appropriate to a domestic goddess than a holy man. What next - St Nigella? Not under the new rules, thank goodness.

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High-tech US border surveillance

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Washington warns that the recently-developed high-tech virtual fence on the US-Mexican border is fully prepared to tackle any form of illegal crossings.

The $20 million ‘Project 28′ features cutting-edge sensor towers and advanced mobile communications on a 45-km stretch of the southern border near Nogales, Arizona.

“I have personally witnessed the value of this system, and I have spoken directly to the Border Patrol agents … who have seen it produce actual results, in terms of identifying and allowing the apprehension of people who were illegally smuggling across the border,” said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Chertoff anticipated the high-tech surveillance equipments would finally put a stop to the highly charged political issue of immigration.

Rep. Bennie Thompson who heads the House of Representatives Homeland Security committee, however, criticized the plan for relying too much on contractors and barring Border Patrol agents from highlighting the ‘obvious flaws’.

“I would hope that they (Homeland Security officials) have learned from these mistakes,” he said.

SBB/RA

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Telecoms Backing Off Illegal Wiretaps for Bush

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Without protection against lawsuits, are the telecoms less willing to cooperate with government spying efforts?

By Mark Hosenball | Newsweek

It’s been barely a week since the Democratic-controlled Congress allowed a temporary electronic spying law to lapse. But U.S. intelligence agencies are already encountering problems maintaining and expanding vital operations, the Bush administration claims.

In a letter sent late on Friday to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey claimed that in the six days since the temporary law expired, some “partners” in intelligence operations have “reduced cooperation.” According to two government officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive material, the “partners” referred to in the letter are (unnamed) U.S. telecommunications companies, who-with administration backing-have been aggressively lobbying Congress for a controversial clause in new electronic spying legislation. The clause would effectively wipe out a series of private lawsuits seeking damages against the telecoms for their cooperation with what civil libertarians and administration critics claim was an illegal expansion of electronic spying against targets inside the U.S.-an expansion authorized by President Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

In their letter, McConnell and Mukasey claim that since the so-called Protect America Act lapsed, partners “have delayed or refused compliance with our requests to initiate new surveillances of terrorist and other foreign intelligence targets under existing directives issued pursuant to the Protect America Act.”

The letter continues: “Although most partners intend to cooperate for the time being, they have expressed deep misgivings about doing so in light of the uncertainty and have indicated that they may well cease to cooperate if the uncertainty persists.”
Mukasey and McConnell say that they are currently “working to mitigate these problems and are hopeful that our efforts will be successful.” But they add that unless Congress passes a version of a new electronic surveillance bill, approved by the Senate, which includes the controversial retroactive lawsuit immunity for telecom companies, “the broader uncertainty caused” by the temporary spy law’s expiration “will persist.” The letter adds that: “This uncertainty may well continue to cause us to miss information that we otherwise would be collecting.”

The letter amounts to a stepping-up of pressure on Democrats in Congress–and in the House in particular–to pass a surveillance bill to the liking of the White House and the telecom industry.

A majority in the Senate, with the backing of Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller, approved a bill which would extend many provisions of the electronic surveillance law that recently expired. That legislation, which was opposed by a small group of liberal senators, would also give the telecoms the retroactive immunity they are seeking.

The administration and the Senate majority pressured the House to go along with the Senate bill. But the House approved a version which contained additional civil-liberties protections-and omitted any retroactive immunity for the telecoms. That left Congress deadlocked; the White House has indicated President Bush will veto any version of a new surveillance law that does not include the immunity provision.

The letter from Mukasey and McConnell does not spell out precisely what kind of new intelligence operations are being thwarted because of the congressional impasse. And administration critics, including Rep. Reyes, have recently accused the administration and its supporters of exaggerating the threat to current intelligence activities caused by the congressional standoff.

Administration critics note that eavesdropping operations undertaken under the intel law which just lapsed are allowed to continue for 12 months after they were first authorized. However, administration officials claim the telecoms are nervous that the situation leaves them with insufficient protection against new private lawsuits.

In a statement released late Friday, Reyes, Rockefeller and several other Democrats lashed out at the White House’s tactics. “Further politicizing the debate, the administration today announced that they believe there have been gaps in security since the Protect America Act expired. They cannot have it both ways; if it is true that the expiration of the PAA has caused gaps in intelligence, then it was irresponsible for the President and congressional Republicans to openly oppose an extension of the law. Accordingly, they should join Democrats in extending it until we can resolve our differences.”

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Laying The Groundwork For One-World Religion?

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Ruth Gledhill

A diocese of the Church of England is giving an unprecedented £250,000 towards a multifaith building in which the largest amount of worship space will be reserved for Muslims.

