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‘Western Leaders Are War Criminals’

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

The former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, has echoed calls for Western leaders to be charged with war crimes over the invasion of Iraq.

Speaking at Imperial College in London Mahathir, who was in office from 1981 to 2003, singled out US President George Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australia’s former prime minister John Howard as he wants to see them tried “in absence for war crimes committed in Iraq”.

The event was organised by the Ramadhan Foundation which is a leading British Muslim youth organisation working for peaceful co-existence and dialogue between communities.

Mohammed Shafiq, spokesman for the group said: “It was an opportunity for students to put a range of questions about war crimes and the international situation. He said that people have to stop killing each other and use arbitration, negotiation and discussion as an alternative to violence, war and killing.”

Speaking about the Iraq war, Mahathir focused on “the thousands dying, the economic war, the power of oil and how we could utilise some of these tools to have a leverage against the people who commit countries to war”, Shafiq said.

The event was incredibly well attended with over 450 people and 200 more had to be turned away.

Among the mountain of war crimes Western leaders are guilty of include:-

The illegal use of napalm and other chemical weapons

Intentionally torturing and abusing detainees

Blocking aid convoys

Killing unarmed civilians, including shooting into family homes

Western leaders are also guilty of many other violations of the Geneva Convention, the Charter of the United Nations, the Nuremberg Charter, International Law and the Constitution of the United States, including crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.

International law professors have called the attack against Iraq “a fundamental breach of international law (that) would seriously threaten the integrity of the international legal order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War.”

Mahathir Mohamad’s statement appears to be valid as the International Criminal Court defines the following as international crimes:

(a) Crimes against Peace:

Namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing:

(b) War Crimes:

Namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity:

Namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

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Democracy supporters arrested in Zimbabwe

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

UPI | Riot police in the capital of Zimbabwe have arrested nearly 400 supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change, a U.N. information network said. The United Nations Integrated Regional Information Networks said Friday the supporters had been attempting to seek refuge at the opposition party’s offices when they were arrested.

The party’s supporters were among those attempting to flee Zimbabwe’s rural areas, where state-sponsored violence has reportedly been occurring since the recent parliamentary elections.

The Zimbabwe African National Union — Patriotic Front government lost in those elections and has since initiated a “Who did you vote for?” operation in the areas around the capital of Harare.

An anonymous political analyst said the nearly 400 MDC supporters were among those being arrested for allegedly causing the post-election violence.

MDC officials have claimed their leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, defeated Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe in the first round of presidential elections, IRIN reported. The official results of the first round have yet to be announced.

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Bush’s disapproval worst of any president in 70 years

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

By Susan Page |

President Bush has set a record he’d presumably prefer to avoid: the highest disapproval rating of any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup Poll.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

The previous record of 67% was reached by Harry Truman in January 1952, when the United States was enmeshed in the Korean War.

Bush’s rating has worsened amid “collapsing optimism about the economy,” says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies presidential approval. Record gas prices and a wave of home foreclosures have fueled voter angst.

Bush also holds the record for the other extreme: the highest approval rating of any president in Gallup’s history. In September 2001, in the days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush’s approval spiked to 90%. In another record, the percentage of Americans who say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake reached a new high, 63%, in the latest poll.

Assessments of Bush’s presidency are harsh. By 69%-27%, those polled say Bush’s tenure in general has been a failure, not a success.

Low approval ratings make it more difficult for presidents to maneuver, limiting their ability to get legislation passed or boost candidates in congressional elections.

“The president understands war and the slowdown in the economy weigh down public opinion, but the situation in Iraq is improving and the economy is about to get a big boost from the stimulus package,” said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.

Bush has had dismal ratings through most of his second term. His approval rating hasn’t reached as high as 50% since May 2005. He’s been steadily below 40% since September 2006.

Views of Bush divide sharply along party lines. Among Republicans, 66% approve and 32% disapprove. Disapproval is nearly universal — 91% — among Democrats. Of independents, 23% approve, 72% disapprove of the job he’s doing.

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Bush Secrecy Policies Transforming U.S. Government

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

By Sherwood Ross |

President George W. Bush has transformed an open federal government in Washington into one of “pervasive secrecy,” a distinguished authority on communications and First Amendment rights says.

Since his inauguration, Bush has overseen changes that suggest “a dramatic growth of government secrecy, far beyond the secrecy occurring during the Clinton Administration,” writes Susan Dente Ross,(no relation) an Associate Professor in the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication at Washington State University at Pullman.

“Through executive agency opinions, executive orders, statutory changes, and aggressive litigation, the Bush Administration has effectively limited the power of FOIA(Freedom of Information Act) and reversed the presumption that government records should be available to the public absent demonstrable proof showing that secrecy is needed,” Ross writes in The Long Term View, a journal of opinion published by the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

“The administration’s sweeping expansion of the power of federal government to classify records, and so hide them from public view, increases the range of information that may be classified and extends the lifetime of such secrecy,” Ross says. She noted that:

# Bush has increased the number of federal agencies authorized to designate information as secret and exempt them from public disclosure.

# The Department of Homeland Security removed the agency’s entire classification of information process from public scrutiny. The secretaries’ of Health and Human Services and Agriculture and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, have been granted the right to classify information “for purposes of national security and national defense.”

