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The Bush team’s Geneva hypocrisy

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Newly released U.S. government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Conventions’ protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq war when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers.

Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush and other administration officials orchestrated a chorus of outrage, citing those TV scenes as proof of the Iraq’s government contempt for international law in general and the Geneva Convention in particular.

“It is a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention to humiliate and abuse prisoners of war or to harm them in any way. As President Bush said yesterday, those who harm POWs will be found and punished as war criminals,” Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said on March 24, 2003.

That same day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told BBC that “the Geneva Convention is very clear on the rules for treating prisoners. They’re not supposed to be tortured or abused, they’re not supposed to be intimidated, they’re not supposed to be made public displays of humiliation or insult, and we’re going to be in a position to hold those Iraqi officials who are mistreating our prisoners accountable, and they’ve got to stop.”

At a March 25, 2003, press briefing about progress in the U.S.-led invasion, Secretary Rumfeld said, “This war is an act of self defense, to be sure, but it is also an act of humanity. . . . In recent days, the world has witnessed further evidence of their [Iraqi] brutality and their disregard for the laws of war. Their treatment of coalition POWs is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.”

The U.S. corporate news media also assisted in this one-sided indictment by uncritically reporting the administration’s complaints while staying silent on the fact that just days earlier, American TV had run scenes of captured Iraqi soldiers, some forced to kneel down at gunpoint to be patted down by U.S. soldiers.

This behavior of the U.S. corporate news media during the early phase of the Iraq War fit with its lack of skepticism in the months leading up to the March 19, 2003, invasion as Bush administration officials spoon-fed the press false intelligence alleging secret Iraqi WMD stockpiles and covert links to al-Qaeda terrorists allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

So, perhaps it should have come as no surprise when the U.S. corporate news media treated the TV footage of American POWs as further evidence that Iraq was run by a lawless regime with no respect for the rules of war.

Stunning hypocrisy

In retrospect — now with much more of the documentary record available — the disparity between the administration’s outrage toward the Iraqis for showing the video and the abuse inflicted by the U.S. government on captives from the Iraq and Afghan wars is stunning.

Declassified documents reveal that the Bush administration concocted legal theories to justify sidestepping the Geneva Conventions when it came to prisoners incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, at secret CIA prisons and at various locations in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib where shocking photos were leaked of sexual and physical abuse in 2004.

Indeed, while U.S. government officials were preaching to Iraqis about the rules of war, the Bush administration was seven months into a secret interrogation program that authorized CIA interrogators to question Afghan and al-Qaeda detainees using brutal methods.

The techniques included painful “stress positions,” forced nudity in cold conditions and the simulated drowning of waterboarding, practices that human rights organizations say violated Geneva and anti-torture laws.

The Bush administration also ordered the CIA to engage in “extraordinary renditions,” which involved kidnapping terror suspects and shipping them to countries that are known to practice torture.

If held to the same standards that the Bush administration demanded of the Iraqi military, U.S. officials implicated in these policies would be guilty of violating the Geneva Conventions, said Claire Tixeire, a human rights attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

“They clearly knew that the laws of war were supposed to apply to prisoners apprehended by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they found every legal loophole to find ways it didn’t apply to the U.S. side,” Tixeire said in an interview.

Tixeire, whose organization is defending some of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, said that while U.S. officials may have had a point in accusing the Iraqi military of violating the Geneva Conventions over the TV interviews, the way the U.S. treated Iraqi captives was much worse.

“It’s clear to me these actions came down from the very top,” Tixeire said. “Denying prisoners of war humane treatment is the greatest breach of the Geneva Convention. It’s a war crime. They put U.S. troops at risk for being treated inhumanely if they were captured.”

When asked recently about the past statements about Iraqi violations of the Geneva Conventions, representatives for Clarke, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld said the now-former officials would not comment for this story.

Anti-torture laws

The actions of the Bush administration also flouted the 1984 “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,” which was approved by 145 nations, including the United States. It declares that: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Moreover, the convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors and it mandates that torturers be prosecuted wherever they are found.

