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SOCPA Demo Pics & Report

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

SOCPA placard outside the National Gallery

Demonstrators in Trafalgar Square

Officer attempts to impede photography during stop and search, Whitehall

Peace Protesters, Parliament Square

SOCPA placard and Big Ben

Disproportionate policing was the name of the game in Westminster on Saturday, where hundreds if not thousands of police were on duty over the area in an obvious attempt to avoid a repeat of the January ‘Freedom to Protest’ debacle. (See http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2008/01/jan.htm#freedom )

Despite the gravity of the issue, only a small group of demonstrators turned up, and at the start of the event they were outnumbered by the media - and were only a minute fraction of the police presence. A few arrived later, and some went home quickly, but at the peak numbers were still under 50. A senior officer came over at the start and issued a warning that serious action would be taken if any demonstration in the SOCPA designated area were attempted, handing out copies of the usual notice. A demonstrator took notes and the FIT photographer photographed and filmed everything that moved.

Later this photographer objected to demonstrators photographing him from a close range and several times pushed out his arm in an unfortunate gesture resembling a Nazi salute, at one point hitting a demonstrator in the throat. Later, harassed by a ’serious criminal’ with her ‘Illegali-Tea’ shopping trolley, he ran off and scuttled off up the steps of the National Gallery to escape, much to the amusement of all present, including even some of his colleagues.

A small group of demonstrators decided to set off for Parliament Square, walking quietly along the pavement. One young man who managed to evade the police (but not several press photographers) was stopped and searched by police opposite Downing St, who forced him to remove his balaclava. The most suspicious things found on him were a National Express ticket and a strong Newcastle accent.

In Parliament Square the peace protest was continuing as usual, and one protester was producing a splendid chalk pavement drawing. As I watched a police community support van drew up by her and it looked for a moment as if she was about to be apprehended, but seeing several press photographers taking pictures, the van drove off.

Later in the day a small group of the ‘Freedom to Protest’ demonstrators walked down Whitehall and through Parliament Square, and a short protest was held. Followed by a police van and the FIT photographer and minder they then made their way to a pub on the Horseferry Road, causing a little consternation among police around the Home Office as they passed close by. But the demonstrators went into the pub and police and press went home.

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UK: Attack on Iran, big mistake

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

British lawmakers say ‘Washington and allies’ should not use force on Iran cautioning it could ‘provoke an extremely violent backlash’.

“Any military strike against Iran would have ‘grave repercussions’ for the Middle East,” The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee said in a Sunday report.

In its ‘Global Security: Iran’ report, the select committee also warned that the use of force on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be “unlikely to succeed”.

The report added that ‘given Iran’s ‘lynchpin’ role in energy security’, launching military strikes against the country ‘would also have a highly detrimental economic impact across the globe’.

Washington and allies accuse Iran of conducting a covert weapons program and have done everything in their power to pressure Tehran into halting its nuclear program.

US President George W. Bush has kept the military option on the table, advocating that the ‘consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran are such that military strikes are justified, whether a smoking gun is found or not’.

The committee, however, urged British echelons to persuade the White House into ‘directly engaging’ with Iran on the nuclear issue, ‘as the absence of such engagement has deprived the international community of a significant diplomatic tool’.

“We recommend that the government urges Washington to consider offering a credible security guarantee to Iran if the Iranian government, in turn, will offer an equally credible and verifiable guarantee that it will not enter into a nuclear weapons program,” the committee concluded.

Iran maintains that as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty it is entitled to a uranium enrichment program in order to produce fuel for the country’s under-construction nuclear power plants.

MD/HGH

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The Lies of the Drug War

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

One war appears to be going well for the United States and its allies these days: the drug war.

That was the lead in dozens of U.S. newspapers in response to a June 2007 United Nations report claiming that U.S. drug policy has led to a substantial decline in illicit drug use. Chances are the author of the story hadn’t read a copy of Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics: A Critical Analysis of Claims Made by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

He ought to.

Written by a pair of Appalachian State associate professors – Matthew Robinson and Renee Scherlen – Lies, Damn Lies, and Drug War Statistics seeks to provide an objective, “fair assessment of America’s drug war” since the passage of the 1988 federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act. (The law, passed by Congress at the height of the 1980s drug-war Zeitgeist, created the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy – known colloquially as the “drug czar’s” office – and pronounced, “It is the declared policy of the United States Government to create a Drug-Free America by 1995.”)

Their assessment is nothing short of scathing.