# The Defense Department has adopted a new policy that imposes strict limits on discussion of all its “critical research” from the “idea phase” onward.

# Bush has placed his own papers, and those of his father, the former president, “outside the public eye and empowered himself to keep Congress in the dark about intelligence matters.

# Bush has increased the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency to empower its director to block declassification of CIA information unless disclosure is authorized by the president.

# Bush has extended time that information can be kept classified from 10 to 25 years and this period may be extended even longer.

“Blanket closures of INS(Immigration and Naturalization Service) proceedings and absolute gags on disclosure of related information eviscerate the time-honored constitutional protection of open public trials,” Ross writes.

She noted the federal government “arrested and refused to identify hundreds of aliens who either may be connected to terrorism as material witnesses or who may have visa or other INS infractions.”

An INS directive issued promptly after September 11, 2001, mandated absolute closure of all deportation hearings in cases the agency determined to be of “special interest” to the war on terrorism, Ross said.

The INS judges could gag aliens from disclosing anything learned in closed proceedings and an INS regulation requires states and localities housing federal detainees to withhold all information about them.

Ross noted, though, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge struck down the INS closures and a U.S. District Court Judge in Washington ordered the Justice Department to disclose the names of more than 1,100 non-U.S. citizens detained at some point in connection with terrorism.

Ross asserts, “Legislation championed as essential to protect the nation against terrorist threats allows the federal government to spy on its citizens, to detain them in secret without charges, to prosecute them based on secret evidence, and to prohibit parties to the trial from discussing related information.”

Ross writes the merest perusal of some Bush initiatives shows it has reversed the presumption of open government: “Although the now prevailing presumption of closed government is masked in subtle nuances of language and interpretive guidelines, we may liken the shift to the sea change that would occur in our criminal justice system if we moved from a presumption of innocent until proven guilty to an assumption of guilty until proven innocent.”

Granting the Bush administration has imposed its sweeping secrecy policies in the name of national security, Ross contends this exchange is “unacceptable.”

“The trade-off, secrecy for security, is a sham,” she writes. “The citizenry gives up its vital check on abuse of government power and gains little in return.”“A shadow government that operates in secrecy,” Ross continues, “does not advance the security of its citizens. Ignorance is not security. Safety is not increased when citizens are blinded by government deception and distortion. Government does not better serve its electorate when it operates with impunity.”

The Massachusetts School of Law, publishers of the Long Term View, is purposefully dedicated to the education of minorities, immigrants, and students from low- and middle-income backgrounds that would otherwise be unable to attend law school and enter the legal profession. Views expressed in the publication are not necessarily those of the law school.

(Sherwood Ross, media consultant to Massachusetts School of Law. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com )

Sherwood Ross has worked as a publicist for the City of Chicago and Nassau County, N.Y., governments; as a news director for the National Urban League; as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News; as a workplace columnist for Reuters; as a media consultant to colleges, universities, law schools and more than 100 national magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Business Week, and Foreign Policy; as a speechwriter for mayors, governors and presidential candidates, and as a radio news reporter and talk show host at WOL, Washington, D.C. He holds an award for “best spot news coverage” for Chicago radio stations in 1963. His degree from the University of Miami was in race relations and he has written a book, “Gruening of Alaska,” a number of national magazine articles and several plays, including “Baron Jiro,” produced at Live Arts Theatre, Charlottesville, Va., and “Yamamoto’s Decision,” read at the National Press Club, where he is a member. His favorite quotations are from the Sermon on The Mount.

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Syrian ambassador says CIA fabricated photos

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

Reuters | Syria’s ambassador to the United States said Friday that the CIA fabricated pictures allegedly taken inside a secret Syrian nuclear reactor and predicted that in coming weeks the U.S. story about the site would implode from within.

“The photos presented to me yesterday were ludicrous, laughable,” Ambassador Imad Moustapha told reporters at his Washington residence.

He refused to say what the building in the remote eastern desert of Syria was used for before Israeli jets bombed it in September 2007.

Senior U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday they believe it was a secret nuclear reactor meant to produce plutonium, which can be used to make high-yield nuclear weapons. They alleged that North Korea aided in the design, construction and outfitting of the building.

Syria bulldozed the building’s ruins a month after it was bombed and
constructed a new, larger building in its place, leaving little or no evidence of what had been on the site.

Moustapha would not explain the purpose of the new building. But he said the lack of military checkpoints, air defenses or barbed wire fences around either building should show that it was not a sensitive facility.

So far, Syria has not allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to
inspect the area.

Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Ja’afari, pledged on Friday to cooperate with the IAEA and suggested that the main target of the American CIA allegations against Syria is to justify the Israeli attack against the Syrian side.

In a message to employees, CIA Director Michael Hayden praised the agency’s outstanding work, calling it a case study in rigorous analytic tradecraft, skillful human and technical collection.

But some outside nuclear experts were questioning some of the CIA’s analysis, though not disputing its conclusions.

David Albright, president of the nonprofit Institute for Science and
International Security, analyzed commercial satellite imagery of the bombed facility last fall and surmised then it was a nuclear reactor. He questioned the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that the reactor was within months or weeks of completion.