The United States signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 under President Ronald Reagan, who hailed it as “a significant step” in preventing torture, which he called “an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.”

In a May 20, 1988, message to the U.S. Senate, Reagan noted that “the core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’”

According to that provision, “each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

It was this convention, ratified by the Senate in 1994, that Bush administration officials sought to bypass with legal memos, many drafted by John Yoo of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

The administration memos argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees in the “war on terror” and that President Bush’s commander-in-chief powers allowed him to ignore laws in the interest of protecting the nation.

The record now shows that during the same week in March 2003 — when Rumsfeld was publicly berating Iraq for violating the Geneva Conventions by broadcasting footage of American POW’s — he was engaged in drafting a top-secret plan that would give military interrogators at Guantanamo wide latitude to use harsher techniques to obtain information from prisoners.

Rumsfeld signed off on the plan on April 2, 2003, according to documents declassified and turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union last month in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Though some of the more extreme techniques were dropped as the list was winnowed down to 24 from 35, the final set of interrogation methods Rumsfeld approved still included tactics for isolating and demeaning a detainee, known as “pride and ego down.”

Such degrading tactics would appear to contravene the Geneva Conventions, which bar abusive or demeaning treatment of captives.

Reports of abuse

Weeks after the Iraq invasion, human rights groups started receiving information about the abuse of dozens of Iraqi prisoners at Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, and the deaths of two prisoners, one of whom died from a crushed larynx, and the other from a hard blow to the head.

Amnesty International sent a letter to the head of the U.S. occupation, Paul Bremer, on June 26, 2003, raising concerns about abuses during house searches, treatment during arrest and detention, people being forced to lie face down on the ground; use of hoods or blind folds, exposure to sun and heat for hours, limited amount of water supplied, and lack of proper washing and toilet facilities.

One month later, Amnesty International released a report, “Iraq: memorandum on concerns relating to law and order,” warning of allegations of torture and abuse in U.S. prisons, including Abu Ghraib.

“Regrettably, testimonies from recently released detainees held at Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib Prison do not suggest that conditions of detention have improved,” the report said.

There are “a number of reports of cases of detainees who have died in custody, mostly as a result of shooting by members of the Coalition forces.” A Saudi national “alleged that he was subjected to beatings and electric shocks.”

Photographs backing up these allegations would surface a year later in two investigative news reports, one by Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker and the other by “60 Minutes II,” which detailed the systematic abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Months before the worldwide condemnation of the treatment of the Abu Ghraib prisoners, Rumsfeld sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller to Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay to “hit back at the [Iraqi] insurgents . . . through unorthodox means,” according to a May 10, 2004, front-page story in the Washington Post.

“He came up there and told me he was going to ‘Gitmoize’ the detention operation,” turning it into a hub of interrogation, said Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, then commander of the US military prison system in Iraq, according to the Post.

Hersh wrote in The New Yorker’s May 24, 2004, issue that “the roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year [2003] by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. . . .

“The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. . . . Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, [bringing] unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. . . . The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.”

Tarnished image

Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project and the co-author of Administration of Torture, added that Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials by “holding up the Geneva Convention and saying it did not apply to some prisoners have tarnished the image of the U.S. throughout the world.”

Even after the programs governing interrogations were exposed, Rumsfeld made sure that a loophole in a new Defense Department policy issued in November 2005, which barred torture and called for the “humane” treatment of detainees, gave him and his deputy the authority to override it.

“Intelligence interrogations will be conducted in accordance with applicable law, this directive and implementing plans, policies, orders, directives, and doctrine developed by DoD components and approved by USD (I), unless otherwise authorized, in writing, by the secretary of defense or deputy secretary of defense,” the policy says. “USD (I)” refers to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Rumsfeld resigned in November 2006.

Jason Leopold is the author of “News Junkie,” a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview.

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US air force calls for mission to combat climate change

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By David Adam | The US air force will this week call for the world’s top scientists to come together in a 21st-century Apollo-style programme to develop greener fuels and tackle global warming. It wants universities, governments, companies and environmental groups to collaborate on a multibillion-dollar effort to work out greenhouse gas emissions of existing and future fuels.