The Guildford diocese is one of the wealthiest in the UK. The Bishop of Guildford, the Right Rev Christopher Hill, gave the £250,000 cheque yesterday to the University of Surrey for the first multifaith building of its kind in Britain.

The £6.5 million building will contain separate worship spaces for the Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Sikh communities, along with a further shared space for Buddhists and Hindus. All faiths will share the café in the basement, with a shared staircase down from the upper floors.

Converting each other will be forbidden, an insider said, but it is hoped that the different faith members will form friendships, learn to respect each other and enhance each other’s understanding.

Abdul Mateen Sansom, a Muslim chaplain, said: “As well as being a sorely needed practical solution to student needs, I believe the design and underpinning ethos of this project have potential for notable impact nationally and internationally.”

Lesley Scordellis, lead fundraiser for the centre and development manager at the University of Surrey, defended the Muslim advantage in the space allocation. “It isn’t about giving greater provision for Muslims, it is about likely numbers using it. We certainly have a strong demand for worship space from the Muslim community,” she said.

“We sit right beside Guildford Cathedral so the relative provision in the locality is very different.”

She continued: “We think it is the first of its kind. It breaks with the tradition of having a shared space for each faith. It is all in the same building but each has a completely separate space. The Jewish space has an exclusive kosher kitchen and the Muslim space has an ablutions facility. The design of the building is to facilitate the feeling that they are in one building about faith.”

The donation from the Guildford diocese has not been funded by parishioners but from an old will, the Onslow bequest, one of a number of similar “restricted” funds within the diocese that are used to finance mission projects.

Mark Rudall, a diocesan spokesman, said: “This building has been identified as a potentially highly significant mission resource in what is seen as an unusually diverse setting.”

Christopher Snowden, the university’s Vice-Chancellor, said he was “delighted” by the support from the diocese. “Local support of this nature is crucial to our fundraising.”

Bishop Hill said: “We are proud to participate in this significant venture toward world understanding here in Surrey.”

The multifaith centre is due for completion in 2010. A fundraising campaign has begun to raise the rest of the money.

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CIA Waterboarding Probe Revealed By Feds

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Bush White House Maintains Waterboarding Was Legal When Used

The Justice Department has opened an internal investigation into whether its top officials improperly authorized or reviewed the CIA’s use of waterboarding when interrogating terror suspects, according to documents released Friday.

The investigation was revealed at the request of Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. A Justice Department spokesman, however, said the inquiry has been ongoing for several years. Questions about waterboarding are part of a larger Justice probe of the so-called Bybee memo, wrote Marshall Jarrett, head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, in a Feb. 18 letter to the two senators. “Among other issues, we are examining whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys,” Jarrett wrote. Asked for details, Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said, “This is not a new investigation, but rather has been ongoing for some time.” Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world. Critics call it a form of torture. The memo at the heart of the internal Justice inquiry was dated Aug. 1, 2002, and written by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee for then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. It defined torture as recognized by U.S. law as covering “only extreme acts” causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure. The Bush administration maintains waterboarding was legal when it was used by CIA interrogators in 2002 and 2003 on top al-Qaida detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Earlier this month, CIA Director Michael Hayden said waterboarding was used, in part, because of widespread belief among U.S. intelligence officials that more catastrophic attacks were imminent. The CIA banned its personnel from using waterboarding in 2006. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to publicly discuss whether waterboarding is currently legal since it is no longer used by CIA interrogators. Durbin called the internal Justice inquiry “long overdue” and noted that the U.S. government has previously prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime. “Within the question how America could come to use interrogation techniques of the Inquisition is the question how the Department of Justice could have overlooked its own precedents to authorize waterboarding,” added Whitehouse, a former federal prosecutor. He suggested “the answer was preordained and the department was driven by politics and obedience, not law and independence.” Mukasey told Congress earlier this month that he would not pursue criminal charges against CIA officials who used waterboarding after relying on Justice Department guidance that the interrogation tactic was legal. He said Friday he did not believe the Bybee memo was politically motivated. “I have no reason to believe that politics was involved in that or any other analysis,” Mukasey said.

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Who Should be on The DNA Register?

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Iain Dale

Balancing the responsibilities of the State against the rights of the individual is one ofthe most difficult things for politicians to get right. The tendency is to be all in favour of civil liberties while in opposition but to revert to authoritarian type when in government. That’s certainly happened with this Labour government. And in times of threats to national security, politicians need to be quite courageous to resist all the demands to impose authoritarian measures on the populace.

The argument surrounding DNA evidence is a perfect example of the dilemmas faced. At the moment only someone interviewed by Police has their DNA taken. If they are charged it is kept on their records, but not removed if they fail to be convicted. Some argue that if the government had everyone’s DNA on record it would make the Police’s life far easier and crimes would be solved much more quickly. It’s a similar argument to ID cards.