“It’s not clear-cut it was ready to turn on,” Albright said.

He also took issue with the Bush administration’s assertion that the reactor was solely intended to support a nuclear weapons program. Officials said Thursday the reactor was ill-suited for electrical generation, lacking distribution wires or substations, and did not bear the hallmarks of a research reactor. They concluded the plutonium was therefore meant for weapons but acknowledged they had no direct evidence of that.

“Almost all reactors produce plutonium, even those dedicated to peaceful
purposes,” Albright said.

Civilian uses are possible and cannot be dismissed out of hand, he said. I think the CIA and the White House have not shown that the only possibility for this reactor is that it was to make plutonium for nuclear weapons.

It very well could be true, he said, but it is far less than ironclad, absent other information.

According to the CIA, the Syrian reactor was modeled on a small North Korean reactor built at Yongbyon. That facility produced a small amount of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Albright said that facility also was a research effort to determine whether the North Koreans could scale up the model to produce electricity efficiently.

Siegfried Hecker, co-director of Stanford University’s Center for
International Security and Cooperation, said the evidence strongly suggests Syria’s intention was to produce plutonium. He agreed with the assessment that the plant was not well-suited for generating electricity.

On the other hand, it was the best path to bomb-grade plutonium, he said. That was most likely the primary purpose of this facility.

One piece of evidence that casts doubt on Syrian intentions to produce
plutonium for weapons was the absence of a reprocessing facility, necessary to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.

But Anthony Cordesman, a military expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that may not have been a serious impediment. Syria could quickly build such a reprocessing capability, he said.

Cordesman also said the CIA undercut its case against Syria by not explaining how a plutonium-producing reactor would fit into Syria’s long history of suspicious activities that suggest it is trying to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

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Police Taser Claims Another Life

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

By Shamus Toomey - Chicago Sun-Times |

A 24-year-old Lake View man died Thursday, five days after suburban Cincinnati police shocked him with a Taser outside a bar there.

Kevin Piskura, 24, of the 800 block of West Fletcher, had been hospitalized since the incident at 2 a.m. Saturday outside a bar in Oxford, Ohio, and he died Thursday afternoon at University Hospital in Cincinnati, his family said.

Piskura was surrounded by loved ones at the time of his death, and the family issued a written statement later in the day: “Today, we lost a son, a brother, a family member and a friend.”

Video was captured by the camera atop the Taser X26 stun gun used by the Oxford police officer who scuffled with Piskura early Saturday outside a bar near Miami University. Piskura graduated from the school in 2006 before moving to Chicago.

Piskura’s Lake View roommate, Steven G. Smith, 24, was being thrown out of the bar and began fighting with employees. A police officer ordered Smith to stop, but Piskura joined in and started fighting with the officer, who drew his Taser and warned them to stop, police said.

Smith backed off, but Piskura was hit in the chest by the Taser’s barbs — after Officer Geoff Robinson shouted “Taser” three times, per department policy, police said.

The dramatic, 69-second video of the incident shows Piskura rolling on the ground while being shocked for about 10 seconds. The incident is being investigated by the local county sheriff.

The officer who fired the Taser had been on the police force for two years. He was trained on the Taser in September and completed a refresher course April 12, police said.

Piskura’s father is a former interim police chief in suburban Cleveland, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

In the statement, Piskura’s family also noted: “No one feels this loss more deeply than we do, however we still request that people refrain from rash judgment.”

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‘Sustainable’ bio-plastic can damage the environment

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

By John Vidal |

The worldwide effort by supermarkets and industry to replace conventional oil-based plastic with eco-friendly “bioplastics” made from plants is causing environmental problems and consumer confusion, according to a Guardian study.

The substitutes can increase emissions of greenhouse gases on landfill sites, some need high temperatures to decompose and others cannot be recycled in Britain.

Many of the bioplastics are also contributing to the global food crisis by taking over large areas of land previously used to grow crops for human consumption.

The market for bioplastics, which are made from maize, sugarcane, wheat and other crops, is growing by 20-30% a year.

The industry, which uses words such as “sustainable”, “biodegradeable”, “compostable” and “recyclable” to describe its products, says bioplastics make carbon savings of 30-80% compared with conventional oil-based plastics and can extend the shelf-life of food.

Concern centres on corn-based packaging made with polylactic acid (Pla). Made from GM crops, it looks identical to conventional polyethylene terephthalate (Pet) plastic and is produced by US company NatureWorks. The company is jointly owned by Cargill, the world’s second largest biofuel producer, and Teijin, one of the world’s largest plastic manufacturers.

Pla is used by some of the biggest supermarkets and food companies, including Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and Del Monte. It is used by Marks & Spencer to package organic foods, salads, snacks, desserts, and fruit and vegetables.

It is also used to bottle Belu mineral water, which is endorsed by environmentalists because the brand’s owners invest all profits in water projects in poor countries. Wal-Mart has said it plans to use 114m Pla containers over the course of a year.

While Pla is said to offer more disposal options, the Guardian has found that it will barely break down on landfill sites, and can only be composted in the handful of anaerobic digesters which exist in Britain, but which do not take any packaging. In addition, if Pla is sent to UK recycling works in large quantities, it can contaminate the waste stream, reportedly making other recycled plastics unsaleable.