William Anderson, an assistant secretary of the air force, said the project aimed to calculate the overall carbon footprint of the world’s energy sources, rather than merely measure their direct emissions.

He said controversy over the environmental impact of biofuels showed such an effort was needed to avoid making the situation worse: “If you look at the situation with bioethanol from corn, a lot of people saw that as a panacea, but now it seems that if you include the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, the carbon footprint may be worse than people realised.

“If the world wants to get serious on greenhouse gas emissions, we have to figure out where they’re coming from.”

Anderson said the effort required was the modern equivalent of the Apollo missions to put a man on the moon, “and the US air force knows something about that”. The project will be discussed on Wednesday at a meeting in Washington DC organised by the Connecticut Centre for Advanced Technology. Anderson said the project aimed to combine research already under way across the world, and to encourage governments and companies to release “billions of dollars” of funds.

US officials have already met the Royal Air Force and French air force to discuss ways to make their activities more environmentally friendly. A second meeting is scheduled for Paris in June.

Anderson said the military could learn from civilian airlines, which have studied how to reduce weight and increase fuel efficiency. He said: “What everybody sees is the fighter aircraft, but the predominant part of what we do is transporting people and stuff around. And so do British Airways, so do Virgin and so do Fed Ex.”

Concerned about future supplies of oil, the US air force plans to switch its aircraft to a synthetic liquid fuel made from coal. It has tested the new fuel in aircraft such as the B-52 bomber, and is encouraging the British and French to follow. Anderson said: “Energy demand is going to outstrip any gains from renewables. As oil starts to diminish, coal is going to play big.”

Environmental campaigners have criticised such fuels, which they say have overall carbon emissions about double those from oil. But Anderson said much of the carbon pollution could be trapped and stored underground. He insisted the air force would not switch to new technology unless it “has a greener carbon footprint” than existing fuels.

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A Million Palestinians Threatened with Starvation

Monday, April 28th, 2008

The Israelis already have the Gaza Strip under military siege, carefully controlling what and who goes in and out of it. They have now cut off most fuel, and the United Nations has been forced to stop distributing food aid.

This Israeli government action is an unvarnished war crime. It is known as collective punishment. There was already hunger and malnutrition among Palestinian children, which will now be worsened.

Hamas told Jimmy Carter it was ready to negotiate.

The Olmert government is not interested in negotiating, apparently, even though nothing the Likud and the Kadima “Likud Light” has done since 2001 has diminished the salience of the Gaza Muslim fundamentalist party, including a concerted campaign of murder, kidnapping, assault and collective punishment. Despite the violent groups on its margins, Hamas itself has at various points indicated a willingness to play ordinary politics, but Olmert will be satisfied with nothing less than destroying it. So far it isn’t going well for him.

Cutting off fuel to the Gazans and provoking a cut-off of UN food aid is not only criminal but also stupid. It is difficult to imagine such mean-spirited sanctions against civilians having any policy effect whatsoever, so they are just making Israel look bad.

Israeli ambassador to the UN Dan Gillerman called Carter a bigot for his diplomacy.

Gillerman called Hizbullah, an Arab party, “animals” in summer of 2006. Would he like to expand the reference to include other races? How many of us exactly are Untermenschen in his view? For Likudniks to call Jimmy Carter a “bigot” is sort of like the Ku Klux Klan denouncing Nelson Mandela for racial insensitivity.

Informed Comment

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Investigators: Millions in Iraq contracts never finished

Monday, April 28th, 2008

AP | Millions of dollars of lucrative Iraq reconstruction contracts were never finished because of excessive delays, poor performance or other factors, including failed projects that are being falsely described by the U.S. government as complete, federal investigators say.

The audit released Sunday by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, provides the latest snapshot of an uneven reconstruction effort that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $100 billion. It also comes as several lawmakers have said they want the Iraqis to pick up more of the cost of reconstruction.