This week European judges will consider the case of two people who were charged with a crime but never convicted who want their DNA wiped off the national database. This case has far reaching implications and could lead to more than 500,000 other people’s DNA being wiped.

This is a really difficult one for people like me who believe that the rights of the individual must be protected from the pervasive influence of the State. In theory I would support the right of the innocent individual to have their records wiped if they had been found not guilty of a crime, or not even charged. However, the real world does not operate in this way. The individual also has the right to be protected from harm by others, and it is the role of the State to introduce laws which enable that to happen.

As I understand it the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives believe that only those convicted of a crime should be on the DNA database. It’s a consistent position and easy to argue. The fact that 100,000 innocent children are on it and should never have been, 26,000 police-collected samples have been left off it and half a million entries have been misrecorded lend weight to the view that the government is incapable of managing such sensitive data.

And yet, and yet. What worries me is that sex attackers and murderers are more difficult to find without full access to DNA records. So I wonder if a messy compromise isn’t something we should be considering. My only exceptions to the “No DNA record unless charged” rule would be for people interviewed on suspicion of rape or murder. I accept that it would mean some innocent people being added to the DNA register, but it would undoubtedly reduce the time it takes the Police to solve these two heinous crimes, and therefore prevent others from taking place. Of course one can take this further and use the same argument in favour of everyone having their DNA taken, as it would then lead to other crimes being solved more quickly. I realise that. But I’m afraid that murder and rape are crimes which merit a different and stronger approach.

UPDATE: Martin corrects me in the comments: “Actually Iain you’re wrong to say:”If they are charged it is kept on their records, but not removed if they fail to be convicted.”People who are arrested but not charged remain on the DNA database.”Before 2001, the police could take DNA samples during investigations but had to destroy the samples and the records derived from them on the Database if the people concerned were acquitted or charges were not proceeded with.The law was changed in 2001 to remove this requirement, and changed again in 2004 so that DNA samples could be taken from anyone arrested for a recordable offence and detained in a police station.”http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/science-research/using-science/dna-database/So the dataabse is already being populated with the DNA of people who have never been charged just in case they later go on to commit a crime. Either they should be removed or everyone should be added.

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Wikileaks and Internet Censorship

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

JONATHAN WERVE

Using data from the Global Integrity Index, we put a U.S. court’s recent order to block access to anti-corruption site Wikileaks.org into context. In summary: The Wikileaks.org shutdown is unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes. Good thing it doesn’t work very well.

Starting in 2007, Global Integrity added specific questions about Internet censorship to the Integrity Indicators, which are a set of 304 questions addressing the practice of anti-corruption in national governments. We have always held that a free and critical media is an essential component of good governance; adding an analysis of Internet censorship was an overdue refinement.

We asked two questions:

Are Internet users prevented from reaching political material on the Internet?
Are content creators prevented from posting political material to the Internet?

The results of this work are generally encouraging. In examining a diverse group of 50 countries, a majority earn a full score on both counts. Freedom of speech is a widely held right. Moreover, Internet censorship is difficult and is often ineffective in suppressing political activity. Most governments, aside from targeted libel restrictions, don’t bother regulating online political speech at all.

The Many Flavors of Internet Censorship

A few countries, however, are deeply committed to trying to make censorship work. On this list in 2007 are Algeria, China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia and Thailand. Each has it’s own flavor to the repression of online speech — Internet censorship is still in an experimentation phase, and even the most aggressive approaches don’t seem to work very well.

Algeria has no firewalls or filters, but outlaws hosting content critical of the government, and monitors chat rooms for political speech.
China is home to 1.3 billion people and has a highly scalable technological approach based onextensive content filters known satirically as the Great Firewall of China. China is also uses technology to discourage content creation, deploying cute animated police characters (pictured above) to remind Internet users they are being watched.
Egypt has limited technical means to discourage content creation, so it relies on an old-fashioned technique — harassment, beatings and arrests. Hala Al-Masry used to publish in a blog entitled “Cops Without Boundaries” until the government harassed her, “unknown people” beat her father, and she and her husband were arrested and signed a commitment to shut down the blog. Similar techniques haveshut down websites of opposition parties.
Kazakhstan has little Internet capacity. The government uses this to mask censorship — rather than block sites, it slows them down, frustrating the users of political content into looking elsewhere. The KNB (formerly the KGB) has a special program called Bolat, which slows down, but does not stop, access to sites of terrorist organizations. Popular opinion holds that it is used to slow opposition party sites as well.
Russia has a mixed bag of state persecution and neglect, allowing a rare opening for free expression in a country with highly restricted media. However, the sophistication of the attacks that do occur is frightening, with hackers singling out individual online targets. For instance, the website of Ekho Moskvy, a liberal Moscow radio station critical of the Kremlin, was brought down by a DDoS attack last year.
Thailand’s military junta moved aggressively to shut down message boards and the formerly-ruling party Thai Rak Thai website after taking over the country in 2006. But the junta’s censorship cops work to keep the thinnest appearance of tolerance — message boards were allowed to reopen under the condition that they did not “provoke any misunderstandings.” Message received.