Last year Innocent drinks stopped using Pla because commercial composting was “not yet a mainstream option” in the UK.

Anson, one of Britain’s largest suppliers of plastic food packaging, switched back to conventional plastic after testing Pla

in sandwich packs. Sainsbury’s has decided not to use it, saying Pla is made with GM corn. “No local authority is collecting compostable packaging at the moment. Composters do not want it,” a spokesman said.

Britain’s supermarkets compete to claim the greatest commitment to the environment with plant-based products. The bioplastics industry expects rising oil prices to help it compete with conventional plastics, with Europe using about 50,000 tonnes of bioplastics a year.

Concern is mounting because the new generation of biodegradable plastics ends up on landfill sites, where they degrade without oxygen, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. This week the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration reported a sharp increase in global methane emissions last year.

“It is just not possible to capture all the methane from landfill sites,” said Michael Warhurt, resources campaigner at Friends of the Earth. “A significant percentage leaks to the atmosphere.”

“Just because it’s biodegradable does not mean it’s good. If it goes to landfill it breaks down to methane. Only a percentage is captured,” said Peter Skelton of Wrap, the UK government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme. “In theory bioplastics are good. But in practice there are lots of barriers.”

Recycling companies said they would have to invest in expensive new equipment to extract bioplastic from waste for recycling. “If we could identify them the only option would be to landfill them,” said one recycler who asked to remain anonymous. “They are not wanted by UK recycling companies or local authorities who refuse to handle them. Councils are saying they do not want plastics near food collection. If these biodegradable [products] get into the recycling stream they contaminate it.

“It will get worse because the government is encouraging more recycling. There will be much more bioplastic around.”

Problems arise because some bioplastics are “home” compostable and recyclable. “It’s so confusing that a Pla bottle looks exactly the same as a standard Pet bottle,” Skelton said. “The consumer is not a polymer expert. Not nearly enough consideration has gone into what they are meant to do with them. Everything is just put in the recycling bin.”

Yesterday NatureWorks accepted that its products would not fully break down on landfill sites. “The recycling industry in the UK has not caught up with other countries” said Snehal Desai, chief marketing officer for NatureWorks. “We need alternatives to oil. UK industry should not resist change. We should be designing for the future and not the past. In central Europe, Taiwan and elsewhere, NatureWorks polymer is widely accepted as a compostable material.”

Other users said it was too soon to judge the new technology. “It’s very early days,” said Reed Paget, managing director of Belu. “The UK packaging industry does not want competition. It’s shortsighted and is blocking eco-innovation.” Belu collects its bottles and now sends them to mainland Europe.

“People think that biodegradable is good and non-biodegradable is bad. That’s all they see,” said Chris Goodall, environmental analyst and author of How to Live a Low-carbon Lifestyle. “I have been trying to compost bags that are billed as ‘biodegradable’ and ‘home compostable’ but I have completely failed. They rely on the compost heap really heating up but we still find the residues.”

Bioplastics compete for land with biofuels and food crops. About 200,000 tonnes of bioplastics were produced last year, requiring 250,000-350,000 tonnes of crops. The industry is forecast to need several million acres of farmland within four years.

There is also concern over the growing use by supermarkets of “oxy-degradable” plastic bags, billed as sustainable. They are made of conventional oil-based plastic, with an additive that enables the plastic to break down. The companies promoting it claim it reduces litter and causes no methane or harmful residues. They are used by Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut and KFC in the US, and Tesco and the Co-op in the UK for “degradable” plastic carrier bags.

Some environmentalists say the terminology confuses the public. “The consumer is baffled,” a Wrap briefing paper said. “It considers these products degradable but … they will not degrade effectively in [the closed environment of] a landfill site.”

A spokesman for Symphony Plastics disputed that. “Oxy-bioplastic can be re-used and recycled, but will degrade and disappear in a short timescale”, he said.

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NY police cleared in 50-bullet wedding day shooting

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

Reuters | Three New York City detectives were found not guilty on Friday in the shooting death of an unarmed black man killed in a hail of 50 bullets on his wedding day, prompting angry reactions and a federal review of the case.

A New York state judge cleared two police officers of manslaughter and other charges and a third of reckless endangerment in the death of Sean Bell, 23. Bell was shot, along with two friends, after a bachelor party at a strip club in November 2006.

But federal authorities said they would consider civil rights charges in the case in a review to be conducted by the Justice Department, federal prosecutors and the FBI.

They will “take appropriate action if the evidence indicates a prosecutable violation of federal criminal civil rights statutes,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

After the verdict, hundreds of demonstrators yelled angrily, and there was pushing and shoving in the crowd as police, reporters and spectators packed the sidewalk.

Civil rights leader Al Sharpton, who has been highly critical of police and is influential in New York’s black community, called for wider protests.

“They want us to act crazy so they would have an excuse to do more,” Sharpton told the audience of his radio show. “We are going to be strategic. We are going to close the city down in a nonviolent effective way.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg called for calm after the verdict, saying, “We don’t expect violence or law-breaking, nor is there any place for it.”