The special IG’s review of 47,321 reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars found that at least 855 contracts were terminated by U.S. officials before their completion, primarily because of unforeseen factors such as violence and excessive costs. About 112 of those agreements were ended specifically because of the contractors’ actual or anticipated poor performance.

In addition, the audit said many reconstruction projects were being described as complete or otherwise successful when they were not. In one case, the U.S. Agency for International Development contracted with Bechtel Corp. in 2004 to construct a $50 million children’s hospital in Basra, only to “essentially terminate” the project in 2006 because of monthslong delays.

But rather than terminate the project, U.S. officials modified the contract to change the scope of the work. As a result, a U.S. database of Iraq reconstruction contracts shows the project as complete “when in fact the hospital was only 35 percent complete when work was stopped,” said investigators in describing the practice of “descoping” as frequent.

“Descoping is an appropriate process but does mask problem projects to the extent they occur,” the audit states.

Responding, USAID in the report said it disagreed that its descoping of the hospital project was “effectively a contract termination,” but that it had changed the work because of escalating costs and security problems. Mark Tokola, the director of the Iraq transition assistance office, also responded that the database the IG’s office reviewed of Iraq reconstruction contracts was incomplete.

Bowen’s office said its review was preliminary and that it planned follow-up reviews to investigate descoping more closely. Investigators said they were also looking into whether contractors whose projects were terminated by the U.S. government due to inadequate performance might have been awarded new contracts later despite their poor records.

Investigators said the database they reviewed lacked full data on projects such as those done by USAID, the State Department, and those completed before 2006. But they said the figures cited in the report offered a baseline in terms of unfinished Iraq reconstruction contracts.

“Adding contract terminations from these (other) sources would certainly raise the number of terminated projects,” the report states.

The audit comes amid renewed focus in recent months on potential abuse in contracting government-wide, such as Iraq reconstruction. Last year, congressional investigators said as much as $10 billion — or one in six dollars — charged by U.S. contractors for Iraq reconstruction were questionable or unsupported, and warned that significantly more taxpayer money was at risk.

In recent weeks, Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., has been working with Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, on legislation that would restrict future reconstruction dollars to loans instead of grants; require that Baghdad pay for fuel used by American troops and take over U.S. payments to predominantly Sunni fighters in the Awakening movement.

Danielle Brian, executive director of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said the latest audit report points to significant U.S. taxpayer waste in current reconstruction efforts.

“The report paints a depressing picture of money being poured into failed Iraq reconstruction projects — contractors are killed, projects are blown up just before being completed, or the contractor just stops doing the work,” she said.

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Bush Administration Policies Making Work Less Safe

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By Leo W. Gerard | In the heart of Pennsylvania, while the media still relentlessly plagued Senators Obama and Clinton about flag pins and memory lapses just before the primary, a machine at an ArcelorMital plant in Steelton crushed Roger H. Prichard to death. He was 58.

It was April 18, three days before the Pennsylvania primary. It occurred just five days after piping crushed Jaren T. Hoover to death at the Dura-Bond Pipe factory, also in Steelton. He was 19.

Life went on. Jaren’s father, a Pennsylvania common pleas judge, found dozens of his son’s friends at the funeral, mourning, and doing what kids do now, which is post memorials on MySpace. Roger Prichard’s wife told a local reporter that her husband was a good father and husband and loving person, before she was too overcome to continue speaking. His grandchildren will never get to know him.

As the presidential candidates are repeatedly forced to focus on the frivolous — whether Hillary faked crying or laughed too loud or whether Obama once served on a board of directors with an unsavory character — real issues like federal enforcement of workplace safety are completely ignored.

Monday, April 28, however, is one day set aside to concentrate on saving workers’ lives. It is Workers Memorial Day. It is an occasion on which we mourn the dead and strive for better conditions for the living.

Under the Bush Administration, this has been nothing but a struggle.

Here’s a telling statistic: the number of workplace deaths increased from 2005 to 2006, the last full year for which figures are available. By 106. The total for 2005 was 5,734 dead in the U.S. The next year, it rose to 5,840.