Since the ONDCP’s founding in 1989, “trends in drug use, drug treatment, deaths attributed to drug use, emergency-room mentions of drug use, drug availability, drug purity, and drug prices are inconsistent with the goals of [the federal government],” the authors assert. “Yet, during this same time period, funding for the drug war grew tremendously and costs of the drug war expanded as well.”

Of course, such a critical appraisal of U.S. drug policy is hardly unique. What sets Robinson and Scherlen’s evaluation apart is their methodology. Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics consists primarily of the authors’ evaluation of the federal anti-drug agency’s annual National Drug Control Strategies. These reports, issued by the ONDCP at the beginning of each year, outline the agency’s policy objectives (“Stop [illicit drug] use before it starts; heal America’s drug users; [and] disrupt the [illicit drug] market.”) and, in theory, provide statistical “proof” to Congress and the public of the drug war’s ongoing success.

Under close scrutiny, however, it is troublingly apparent that (a) the agency is failing to achieve its stated goals, and (b) the drug czar’s office is manipulating and falsifying statistics in its public reports in order to claim successes that are not warranted.

Robinson and Scherlen affirm that there is “overwhelming evidence” that the ONDCP is “consistently making false and dishonest claims” regarding the drug war’s perceived progress, and the authors cite more than 80 instances of the agency’s relying on “inappropriate and dishonest uses of statistics to prove its case.”

Examples of the agency’s duplicity include:

Manipulating its budgeting techniques to exclude law enforcement and correctional costs attributable to the drug war in order to give “the appearance of increasing the proportion of funding for treatment in the drug war budget.”
Creating the impression of declines in illicit drug use by beginning its trend analysis in 1979 (the peak year of self-reported illicit drug use in the United States). By doing so, the agency attempts to “show visually that drug use is down when it has actually not decreased during [the ONDCP’s] existence.” (Authors further note that although the agency consistently claims credit for alleged declines in drug use, the ONDCP fails to accept any responsibility for increases in drug use among the general population.)
Claiming that the black-market prices for illicit drugs are holding steady as a result of U.S. drug policies, when, “in fact, they are generally declining.”
Alleging that most U.S. drug arrests and incarcerations are for trafficking offenses, when, in fact, approximately 80 percent of all drug arrests are for possession offenses.
Abandoning previously stated goals without comment, and replacing them with new (and in recent years, far fewer) goals. Though the ONDCP “generally does not … admit failure in meeting [its] goals … it [does] use its failure to call for stepped-up efforts in the drug war,” the authors note.

Of the available critiques of U.S. drug policy, Robinson and Scherlen’s work proves to be one of the most thorough and irrefutable, as it relies solely on the ONDCP’s own rhetoric and data sources to debunk the agency’s various claims. In the authors’ final analysis, they determine that the agency consistently and overwhelmingly fails to act in a fair, honest, or transparent manner – as required by law.

Instead, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy predominantly operates “as a generator and defender of a given ideology in the drug war,” Robinson and Scherlen conclude:

This ideology asserts that illicit drugs are always bad, never acceptable, supply-driven, and must be fought through an ongoing war. This ideology asserts that fighting a “war” on drugs is the only way to reduce drug use and achieve related goals.

In theory, one would expect that policies that do not achieve their objectives (such as the drug war) would be discontinued…. Our assessment reveals that the ONDCP has not achieved its goals in the years since its creation. Thus, a rational response to this situation would be to terminate the ONDCP. This would save tax money, alleviate government inefficiency, and reduce the size of government. If accompanied by a reassessment of U.S. policy toward drugs, it might even result in better outcomes with regard to drug use and abuse in the United States.

Paul Armentano [send him mail] is the senior policy analyst for NORML and the NORML Foundation in Washington, DC. He is the author of “Emerging Clinical Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids: A Review of the Scientific Literature” (2007, NORML Foundation).

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Review: Notes from the Borderland

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

Reviewed by Brian Precious | SPECTREZINE

Is Notes from the Borderland (NFB) a magazine or a series of pamphlets? One could be forgiven for thinking the latter, since the first issue of this very substantial magazine came out in the Winter of 1997, and the latest issue, issue 8 , only came out last year. This has been the story all along for NFB readers, who have to wait approximately a year between issues, produced by Larry O’Hara (a regular contributor to Rob Ramsay’s similar, now veteran, magazine Lobster) and the rest of the ‘NFB Collective’. To what extent NFB is an offshoot of ‘Lobster’ this reviewer does not know. But NFB shares concerns with it’s elder magazine in it’s attempt to scrutinize the activities of the ’security services’, their assets, and how they seek to maintain and project the power and privilege of the ruling class and the establishment,by various methods of subversion, infiltration, and manipulation of the agendas of progressive causes and movements. From the outset, it has been clear that NFB has had no interest whatsoever in pandering to any mainstream aesthetic. NFB looks like it was produced on a shoestring by a bunch of anarchists, which is not a million miles from the truth.The front of NFB can either be a cartoon use of classic art - such as the first issue’s use of Delacroix’s ‘Madame Liberté’ - or more recently we have seen covers sporting a much more radical (not impossible!) version of the satirical covers used by Private Eye. Given that Larry O’Hara seems to view Private Eye as a source of semi-radicalism and security service disinformation, perhaps this is more than coincidence.