The case had generated outrage in New York’s black community, though police said they did not expect violence because numerous demonstrations against the perceived police brutality had remained peaceful.

“It shows that there is no justice in America for the black man. This is telling us the cops can do whatever they want and get away with it,” said B.M. Marcus, a community organizer.

APOLOGY

The acquitted officers gave brief statements thanking their friends and family.

“I’d like to say sorry to the Bell family for the tragedy,” said detective Marc Cooper, who had been charged only with reckless endangerment.

The other two detectives, Gescard Isnora and Mike Oliver, were charged with manslaughter.

All three defendants waived their right to a jury trial and decided to have the judge decide guilt or innocence. The defense lawyers said jurors in the borough of Queens were likely to be biased against the policemen due to the intense media coverage generated by the case.

State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Cooperman said the charges could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, noting that some prosecution witnesses contradicted themselves from prior statements and may have had motivation to lie.

“At times the testimony just didn’t make sense,” Cooperman said.

After the verdict, loud sobs were heard in the courtroom.

The judge gave credibility to the detectives’ statements that they believed they were in danger but also offered, “Questions of carelessness and incompetence must be left to other forums.”

The eight-week trial centered on whether the detectives had reason to believe they faced imminent danger and whether they made it clear to Bell and the two survivors that they were police officers.

On the night of the shooting, Isnora, the undercover officer who fired first, followed Bell and his two friends to Bell’s car believing they went to fetch a gun to settle a dispute at the club. He opened fire after being grazed by Bell’s car as Bell attempted to drive away.

The other officers reached Bell’s car after the initial confrontation and said they believed Isnora was being fired at from inside the vehicle.

(Reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Jackie Frank)

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FBI wants widespread monitoring of ‘illegal’ web activity

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

By Anne Broache |

The FBI on Wednesday called for new legislation that would allow federal police to monitor the Internet for “illegal activity.” The suggestion from FBI Director Robert Mueller, which came during a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, appears to go beyond a current plan to monitor traffic on federal-government networks. Mueller seemed to suggest that the bureau should have a broad “omnibus” authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks as well.

The surveillance should include all Internet traffic, Mueller said, “whether it be .mil, .gov, .com–whichever network you’re talking about.” (See the transcript of the hearing.)

In response to questions from Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, Mueller said his idea “balances on one hand, the privacy rights of the individual who are receiving the information, but on the other hand, given the technology, the necessity of having some omnibus search capability utilizing filters that would identify the illegal activity as it comes through and give us the ability to preempt that illegal activity where it comes through a choke point.”

In response, Issa said: “Can you have someone on your staff designated to work with members of Congress on trying to craft that legislation?”

If any omnibus Internet-monitoring proposal became law, it could implicate the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. In general, courts have ruled that police need search warrants to obtain the content of communication, and the federal Wiretap Act created “super warrant” wiretap orders that require additional steps and judicial oversight.

In addition, it’s unclear whether “illegal activity” would be limited to responding to denial-of-service attacks and botnets, or would also include detecting other illegal activities, such as online gambling, the distribution of “obscene” images of adults engaged in sexual acts, or selling drugs without a license.

Robert Mueller

(Credit: FBI )

To be fair, Wednesday’s discussion of the plan was geared toward cybercrime and the Bush administration’s classified “cyberinitiative,” which includes a shadowy program known as Einstein.

Some politicians have already raised concerns that even Einstein, which is described as dealing only with government networks and not private ones, could infringe upon the privacy rights of American citizens. It’s already in place at 15 federal agencies, but Homeland Security has said it’s still preparing the necessary privacy impact assessments for a proposed $293 million governmentwide Einstein expansion.

Issa, for his part, referred on Wednesday to malicious attacks being undertaken by foreign and domestic hackers who want to “take control of computers” and harvest the national-security secrets and private information of government agencies, private companies, and individual Americans.

“What authorities do you need to monitor, looking for those illegal activities, and then act on those, both defensively and, either yourselves or certainly other agencies, offensively in order to shut down a crime in process?” Issa asked.

In response, Mueller said he would be happy to have his legislative staff work with members of Issa’s committee on creating a bill for a broader-reaching surveillance system.

Issa suggested that perhaps the FBI already has the power to seek voluntary private-sector partners that would like to be “defended” by its agents, provided that they give the FBI their consent. Mueller, however, wasn’t so sure, saying, “that’s going to require some thought.”

[6:00 pm: Updated story with additional quotations from transcript of the hearing.]

CNET News.com’s Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.

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Iraqi oil pipeline blown up again

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

BBC News | An oil pipeline south of Baghdad has been blown up, wounding at least eight security guards, Iraqi police say. The blast, near the town of Iskandiriya, caused a large fire and disrupted the flow of crude oil to refineries in the south of Iraq.

The pipeline carries fuel south from Baghdad’s Doura oil refinery.

It was the second time in the past year the pipeline had been hit and the latest in a series of attacks on Iraqi oil refineries, blamed on insurgents.

Pumping from the refinery was stopped because of the explosion, and production was likely to be affected, according to an official speaking anonymously.

A police officer, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said “the bombing has caused a huge fire”.

He added that at least 16 firefighting units had been sent to the area to deal with the explosion.