During the six years of the Bush administration for which there are statistics, the number of deaths rose four times. The deaths climbed so high from 2003 to 2004 that the rate actually increased, the first time that has occurred — during either a Republican or a Democratic administration — since 1970 when Congress passed the act creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to improve workplace safety.

Each day in 2006, 16 workers died on the job. This was not from heart attacks or strokes. This was from traumatic workplace injuries — because they suffocated when pits they were digging collapsed with sides not properly shored up, or because they plummeted from construction sites lacking safety gear to stop the fall, or because dust that should not have been accumulating in the factory air exploded.

Workplace safety has the same problem as car safety. No one much pays attention to individuals like Jaren T. Hoover and Roger H. Prichard, just like they don’t pay much attention to single car accidents killing a person here and there on the highway. The public does notice, however, when a plane crashes or when a crane topples over in Manhattan, killing six construction workers all at once, or when a disaster in a mine in West Virginia suffocates 12 Sago workers.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of deaths occur one-by-one, and so, in the resulting lack of public outrage and uproar afterward, the Bush Administration has, over the past seven years, managed to de-fund OSHA, the agency responsible for keeping workers safe and dismantle its regulation structure.

Since George W. Bush took office and decided that a policy of government and business cooperating like good ‘ole boys to enforce rules should replace the former inspection structure, OSHA’s budget has been cut by $25 million and its staff by nearly 200 positions.

A report by the AFL-CIO Safety and Health Office, called, “Death on the Job, The Toll of Neglect” calculates that with OSHA’s current number of inspectors, it would take the agency 133 years to examine each workplace under its jurisdiction just once. So don’t expect OSHA to show up to check your employer real soon, no matter how bad things are.

The report puts the situation this way: “When it comes to job safety enforcement and coverage, it is clear that OSHA lacks sufficient resources to protect workers adequately.”

Well, surely then, when something happens, like a workplace crushing death, OSHA responds by smacking down the recalcitrant employer with a big fine to get them in line, right? Wrong.

In 2007, serious violations of the act — an infraction is deemed serious if it poses a substantial probability of death or major physical harm — carried an average fine of $909.

For a fatality, the average penalty was $10,133. And that number is unusually high. In the previous four years, the fines averaged $6,100. The AFL-CIO report authors expect the 2007 number to shrink after companies successfully appeal larger fines levied against them.

Barring good use of inspections and fines, there’s another enforcement tool that could keep workers safe. That would be criminally prosecuting employers whose engage in egregious behavior, like removing or disabling safety devices on dangerous equipment.

In Canada, workers will toll a bell during their Workers Memorial Day commemorations for Steve L’Ecuyer, a 23-year-old crushed to death by a machine after his employer, Transpave, Inc. deliberately disabled a safety device intended to prevent such an accident. There, Transpave was found criminally negligent and fined $110,000.

Here, the Department of Labor referred ten cases to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution in 2007. The number is limited because the kinds of cases are restricted under current U.S. law. They may only be instances in which Labor found that an employer’s willful violation of regulation resulted in a worker’s death or where false statements were made. If there’s a conviction, the penalties are also limited — a maximum of six months in jail.

Even so, the Justice Department has taken action on none of the referred cases.

Not one.

No wonder 106 more people failed to come home from work in 2006 than in 2005.

Work is less safe. Monday is the day to protest that. It is the day to demand safety in the names of Roger H. Prichard and Jaren T. Hoover and all of the others who did not come home.

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Use of Secret Spy Law is Widespread

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By Michael Howie | NEW spy laws are being used by Scottish councils to track people suspected of housing-benefit fraud, selling cigarettes to children and environmental-health offences. Campaigners are now calling for a “root-and-branch review” into the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), after the scale of its use by local authorities across the UK was revealed.

Ripa was introduced in 2000, primarily giving the police, security services and HM.

Revenue and Customs wide powers to spy on people and their communications.

The main objectives of the Act were to help in the fight against crime and terrorism. But in 2002, the powers were controversially extended to councils, offering the opportunity to carry out surveillance.