So is the annual release of the latest NFB worth the wait? Read on. The first issue of NFB is as good an introduction as any. It concentrates on news and investigations of various far-right and racist organisations, such as the International Third Position and those trying to export the Ku Klux Klan to the UK. It should be said from the beginning that NFB maintains that there is much more than meets the eye on the racist far-right,which NFB regards as a hot-bed of not only fascist but security service activity. Indeed, subsequently NFB has made a case that this is no surprise, given the usefulness of fascists to the secret state. (More on this below, when we come to the fascinating tale of -he whom NFB call- ‘multi-party animal’ Aidan Rankin, and the state-destabilisation of the UK Independence Party.)

Many on the left have had long experience, and longer suspicions of, the activities of state infiltrators and agents-provocateurs from demonstrations to picket lines to ordinary meetings of the local TU branch or CND. People who have become involved, for the first time, in such organisations have often had a rude and extremely disturbing awakening as to the kind of beast the British state and broader establishment really is, and the interests it really -and exclusively- serves. From the Gandalf trial to the experience of middle-England when involved in trying to stop live animal exports, the examples are numerous.

Enter Searchlight magazine. Suspicion of this magazine did not begin with NFB. But it should be pointed out that one of the very first articles to dissect Searchlight appeared more than 15 years ago in ‘Lobster’, written by one Larry O’Hara. NFB regard Searchlight as a ‘honey trap’ ie used to both attract and then spy on the left. Evidence for this began in Lobster a good few years ago, when it published the ‘Gable Memorandum’,in which Searchlight editor/founder confesses to years of spying on the left.

Issue 2 breaks the story of the NFB position on what it calls ‘MI5 shyster’ David Shayler, whose position, they say, does not add up - re his unwillingness to comment on ongoing state acts against dissidents and does he still say nothing on MI6?

Issue 3 investigates the strange aspects of soho nail-bomber David Copeland ie that the security services knew more than they let on and effectively did nothing while Copeland gave them the excuse to inflate their budgets.

Issue 4, from 2001-02, is the pièce de résistance for readers of Spectrezine.

In this issue, NFB gives us another lengthy and extremely well-researched article detailing many of the forces ranged against the left and other opponents of the pet-project of the British and European ruling classes: The European Union.

This superb article details not only the general way in which the state used it’s assets on the far right to smear and discredit the UK Independence Party (UKIP), leading its founder, LSE academic Alan Sked, to withdraw, disillusioned, from politics, but also gives us a sidelight on how state assets work in the form of an analysis of a one Dr Aidan Rankin.

NFB declare that Rankin’s career is so bizarre it would seem out of place in a Le Carre novel. Rankin has been a member of at least six political parties, from left to right: Labour,Tory,Albion Party, Third Way, Conservative Democratic Party and UKIP. Readers may recall an article in the New Statesman a couple of years ago, in which Rankin strongly protested the ‘racism’ of UKIP in order to politically discredit UKIP as much as possible. Well, here’s what: Recall Third Way, of which Rankin is a former member. Third Way is a post-National Front grouping led by Patrick Harrington (is this the same Harrington who caused a scandal as a student for his fascist views?). What do you know, while a member of this far-right organisation, Rankin tried to move it’s position from anti-EU to pro-EU, an attempt he has made in many if not all of the organisations of which he has been a member.

So precisely why is Rankin complaining about the alleged racism at UKIP when he himself was previously a member of a far-right organisation? More fundamentally, why has Rankin been all round the political houses, and why does he try to do the same thing in each house? Why does someone whose views on the EU fit with those of New Europe , then go and join UKIP?

Issue 5 continues with these themes and much more - including unearthing a secret Searchlight strategy dosument, written by leading Searchlight contributor Nick Lowles, on how to spread propaganda against the anti-EU movement, to ‘influence and educate public opinion’ by the ‘drip flow of information’.

The full document is available for a couple of stamps, from the NFB address.

Issues 6,7 and 8 of NFB give us more of the same excellent in-depth coverage, all so exhaustively researched that NFB’s opponents seem to know they are onto a loser if they try to take NFB on.Issue 8, the latest, features ex-MI5 head Eliza Manningham-Buller saying to her successor Jonathan Evans ‘I’m sure you’ll do as well as I did’ , to which Evans replies ‘That’s what I’m afraid of’.