Iraq has the world’s third-largest oil reserves, consisting of more than 115 billion barrels.

But oil pipelines have often been targeted around the country by insurgents or saboteurs.

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Senate votes unanimously to protect watchdogs

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

AP | Facing a possible White House veto, the Senate has passed a watered-down version of legislation that would protect government watchdogs from political pressure.But Senate lawmakers say the measure, approved unanimously on April 23, still offers strong protection to shield inspectors general from undue influence by the government agencies they are charged with investigating and makes reports and audits more accessible to the public.

“This bill is key to preserving the IGs’ role as government watchdogs and making sure they can do their job of rooting out waste in this country,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., one of the authors of S. 2324.

The Senate bill leaves out several provisions contained in a similar bill passed in the House last year. The Bush administration threatened a veto over constitutional concerns it had with the House-passed version.

Under the House measure, inspectors would be appointed to seven-year terms and could only be removed from office for cause, such as neglect of duty, inefficiency, conviction for a felony or other inappropriate conduct. The House version also would require the independent watchdogs to submit their budgets directly to Congress in addition to the White House.

The White House complained that those requirements would encroach on the president’s constitutional authority to oversee executive branch employees and requests.

The new Senate bill includes no term limits for inspectors and would require the president’s budget to include how much money each inspector general requested and the amount recommended by the agency. The disclosure would allow Congress to see whether agencies are trying to hamstring inspectors by restricting budget funds.

It also requires Congress to be notified of any effort to remove an inspector general and establishes a new council to review any allegations of wrongdoing made against inspectors or staff members. Inspectors would be prohibited from accepting a bonus and would receive the same pay level as other senior agency executives.

“This bill is good government legislation at its best,” said independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. “It will strengthen the role of inspectors general as an independent investigative force, making sure that taxpayers’ dollars are spent efficiently and effectively while also guaranteeing that IGs themselves be held accountable.”

Despite the changes, House lawmakers are expected to be amenable to compromise. The House measure passed 404-11 in October, well above the level needed to override a veto.

“We’re happy they passed it and we’re going to work to pass that into law,” said John Spragens, a spokesman for Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., the bill’s House sponsor. “Whether it’s that version or a compromise version remains to be seen.”

Inspector general offices were created in the late 1970s to investigate waste, fraud and corruption. Audits and investigations in 2006 alone helped recover $6.8 billion in misspent funds and identified nearly $10 billion in potential savings, according to a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report.

In recent years, inspectors at several government agencies came under attack after investigations uncovered poor performance or wasteful spending.

Half of the 58 inspector general offices are appointed by the president with Senate confirmation. The other half are appointed by agency heads.

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US prepping military options against Iran

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

By Mike Sheehan |

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Pentagon is planning “potential” military actions against Iran, reports The Washington Post.

Mullen criticized Iran’s “‘increasingly lethal and malign influence’ in Iraq,” writes Ann Scott Tyson for the Post.

Addressing concerns about the US military’s capability of dealing with yet another conflict at a time when forces are purportedly stretched thin, Mullen said war with Iran “would be ‘extremely stressing’ but not impossible for U.S. forces, pointing specifically to reserve capabilities in the Navy and Air Force,” Tyson notes.

“It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability,” she quotes the U.S.’s top military leader at a Pentagon news conference.

Mullen’s assertion comes a day after American forces reportedly fired warning shots at Iranian speedboats in the Persian Gulf, a confrontation that Iran denies took place.

A prior incident involving U.S. forces in the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian speedboats in January of this year–which Republican White House candidates used (with the notable exception of Ron Paul) as a saber-rattling opportunity during a nationally-televised debate–was later discredited as a virtual fabrication.

Excerpts from the Post article, available in full here, follow…

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…Mullen made clear that he prefers a diplomatic solution to the tensions with Iran and does not foresee any imminent military action. “I have no expectations that we’re going to get into a conflict with Iran in the immediate future,” he said.

Mullen’s statements and others by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently signal a new rhetorical onslaught by the Bush administration against Iran, amid what officials say is increased Iranian provision of weapons, training and financing to Iraqi groups that are attacking and killing Americans.

In a speech Monday at West Point, Gates said Iran “is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.” He said a war with Iran would be “disastrous on a number of levels. But the military option must be kept on the table given the destabilizing policies of the regime and the risks inherent in a future Iranian nuclear threat.”

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who was nominated this week to head all U.S. forces in the Middle East, is preparing a briefing soon to lay out detailed evidence of increased Iranian involvement in Iraq, Mullen said. The briefing will detail, for example, the discovery in Iraq of weapons that were very recently manufactured in Iran, he said.

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China is world’s largest Internet-using population

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

By Jane Macartney |

China has overtaken the US as the world’s biggest user of the internet, thanks to a rise of more than 61 per cent of people in the country using the web in the past year. More than 221 million Chinese were online at the end of February compared with 137 million at the start of 2007, tying for first place with the United States. But experts say that the number is sure to have risen steeply in the past few weeks, placing China in the undisputed number one position.

Despite the substantial increase, internet penetration in China remains low given the size of the population. Only 16 per cent of the country’s 1.3 billion are online compared with a world average of 19 per cent.