An investigation has now revealed that councils have even used the Act to track dog-foulers and litterbugs, with some local authorities using the powers more than 100 times in the last 12 months.

Among the Scottish local authorities that confirmed using Ripa in the past year was Aberdeen City Council, which admitted covert surveillance on eight occasions to investigate benefit fraud, environmental-health and trading-standards issues.

The council did not specify which environmental-health offences were involved, but this can include flytipping, littering and noisy-neighbour disputes.

Glasgow City Council carried out physical surveillance 24 times in criminal investigations, over trading-standards offences and illegal money-lending.

Thirteen requests to access phone billing information – another power granted under the Act – were used in the same investigations.

In Perth, the Act was used to investigate whether cigarettes and fireworks were being sold to under-18s.

Earlier this month, it emerged that a family in Poole in Dorset had been covertly tracked for nearly three weeks to check if they lived in a school catchment area.

The investigation has also revealed that the law was used in at least seven cases to find out about people who let their dogs foul; a breach of planning law; an animal-welfare case; and an instance of littering.

The findings have fuelled the debate on the surveillance culture in Britain and whether councils are using Ripa – which has been dubbed “a snoopers’ charter” – proportionately.

Privacy International director Simon Davies called for a “root- and-branch review” of Ripa and questioned the huge cost to the taxpayer of the council surveillance.

“There have to be hard limits on the scope of surveillance by local authorities who do not work within the spirit of the Act or indeed the letter,” he said.

“Ripa put physical surveillance on a legal basis but that doesn’t make it right or morally right – it just covers the backs of local authorities but at huge expense.

“Local authorities can be very petty and vindictive and they can become obsessed with issues like dog fouling and there can be a lack of judgment.

“There need to be measures in place to make sure they do not go overboard in regard to surveillance. In the case of dog-fouling, it’s almost morally justifiable to bring these people to book but you have to ask the question is the response an overkill?

“There are better ways to achieve the objectives without using counter-terrorism laws.

“Peer pressure to make such things unacceptable works but takes longer.”

Sir Simon Milton, chairman of the Local Government Association, called for a national debate to balance people’s worries about crime and antisocial behaviour with their privacy.

“Councils are committed to putting local people first and will use every weapon in their arsenal to catch the rogue traders, doorstep criminals and scam artists who cheat the taxpayer and prey on the vulnerable and the elderly,” he said.

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The NSA, personal data and you

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By Mitch Ratcliffe | Here’s a simple rule for preventing totalitarian rule in any nation: Don’t build the systems for monitoring people’s daily lives closely in the first place, and you will not be at risk of totalitarian rulers using those systems to overwhelm individual choice. The Wall Street Journal today has a long piece on the various ways that the National Security Agency has expanded its ability to monitor individuals within the United States without a warrant. It’s a must-read, whether you think we need this kind of police agency or not.

Originally set up by President Truman to facilitate signals intelligence (wiretapping, radio monitoring and so forth) conducted against foreign governments, the NSA today can gain access to your personal communications without any need to ask permission, including:

Email, such as the to- and from-addresses, subject line content and time sent;

Web sites visited and the content of your searches;

Wireless calling, from your location and that of the person receiving the call to the length and account numbers;

Wired phone calling, including account numbers and length of call (there have been rumors for years that the first minute of calls are monitored for keywords, but this is not confirmed, because, as a national security matter, citizens aren’t supposed to know);

Financial transactions, such as your credit card use, wire transfers and deposits and withdrawals on your checking and savings accounts,

as well as the content of any transaction recorded by a computer that the NSA deems necessary for its pattern recognition analyses.

The NSA has always insisted it works scrupulously within the limits of the laws governing its behavior, but it has, like all human institutions, had lapses in its judgment. For example, during the year immediately after 9/11, NSA attempted to set up a Total Information Awareness network, which was meant to grab all data about people and their transactions and communication for analysis, but Congress prohibited any further spending on the program over civil liberties concerns. Nevertheless, the program has continued in pieces that, in total, add up to the same level of access to domestic civilian communications, as the Journal article makes clear.