Give this unusual, committed magazine a try. It doesn’t come out often, but it’s worth the wait. All that research must surely take time!

Go To NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND To Order Your Copy

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Council rules out ‘unlawful’ CCTV

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

The Telegraph

A council has decided not to install CCTV cameras in a crime-ridden area on the grounds they would “contravene the Human Rights Act”.

John Steele: Keeping an eye on CCTV

Over the past year, anti-social behaviour has soared in the South Hams area of south Devon. But the local authority claims that the cameras would breach people’s right to a “private life”.

The council’s stand comes amid a number of complaints by residents in Dartmouth, Devon, about the rise in anti-social behaviour such as drunkenness and vandalism.

The council yesterday revealed it would prefer to tackle the problem by improving lighting and visibility in the problematic areas.

It claims to have been told that CCTV would be an infringement of the Human Rights Act - stating that every member of the public has “a right to respect for their private and family life”.

Nick Hodgson, the head of property services for the district council, said: “The council was advised that the use of CCTV could contravene the Human Rights Act.

“We also took advice from the police, who indicated the use of CCTV would not aid the legal process and was unlikely to help identify offenders.

“CCTV is only one of a number of measures to combat anti-social behaviour.”

But the revelations angered local residents. Angela Pitman, a mother-of-two from Dartmouth, said: “It’s disgusting that the council prefer to think of the criminals and their human rights rather than ours.

“What about us, the people who live their lives by the law, who are the victims of anti-social behaviour nearly on a day-to-day basis?”

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Why we sued the phone company

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

By Studs Terkel, Quentin Young, Barbara Flynn Currie and James Montgomery

More than six years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration remains committed to using the specter of those attacks (and other possible new attacks) as justification for reckless, unlawful and unconstitutional behavior. This pattern can be seen most clearly in the current effort in Congress to grant the administration unchecked power to spy on Americans and to forgive in advance large corporate entities for illegal behavior.

Right now, Congress is engaged in a debate about changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Last August, Congress acceded to demands by the Bush administration to grant spy agencies broad, new powers to monitor the telephone calls, e-mails and Web site use of Americans without prior oversight from a court. The law, known as the Protect America Act, grants spy agencies unfettered access to the full spectrum of communications coming into or out of the U.S. without requiring the government to demonstrate that individuals being monitored are involved in any wrongdoing.

Congress placed a short time frame on the new law and, after a single extension, it was set to expire Feb. 15. Both the U.S. House and Senate offered to extend the measure for several weeks while working on more permanent legislation. That offer was rejected by the White House — because the Bush administration does not simply want the power to spy on Americans without a warrant (they already claim that authority), they want to grant retroactive immunity to the nation’s giant telecommunications companies, which collaborated with the government in spying on innocent Americans. Despite protests by the White House, the truth is that the government already had enough power to spy under pre-existing law.

President Bush’s director of national intelligence recently acknowledged that the goal of this legislative effort was to provide amnesty for the telephone companies. If the telecoms receive the “get-out-of-jail-free” card that the administration demands, more than 40 lawsuits charging that the phone companies acted contrary to established federal law by not protecting consumers’ privacy will be thrown out of court. We are plaintiffs in one such lawsuit, and Congress should not deny us our day in court. The companies broke the law, and we believe they must be held accountable.

The Bush administration and its acolytes now claim that we must give giant telecoms amnesty for breaking the law, or else those telecoms will no longer cooperate with the government in spying efforts that help protect America. The truth is that telecoms do not need a special deal. These companies have immunity from lawsuits for turning over customer records to the government if they do so in conformity with existing law. But, in this instance, the telephone companies knowingly violated that law. If we give them a free pass this time, won’t the telephone companies feel free to violate the laws protecting our privacy in the future?

The Bush administration and its supporters in Congress complain that these lawsuits are simply about money and enriching trial lawyers — suggesting that the litigation should be stopped because of the potential damages that might be awarded in such lawsuits. This criticism ignores the fact that, according to the rules in the federal court, the only way that we could ensure that a federal judge could continue to explore previous violations if the companies simply changed their participation or the government changed or ended the program was to ask for minimal damages. We are not interested in recovering money for ourselves, nor is our counsel, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. We, however, are committed to assuring that these giant companies are punished for violating the law and thus dissuaded from violating the law in the future.