Experts say that the number will swell rapidly in the next few years as hundreds of millions of Chinese still toiling as low-paid farmers or labourers experience a rise in their incomes that will enable them to go online. BDA China, a Beijing technology company, estimates that China’s web population will grow by about 18 per cent a year, putting the total at 490 million by 2012 – more than the population of the United States.

For the Chinese, the internet is becoming their preferred means of communication, their top source of information and their favourite for entertainment. Sites that offer video-sharing have become among the most popular in China over the past year, commanding as many as 100 million visitors a day – equal to the entire audience for the biggest state television channels.

The carefully policed Great Firewall of China, which blocks searches for content considered subversive or pornographic, has also turned its spotlight on these sites. Last month the Government said that it would shut down 25 video sites and punish 32 others for violating new rules against carrying content deemed pornographic, violent or a threat to security.

The most commonly blocked searches are for words such as Taiwan independence, Tibet, the Dalai Lama or the Falun Gong, the banned quasi-religious sect. These are topics of less interest to most Chinese than detailed news of the torch relay, results of the latest Manchester United match or gossip about Brad Pitt.

Another reason for the mushrooming popularity of the internet has been a regulatory quirk. Fixed-line phone companies are losing potential new customers to mobile phone services but are barred from entering that market themselves. So they are trying to bring in new revenues by promoting low-cost broadband internet access. This has brought high-speed service to millions more Chinese.

It has been a powerful tool for communication in the past few days when internet users – backed by mobile phone text messaging – tried to mobilise a nationwide boycott of Carrefour, the French supermarket accused of supporting the Dalai Lama.

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Pentagon Propaganda Worse Than We Thought

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

By John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton - PR Watch |

David Barstow of the New York Times has written the first installment in what is already a stunning exposé of the Bush Administration’s most powerful propaganda weapon used to sell and manage the war on Iraq: the embedding of military propagandists directly into the TV networks as on-air commentators. We and others have long criticized the

widespread TV network practice of hiring former military officials to serve as analysts, but even in our most cynical moments we did not anticipate how bad it was. Barstow has painstakingly documented how these analysts, most of them military industry consultants and lobbyists, were directly chosen, managed, coordinated and given their talking points by the Pentagon’s ministers of propaganda.

Thanks to the two-year investigation by the New York Times, we today know that Victoria Clarke, then the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, launched the Pentagon military analyst program in early 2002. These supposedly independent military analysts were in fact a coordinated team of pro-war propagandists, personally recruited by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and acting under Clarke’s tutelage and development.

One former participant, NBC military analyst Kenneth Allard, has called the effort “psyops on steroids.” As Barstow reports, “Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as ‘message force multipliers’ or ’surrogates’ who could be counted on to deliver administration ‘themes and messages’ to millions of Americans ‘in the form of their own opinions.’ … Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war.”

Clarke and her senior aide, Brent T. Krueger, eventually signed up more than 75 retired military officers who penned newspaper op/ed columns and appeared on television and radio news shows as military analysts. The Pentagon held weekly meetings with the military analysts, which continued as of April 20, 2008, when the New York Times ran Barstow’s story. The program proved so successful that it was expanded to issues besides the Iraq War. “Other branches of the

administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.”

Barstow spent two years digging, using the Freedom of Information Act and attorneys to force the Bush Administration to release some 8,000 pages of documents now under lock and key at the New York Times. This treasure trove should result in additional stories, giving them a sort of “Pentagon Papers” of Iraq war propaganda.

In 1971, when the Times printed excerpts of the Pentagon Papers on its front page, it precipitated a constitutional showdown with the Nixon Administration over the deception and lies that sold the war in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers issue dominated the news media back then. Today, however, Barstow’s stunning report is being ignored by the most important news media in America — TV news — the source where most Americans, unfortunately, get most of their information.

Joseph Goebbels, eat your heart out. Goebbels is history’s most notorious war propagandist, but even he could not have invented a smoother PR vehicle for selling and maintaining media and public support for a war: embed trusted “independent” military experts into the TV newsroom. As with most propaganda, the key to the success of this effort was the element of concealment, as these analysts and the Bush administration hid the fact that their talking points and marching orders were coming directly from the Pentagon.

The use of these analysts was a glaring violation of journalistic standards. As the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists explains, journalists are supposed to:

* Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.

* Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.

* Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement,

public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.

* Disclose unavoidable conflicts.

* Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.

* Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.

* Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money.

The networks using these analysts as journalists shamelessly failed to vet their experts and ignored the obvious conflicts of hiring a person with financial relationships to companies profiting from war to be an on-air analyst of war. They acted as if war was a football game and their military commentators were former coaches and players familiar with the rules and strategies. The TV networks even paid these “analysts” for their propaganda, enabling them to present themselves as “third party experts” while parroting White House talking points to sell the war.

Now that Barstow has blown their cover, the TV networks have generally refused to comment about this matter. Further compounding their violations of the public trust, they are blacking out coverage of the New York Times exposé, no doubt on advice of their own PR and crisis management advisors.

Since the 1920s there have been laws passed to stop the government from doing what Barstow has exposed. It is actually illegal in the United States for the government to propagandize its own citizens. As Barstow’s report demonstrates, these laws have been repeatedly violated, are not enforced and are clearly inadequate. The U.S. Congress therefore needs to investigate this and the rest of the Bush propaganda campaign that sold the war in Iraq.