So how does the United States fit into this picture? The court order that muzzled Wikileaks.org (covered here) was prompted not by the government but by a bank registered in the Cayman Islands. The bank used American courts and a compliant domain registrar to scrub the wikileaks.org URL from the Internet. It is extremely unlikely that this decision will stand up in an appeals court, but the larger point is that there is no reason this case should even be fought. Wikileaks should not need a legal team to explain to the courts that the First Amendment requires freedom of speech.

The whole event seems to encapsulate the constant criticism of governance in the United States: that the government has been captured by corporate interests, and that the world-leading rule of law and technocratic mechanisms in place can be hijacked to serve as tools for narrow, wealthy interests.

Online Censorship: Sounds good, but it never works.

While there is much diversity in the style of Internet censorship among the world’s worst offenders, one common thread unites them: Internet censorship doesn’t work. Cut off one site, and a thousand more pop up. In China, censorship online is sparking criticism that off-line censorship has rarely seen.

So Wikileaks.org went offline, but Wikileaks mirror sites hosted overseas hold the same content, and the original site is still up and running from Sweden (http://88.80.13.160) without its easier-to-type URL. As it turns out, shutting down Wikileaks-the-website has focused our attention on Wikileaks-the-idea, which is spreading at the speed of light.

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Police face DNA ban

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Sean O’Neill, David Brown and Richard Ford

European judges could strip the profiles of more than half a million people from the national DNA database on privacy grounds — undermining its growing value to police as an investigative tool.

As two sex killers caught by the database were jailed for life yesterday and a senior detective joined calls for a universal register, the European Court of Human Rights will hear a case that could mean 560,000 DNA samples being destroyed. Two people charged with offences but never convicted will ask the court next week to remove their records from the database. If they succeed, 13 per cent of the 4.3 million profiles collected since 1995 would have to be destroyed.

The category of DNA profiles facing destruction has yielded vital clues in criminal cases. Official figures seen by The Times indicate that the DNA of 8,500 people never previously charged or convicted has been matched with DNA taken from crime scenes. The cases have involved about 14,000 offences including 114 murders, 55 attempted murders and 116 rapes. Europe will rule on the legality of the database as demands grow for the entire British population to be sampled after its crucial role in catching Steve Wright, the Suffolk Strangler, and Mark Dixie, the killer of Sally Anne Bowman.

Detective Superintendent Stuart Cundy, who led the investigation into Miss Bowman’s murder, said that a universal database would have caught Dixie within 24 hours of the killing. Instead he remained at large for nine months until police took a DNA swab from him after a pub fight. Dixie, 35, was jailed for life at the Old Bailey only hours after Wright, 49, was given a whole-life sentence for the murders of five Ipswich prostitutes.

Wright had been arrested after a DNA sample from one of his victim’s bodies matched the profile loaded on the database after his arrest for a minor theft.

Mr Cundy said: “I am all for a national DNA register, with all the appropriate safeguards. If there had been one at the time of Sally Anne’s murder we would have known who it was that day. It could have protected everybody else out there. For nine months between Sally Anne’s murder and the arrest one of our biggest fears and was that this man could attack again. A national DNA register could solve that.”

Richard Ottaway, Miss Bowman’s local Tory MP, said: “A universal DNA database is necessary to solve these crimes.”

The Home Office has published proposals for extending the existing database by taking samples from people detained for minor, or non-recordable offences, such as not wearing a seatbelt.

Ministers are understood to be awaiting the outcome of the European court case before deciding whether to proceed with the expansion plans.

Human rights lawyers will argue in Strasbourg that a juvenile acquitted of attempted robbery and Michael Marper, who faced charges of harassment that were later dropped, should have their profiles removed from the database. South Yorkshire police, which arrested both, has refused to destroy their records.

Peter Mahy, their solicitor, said: “This is the most important case on the human rights implication of retaining biometric data.”

He said his clients were concerned about the uses to which the samples might be put and the lack of independent oversight of the national database.

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VIDEO: The REAL McCain

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

“My friends” with John McCain… starring Vicki Iseman!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioy90nF2anI[/youtube]

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Zeitgeist of the ‘Zeitgeist Movie’ Disinfo Project

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Have Your Say: Zeitgeist of the ‘Zeitgeist Movie’ Disinfo Project
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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 10:31 pm and is filed under General, Multimedia . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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