More important, amnesty not only lets the companies off the hook without answering any questions, it assures that the American people will never learn about the breadth and extent of the lawless program. Some seem to suggest that we should not have our day in court because a select few members of Congress have been able to review documents about the spy program operated by the White House. The judgment of a few Washington insiders is not a substitute for the careful scrutiny of a federal court.

Congress is supposed to act to protect the rights of American citizens, not sacrifice those rights to large corporate entities. The House and Senate should resist the bullying tactics of the Bush White House and ensure that we have our day in court to vindicate our rights and reveal any illegality engaged in by the telecoms. We need to know about the Bush White House’s secret program.

———-

Studs Terkel, author and oral historian; Quentin Young, physician and advocate for health-care reform; State Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie; and James Montgomery, former Chicago corporation counsel, are plaintiffs in Terkel, et. al vs. AT&T.

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Horrifying and unnecessary mistreatment of prisoners

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

Herald Tribune

In the next few days, President George W. Bush is expected to again claim the right to order mistreatment of prisoners that any civilized person would regard as torture. Bush is planning to veto a law that would require the CIA and all the intelligence services to abide by the restrictions on holding and interrogating prisoners contained in the U.S Army Field Manual. Bush says the army rules are too restrictive.

What are these burdens? In addition to a blanket prohibition of torture, the manual specifically bans:

Forcing a prisoner to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.

Placing hoods or sacks over the head of a prisoner, and using duct tape over the eyes.

Applying beatings, electric shocks, burns or other forms of physical pain.

Waterboarding.

Using military working dogs.

Inducing hypothermia or heat injury.

Conducting mock executions.

Depriving a prisoner of necessary food, water or medical care.

Such practices have long been prohibited by U.S. laws and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents. Bush, however, declared that he was unbound by the laws of civilization in responding to the barbarism of Sept. 11, 2001. And reports soon surfaced about the abuse of prisoners at detention centers in Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and secret CIA prisons.

Finally, in 2006, a compliant, Republican-controlled Congress outlawed the kinds of abuse and torture that Bush’s lawyers had turned into government policy. Unfortunately, Congress applied the prohibitions only to the military, and Bush immediately made clear that he would issue whatever orders he wanted to the intelligence agencies. In response, Congress approved an amendment to the intelligence budget bill this year that binds those agencies to the same rules as the military.

Opponents of Bush’s policies on prisoners have long argued that it is immoral, dangerous and counterproductive to abuse and torture prisoners. We do not hold out much hope that the president will heed our last, urgent plea not to veto this bill.

We urge him to read the Army Field Manual, which says: “Use of torture by U.S. personnel would bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It could also place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse.”

He could listen to 43 retired generals or a bipartisan coalition of 18 former members of Congress, secretaries of state and national security officials who all supported the anti-torture amendment.

He could check the testimony of Lieutenant General Michael Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who told Congress last week that waterboarding violated the Geneva Conventions.

Or he could read the letter that General David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, wrote to his troops. “Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy,” Petraeus wrote. “They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.”

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Saudi Arabia accuses Israel of ‘Nazi war crimes’

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

Daily Mail

US ally Saudi Arabia compared Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip to Nazi war crimes on Sunday and called on the international community to stop what it called the “mass killings” of Palestinians.

Israeli forces killed 61 people in Hamas-ruled Gaza on Saturday, the bloodiest day for Palestinians since an uprising against Israeli occupation began in 2000.

Almost half the dead were civilians, including children.

“Saudi Arabia, which condemns the Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people and the threats of Israeli officials to transform Gaza into an inferno, sees that Israel is simulating through these actions the Nazi war crimes,” the Saudi official news agency SPA reported.

“Therefore, Saudi Arabia urges the international community, peace-sponsoring countries and the international Quartet to work to curb the Israeli military machine and stop it from carrying out mass killings and destruction against the Palestinian people and their properties.”

The Saudi statement appeared to refer to a warning by Israel’s deputy defence minister that Gazans risked a “shoah” - a Hebrew word for holocaust - if rocket fire into Israel did not stop.

Aides later said he meant disaster and not holocaust.

Hamas, an Islamist group which seized Gaza after routing forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, held the comment up as proof their Israeli enemies were the “new Nazis.”

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Sunday Israel needed to prepare for a possible escalation in Gaza.

The Jewish state, which lost two soldiers in Saturday’s fighting, has pushed deep into Gaza in an effort to stop Palestinian militants from firing rockets into southern Israel.

The offensive was launched after a rocket killed an Israeli on Wednesday.

“Saudi Arabia watches with utmost concern what is happening in Gaza; the killing of children, women and elderly, the destruction of houses over their owners’ heads, the intimidation at the hands of Israel’s military machine,” SPA said.