Technologists must be aware of this ever-expanding net that can trap and hold their customers’ and colleagues’ data, because it is reshaping the potential for public discourse about what our country and government can and should do, as well as how we may act as individuals.

Sure, there will be commenters on this posting who write that “it’s nothing to worry about if you don’t do anything wrong.” And that may be true, but the problem with these institutions is that they will not go away when the threat of terrorism passes. Maybe you think that threat will never end, but then we must ask whether this approach to fighting terrorism has any merit. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that terrorism can be handled within the scope of normal police activity, as it has been since before 9/11.

Human sources of information are known to be far more valuable than data-driven analysis of massive amounts of transactional data. Yes, after an agency has a human source those data analyses can be very useful in assembling a case, though it is perfectly reasonable and very easy to get a warrant from a judge for that information based on the human source—there is no need for unbridled warrantless monitoring of the people of the United States.

You see, if we assume that most of us are law-abiding citizens, the need for unrestricted monitoring is obliterated by the logic of focused pursuit of known and suspected bad guys based on established legal procedures. Warrants before monitoring is more efficient, faster and not just an ACLU talking point, but the very foundation of limited government.

If we allow our nation to be shot through with monitoring systems, we’ll be monitored forever, because people and institutions that have been granted power seldom give it up, as we all know. They even fall prey to the temptation to abuse those powers. In Cincinnati back in the late 1980s, the power to use wiretaps overcame the good judgment of police officers who used them to listen to their spouses’ conversations and to conduct surveillance on businesses. During the 1970s, the abuse of national surveillance powers was so rife that Congress established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and a system of courts for providing law enforcement legal access to communications with a warrant. Today, the FISA system is under attack by those who believe we need unrestricted surveillance of Americans, as well as of potential terrorists abroad.

The trajectory of the NSA’s existence is the proof we face a serious threat to our ability to live and decide for ourselves. An agency originally chartered to monitor the communications of “foreign governments” is now monitoring individual American citizens. It is a classic case of over-reaching by government.

The NSA has worked around the decision of Congress to build its total awareness network. It is time the people made fighting that unrestricted access to their lives a campaign issue. If we don’t stop the vast spending on domestic surveillance today, it will bankrupt our government, morally and financially. We’ll be giving increasing power to bureaucrats to peak into our lives to ensure that we are living according to their whims, as every comprehensive system of public monitoring in history has produced in the past.

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Facial recognition is same as tossing coin

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By Geraint Bevan - NO2ID | After all the rhetoric about securing our borders, the Home Office has now announced its intent significantly to weaken passport control in the UK. Starting this summer, border guards will gradually be replaced at UK airports by machines performing automatic facial recognition, comparing digital photographs to the data stored on passport chips.

Four years ago, the Home Office ran biometric enrolment trials in Glasgow, Newcastle and Leicester. The trials revealed plainly the fallibility of state-of-the-art biometric authentication. The worst performing biometric technology was facial recognition, which failed 31% of the time for able-bodied participants and a farcical 52% of the time for disabled participants. Problems were also encountered with the elderly, and the system did not cope well with changes to appearances.

Meanwhile, cryptographic researchers working with NO2ID have demonstrated the ability to clone UK passport chips remotely, without even removing passports from the sealed packaging in which they are delivered to recipients. Now all that will stand between imposters with cloned passports and entry to Britain will be a flawed authentication system that performs no better than tossing a coin.

The government is clearly keen to save money. There are much better savings to be made than firing the border guards at airports.

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The Sick Science Tobacco Companies Pursue

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By Scott Thill | Those who complain about how the internet or advances in technology haven’t done enough to make us smarter or better may not truly remember what life was like before either. For one, digging up any type of public or private information took loads more work, especially when offending parties, from governments to free-marketers, were allowed to hide behind arbitrary legalese and the lawyers who enforce it. Before the internet, offenders worked in the shadows while their consumers and citizens were overexposed in the light.