The attack and occupation of Iraq continues, with no end in sight. Estimates of the number of Iraqi dead range from the hundreds of thousands to more than a million. The cost to American taxpayers will eventually be in the trillions of dollars. More than 4,000 US soldiers have lost their lives, and this is just a part of the horrific toll of mental and physical disability that the war is taking on hundreds of thousands of troops and their families.

This war would never have been possible had the mainstream news media done its job. Instead, it has repeated the Big Lies that sold the war. This war would never have been possible without the millions of dollars spent by the Bush Administration on sophisticated and deceptive public relations techniques such as the Pentagon military analyst program that David Barstow has exposed. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Victoria Clarke, who designed and oversaw this Pentagon propaganda machine, now works as a commentator for TV network news. She may have changed jobs and employers since leaving the Pentagon, but her work remains the same.

John Stauber is the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy.

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UN targets US over delay in Syrian nuclear evidence

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

By Anne Penketh |

The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog has reacted with fury at the United States’ delay in passing on intelligence, after Washington accused North Korea of helping Syria to build secretly a nuclear reactor.

According to the Central Intelligence Agency the reactor, which may have been part of a nuclear weapons programme, was destroyed by an Israeli air raid months before its completion.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency chief, issued a stiffly worded statement in which he criticised the US and Israel, as well as Syria, which should have informed the IAEA if it was building a nuclear reactor.

Noting that the IAEA was only informed by the Bush administration about the nuclear reactor claim on Thursday, seven months after the Israeli raid, he deplored the fact that the information had not been provided to the agency in a “timely” manner.

Mr ElBaradei also pointed out that, according to the information provided by the US, “the reactor was not yet operational and no nuclear material had been introduced into it”. According to a Western diplomat in Vienna, that meant that if the UN inspectors had been alerted earlier, they would have been able to verify the facts on the ground. “Now nobody is ever going to know for sure,” the diplomat said. In his statement, Mr ElBaradei criticised Israel for its “unilateral use of force” which undermined the “due process of verification”.

Mr ElBaradei was said to be incensed by the American failure to inform the UN watchdog about the possible risk of nuclear proliferation when the Americans became aware of the nature of the site in 2006. “What kind of non-proliferation regime is this, when they come to the IAEA months after it’s been bombed?” the diplomat said. The IAEA chief pledged to investigate the US information “with the seriousness it deserves”.

The images that were released to the press after a closed-door briefing to US Congressional panels raised new questions as the date of the alleged reactor pictures was not clear.

The head of the Syrian nuclear commission was shown standing next to a car with a Syrian number plate with the head of North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor, which has made weapons grade plutonium. But there was no indication of the date. American officials told reporters that their suspicions were raised because of the secrecy surrounding the project, in comments that had echoes of the Iraq weapons of mass destruction fiasco.

Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, refused to comment on the matter. Syria continued to deny the charges as “ridiculous”, although the reactor images were described as “compelling” by the American nuclear expert David Albright. But he added that the lack of other facilities “has to give pause before accusing Syria of having an active weapons programme”.

Syria accused the Bush administration of having been “apparently party to the execution” of the air raid. An American official said Washington did not give Israel any “green light” to strike the area, although The New York Times reported that there had been extensive discussions between the US and Israel before the raid on 6 September last year.

“It’s sheer fabrication,” said the spokesman for the Syrian embassy in London, Jihad Makdissi, adding that the reactor images showed a deserted military building. “The CIA giving testimony is the same CIA that briefed Colin Powell who spoke at the UN Security Council about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.”

Asked about the photograph of the scientists, Mr Makdissi pointed out that “Syria and North Korea have economic relations. This person was not smuggled into Syria – did you see a nuclear rocket in his hands?”

The impact on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament commitments at six-party talks remained unclear last night. The chief US negotiator, Christopher Hill, said that the co-operation between Syria and North Korea was no longer active, suggesting that the Bush administration had already turned the page.

The need for more answers

*Questions for Syria and N Korea

Why does Syria continue to deny that a reactor was being built despite the images presented to Congress?

Why does North Korea deny the accusations?

Where and why did the head of the Syrian atomic energy commission meet the North Korean nuclear scientist?

Why did Syria not keep the International Atomic Energy Agency informed of the reactor progress in line with IAEA regulations?

Why did Syria not respond after the Israeli strike?

Why did Syria continue its back-channel talks with Israel after the raid?

*Questions for the US and Israel

Why did the US wait until last Thursday to inform the IAEA about the reactor when it had been aware of the site possibly as early as 2006?

Why did it take the CIA seven months to reveal this information to Congress?

Does the intelligence show any intention to build a weapon?

Is there any directevidence of North Koreans actually at the site? The photograph of the Syrian and North Korean nuclear scientists was taken at another location

Why did Israel act unilaterally to destroy the site before IAEA inspectors had a chance to visit?

To what extent was the US involved in the Israeli air strike?

When did Syria and North Korea stop their nuclear co-operation, which the US says has been halted?

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Contributions & Guests, Editor, Top Story, War & Terrorism News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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