“The kingdom strongly condemns these actions that go against international law and humanitarian norms … and contradict what Israel says about its desire for peace.”

The UN Security Council on Sunday urged Israel and the Palestinians to cease all violence in Gaza after the secretary-general condemned Israel’s “excessive” use of force.

Saudi Arabia, a major Arab power broker which attended a US-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis in November, renewed calls for a comprehensive Middle East peace deal.

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Hypocrite Bush Talks About Double Standards

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

The US President condemns leaders who ’sit down at the table’ with ‘tyrants’ and ‘have pictures taken’ for adopting double standards.

“What’s lost by embracing a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs? What’s lost is it will send the wrong message,” said President George W. Bush during a Thursday press conference.

“It will give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity,” he added.

Bush made the remarks when asked if he would back Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for his proposed foreign policy of holding talks with ‘US adversaries’ -such as Iran and Cuba- without any preconditions.

When he was reminded by a reporter that Senator Obama only plans to ‘hold talks’ with the countries that the US does not see eye to eye with, the US President said ‘thank you for reminding me to use a different word’.

“Well, talking to him is embracing. Excuse me. Let me use another word — you’re right, ‘embrace’ is like big hug, right?” said President Bush.

“Sitting down at the table, having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Raul Castro, for example, lends the status of the office and the status of our country to him. He gains a lot from it by saying, look at me, I’m now recognized by the President of the United States,” he continued.

This is while President Bush has apparently forgotten about the numerous times he sat down and had his picture taken with leaders of questionable human rights credentials, such as the Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.

MD/HGH/MMN

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Israelis kill 60 in Gaza offensive

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

The death toll of the Israeli assault on Gaza rises to 60 people on Saturday, marking it the deadliest day of fighting in the coastal region.

Palestinian IMEMC news website quoted head of Gaza’s emergency services, Dr Muawiya Hassanein as saying that there were at least 26 civilians among those killed.

The dead included 5 children, the youngest of whom was just 2 days old, he added.

More than 150 people have also been injured the majority whom are civilians.

At least 16 of those killed were resistance fighters, including 13 from the Islamic Hamas movement and three from the Islamic Jihad.

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 92 Palestinians, including 19 children, have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the Israeli attacks on Sunday.

Despite high civilian casualty, Israel says the incursion is aimed at destroying the Hamas infrastructure.

Two Israeli soldiers were also killed and another seven wounded during clashes with Palestinian resistance fighters, the Israeli army said.

Meanwhile, Hamas political leader Khalid Mashaal on Saturday condemned Israel’s air and overland raids describing it ‘a real holocaust’.

He said that Israel is ‘using the Holocaust’ to justify its atrocities against the Palestinians.

“Israel is using the Holocaust as a cover to do what it wants,” Mashaal said.

DT/DT/MMA/MMN

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Wikileaks back on the Web

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

Case that riled privacy advocates turns on unrelated technicalities

By Jaikumar Vijayan

In a move sure to be welcomed by privacy and civil rights advocates, a California District Court judge on Friday lifted a previous permanent injunction that he had issued two weeks ago to disable the controversial Wikileaks.org whistleblower Web site.

Judge Jeffrey White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco also declined to extend a temporary restraining order he had issued on Jan 15 against Wikileaks. That order prohibited Wikileaks from displaying, posting, publishing, or distributing material that a Swiss bank, which had filed a lawsuit against Wikileaks, had claimed were illegally obtained and defamatory.

The wikileaks.org domain was reactivated today as a result of the decision.

Judge White cited two main reasons for rescinding his previous injunctions. In a seven-page ruling, the judge noted that both the plaintiff in the case and the owner of the Wikileaks.org domain name were foreign entities and therefore outside the court’s jurisdiction. Although there is no firm evidence of the citizenship of the owner of the wikileaks.org domain name, “counsel for the [owner] represented that the owner of the domain name wikileaks.org is a citizen of Australia and a resident of Kenya,” the judge noted in his ruling. As a result the “Court is concerned that it may well lack subject matter jurisdiction over this matter in its entirety,” Judge White noted in his ruling.

He also noted that the injunctions he had issued asking Wikileaks’ domain registrar Dynadot to disable the domain name was totally pointless. “The record currently before the Court indicates that even the broad injunction issued as to Dynadot had exactly the opposite effect as was intended,” the judge noted in his ruling. Not only did the disputed material continue to be available via numerous mirror sites, the media attention generated by the case ensured that more people knew about the availability of the information on the Internet than before, he said.

“The Court is not convinced that Plaintiffs have made an adequate showing that any restraining injunction in this case would serve its intended purpose,” Judge White said. “In addition, there is evidence in the record that “the cat is out of the bag” and the issuance of an injunction would therefore be ineffective to protect the professed privacy rights of the bank’s clients,” he said.

The ruling comes two weeks after Judge White issued two injunctions against Wikileaks. The injunctions were in response to a lawsuit filed by the Julius Baer Group, a Swiss bank that, according to documents on Wikileaks, was involved in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands for customers in several countries, including the U.S.

Wikileaks claimed the documents had been leaked by a bank employee. In its complaint, the Swiss bank claimed that Wikileaks published hundreds of illegally obtained documents and confidential and copyrighted information belonging to the bank. The bank sued both Wikileaks and its domain registrar Dynadot.

In response, White issued a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot to immediately disable the wikileaks.org domain name and lock it to prevent the domain from being transferred to another registrar. The injunction also required Dynadot to immediately remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name. The court asked Dynadot to prevent the domain name from resolving to the Wikileaks Web site or any other Web site or server “other than a blank park page.”

The judge also issued a temporary restraining order that forbade Wikileaks from displaying, posting, publishing, or distributing any material pertaining to the bank on any site that it directly owned or over which it had any control. The order instructed Wikileaks to ensure that all of the bank’s information was removed from all Web sites it owned or controlled, to disable links to the material on such sites, and to provide the court with proof that it had complied with the orders. The judge’s order even enjoined everyone who read the order or received notice of it from publishing or even linking to the documents.

The rulings drew scathing criticism from privacy and civil rights groups that saw it as a flagrant violation of First Amendment rights. Several felt the court had overreacted in ordering the entire domain shut down, just because a relatively small number of documents it hosted were being disputed.

Earlier this week, several privacy and civil rights advocates announced their support for Wikileaks in the case. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a motion seeking the court’s permission to formally intervene in the case.

Expressing similar support was Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP). Earlier this week, the center filed a brief opposing the court’s injunctions against Wikileaks and its domain registrar Dynadot LLC. The amici curiae (friends of the court) brief, which was developed in collaboration with several media and public-interest organizations, asked the court to take back its decision and cited First Amendment concerns.

A statement issued by the EFF today expressed satisfaction at Judge White’s decision. “We’re very pleased that Judge White recognized the serious constitutional concerns raised by his earlier orders,” EFF senior staff attorney Matt Zimmerman was quoted as saying in the statement.

“Attempting to interfere with the operation of an entire website because you have a dispute over some of its content is never the right approach. Disabling access to an Internet domain in an effort to prevent the world from accessing a handful of widely-discussed documents is not only unconstitutional — it simply won’t work.”

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

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A McCain Presidency Guarantees a Military Draft?

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

Paul Abrams

John McCain tells us that he is not a very good economist. It brings to mind the old joke that the definition of an economist is someone who is good with numbers but did not have the personality to be an accountant.

Prepare for a campaign during which McCain will prove to everyone that, as the poor economist he admits to being, he is not good with numbers, and he certainly will not be held accountable.

But McCain is not joking when he talks about his war policy. He wants to continue the Iraq War. He pledges to increase the US commitment to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He wants to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell (and, by the way, he knows how to catch him, he just has not told George Bush). He also speaks of other wars.

George Bush says to listen to the generals. Well, the Army Chief of Staff General George Casey tells us that our military is way overstretched, and that tours-of-duty will have to become shortened. [When asked prior to the invasion in '03 whether he was worried about overextending the military, our seerless President said: "the military will not be overextended," and the reporter failed to ask him how he knew that]. General (ret) Barry McCaffrey has said that we are so lowering recruitment standards just to keep our numbers up that he is concerned for the long-term quality of the military.

Where is the money going to come from to pay for it all? Daddy at least got the Saudis to pay for most of the first Gulf War. George W. has not received a devalued dime from them. Having succeeded in bankrupting the country by turning a $5 trillion projected surplus into a $3 trillion deficit, an astonishing $8 trillion turnaround, borrowing like bandits from the social security trust fund just as the boomers are about to retire in droves, what devalued currency is McCain going to use to pay for all of this?

Listen for these McCain answers: he will be “confident” that Americans will be patriotic enough to answer the call to duty and volunteer in sufficient numbers for the military (but, curiously, not confident that the wealthiest Americans are patriotic enough to pay higher taxes to support his wars — odd, isn’t it?) Does McCain believe that, now that they can no longer exhibit a higher patriotism by helping their dad become president, the Romney sons will now volunteer? Or, Jenna’s financee? Or, perhaps, Jenna herself? We do need to give McCain credit, his own sons, like Jim Webb’s, are volunteering.

But, unlike the squeamish White House reporter who was afraid of not getting called upon again and thus accepted Bush’s bald assertion on overextending the military without a followup, we ought to be entitled to ask McCain two questions: upon what recent evidence is his confidence based? And, if he is wrong, what is going to do?

He has 4 choices. He can call for a draft. He can wind down the Iraq War, and deploy some, but not all the forces to Afghanistan. He can get sufficient volunteers. He can get allies to add troops.

Well, people are just not volunteering in sufficient numbers. The allies are pulling, not adding, troops. So, he is down to a draft or winding down the war. He said he will not do the latter. What’s left?

He will not tell you this, but here is the answer: he will have to call for a military draft, period. The military would prefer not to do it, draftees are more difficult to train and form into cohesive fighting forces. But, there is no other way to fight all his wars, at the level he wishes to fight them. No, McCain is not joking about his war policies. He just will not tell the truth about the implications. He will, of course, deny vigorously when challenged that they require a military draft.

But, that’s what simple addition compels. Today’s second-graders, who will 10 years hence be called by McCain’s draft, could teach him that.

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UN rejects British denial on rendition

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

Indian Ocean atoll Diego Garcia was used to hold US suspects, human rights investigator claims

Jamie Doward

Britain’s denials that its territories have been used for ‘extraordinary rendition’ were dramatically undermined last night after the United Nations claimed that Diego Garcia has been used as a detention centre to hold US suspects.

Manfred Novak, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, who is charged with investigating human rights abuses, said he had received credible evidence from well-placed sources familiar with the situation on the island that detainees were held on Diego Garcia between 2002 and 2003.

Novak pledged he would consider a request by the UK government to share his information. ‘I spoke to my sources on condition of anonymity and it would take time to trace them; I couldn’t do it [brief the UK government] without the explicit authorisation of these people,’ Novak said. ‘But under this caveat, I could share more information.’

Novak said he had spoken to people who had been held on the atoll, situated in the Indian Ocean and home to a large US naval base. They had been treated well in comparison with the regime some endured at places such as Guantánamo Bay. ‘There were only a few of them and they were not held for a long time,’ he said.

In 2004, the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, confirmed to parliament that there was a detention centre on Diego Garcia. Planning documents show it was ‘upgraded’ in December 2001. Ships operating offshore have also been used as floating ‘black sites’ to hold detainees, according to human rights groups.

The revelations raise fresh questions about the island’s role in the process of extraordinary rendition - moving suspects to interrogation centres in third-party countries where they are held outside the law - and why the UK government was apparently unaware that its ally was operating a prison on Diego Garcia to house so-called ‘high-value detainees’.

Last month the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, was forced to admit that two US planes carrying rendered suspects had landed in Diego Garcia in 2002, a major humiliation for Gordon Brown’s administration, which had until then repeatedly denied the claims.

The British government continues to deny allegations that the island has been used to hold terrorist suspects, saying it has been given reassurances by the US authorities that this was not the case. ‘As the Foreign Secretary set out in his statement to parliament on 21 February, the US have told us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia,’ a spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said.

But a former US military general, Barry McCaffrey, said in 2006 that Diego Garcia has been used to hold detainees, though he has subsequently retracted the claims. McCaffrey declined repeated requests for an interview.

Evidence has also emerged that the US has held prisoners on ships operating outside the three-mile zone around the island that defines Britain’s territorial waters. It is believed that the ships are serviced by craft from the atoll. Novak said he was told that some detainees had in the past been held for up to four months. ‘There is an obligation on member states to carry out extensive investigations into what happened,’ he said.

Human rights groups have long suspected that the seas around the island have been used to facilitate rendition. ‘If it turns out any [rendition] boat is being supported by Diego Garcia, Britain would have a duty to investigate what is going on on those boats,’ said Clara Gutteridge, an investigator with human rights group Reprieve.

Evidence supplied to Reprieve confirms that prisoners have been held on US-operated vessels serviced by Diego Garcia. The US authorities have admitted holding eight detainees, including John Walker Lindh, the American who was captured in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban, on board the USS Bataan.

Another US naval vessel that has operated in the waters off Diego Garcia, the USNS Stockham, is also suspected of housing prisoners. ‘We have heard from very reliable sources that this boat was used as a floating prison for high-profile prisoners while it was in the vicinity of Diego Garcia,’ Gutteridge said.

A prisoner released from Guantánamo described to Reprieve a fellow prisoner’s account of his detention on board a US ship. ‘There were about 50 other people on the ship,’ the detainee said the prisoner had told him. ‘They were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.’

A spokesman for the US naval base in Diego Garcia, based in Japan, was not immediately available for comment.

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