But with organizations like the non-profit Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and their various exercises in citizen journalism, those unhappy days have thankfully passed. Check out one of their more interesting wiki projects called Maximum Weirdness, which rifles through declassified files from University of California, San Francisco’s Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and posts both the boring and bizarre results on a wikipedia dedicated strictly to Big Tobacco’s metaverse. It might sound like wonk work on paper, but the right mixture of keyword searches can produce some eye-opening, lung-crushing laughs. Or is that cries? You decide.

Consider the machines with electrostatic traps used to conduct analysis of tobacco smoke. On the surface it may read like science, but pulled roughly from a library file it feels like something out of the Terminator:

The machine is equipped with special controls for parameters such as puff duration, interval between puffs, number of puffs, automatic interruption of the puffs at a given butt length, expulsion of the butt, control of puff volume … At the same time up to twenty cigarettes from different samples can be smoked … The machine is suitable for both restricted and free smoking and a change between these two conditions can mechanically be achieved in a few seconds.

Whatever floats your boat, dude. That’s tame compared to trying to give cats hard-ons, which is what scientists at Tulane University did while trying to study the effects of nitric oxide on erections. At least they gave the cats some Special K before slicing and needling their manhood: “Twenty-six mature male cats … were sedated with ketamine hydrochloride…and anesthetized with sodium pentobarbital. A vertical, circumcision-like incision was made to expose the two ventral corpora cavernosa and the dorsal corpus spongiosum. A 30-gauge needle was placed into the right corpus to permit administration of the drug into the penis. A 25-gauge needle was placed midway into the left corpus for the measurement of intracavernous pressure.”

Normally, nitric oxide is a free radical pollutant belched from cars and factories, but who knew that having it mainlined into your penis from a couple of needles would give you an erection? Well, Tulane evidently, and now you. It’s may be a urologist’s dream, but most likely it’s a cat’s worst nightmare.

Of course, there are more damning documents. Brown and Williamson’s 1967 brainstorming session suggesting cocaine-enhanced cigarettes or signing on Fonzi from Happy Days as a celebrity endorsement is a good one. One interesting British American Tobacco Company document puts nicotine’s lethality into perspective, as its suits try to figure out ways to compete with harder drugs like heroin, cocaine and, yes, glue, all the while rationalizing that cigarettes might one day become as passe as pipes. Punch in some marketing keywords and you’ll find everything from proposals for celebrity smokers programs to cigarettes defiantly named after Death, or even the Black Death. The latter’s brainstorming one-sheet, courtesy of Philip Morris, is especially tactical in turning tolerance on its head with a four-point Bill of Rights for people who may be able to indirectly kill you if you’re near them while they’re smoking. “Black Death cigarettes are a direct protest from smokers against the strongly increasing intolerant anti-smoke movement,” it clumsily proclaims without irony about its ironically titled product. “Black Death smokers want to maintain their rights and they do not want to be socially discriminated by arbitrary legal measures.”

Word for word, the grammatically challenged pitch alone says more about the tobacco industry than all the Joe Camel ads you’ll ever read and throw away. After all, who else but the tobacco industry could complain with a straight face about intolerance and discrimination over a proposed product literally called the Black Death?

But there’s a wiki full of these in Maximum Weirdness, with room for more and with our best interests in mind. The opensourcing movement has changed the way information is compressed, computed and compiled, as well as how it is valued. Information may want to be free, as the internet maxim goes, but it takes public participation in citizen journalism through projects like this to make it happen.

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Vote fraud threatens to wreak chaos on London

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By Jill Sherman | The electoral system is close to breaking point and the mayoral and local elections on Thursday are vulnerable to large-scale fraud, Gordon Brown is warned today.

Efforts to improve turnout by increasing postal voting have raised the risk of fraud and undermined confidence in the electoral process, a damaging report from the Joseph Rowntree Trust concludes.

The report criticises the state of the country’s electoral registers, which often include voters who are dead, fictitious or have a vote registered elsewhere. In some areas, particularly those with many migrants, up to a third of eligible voters may be missing from the roll.

The trust calls for an urgent overhaul, including making voters show photographic ID to get a ballot paper. It also calls for the cleansing of electoral registers to ensure that all names are legitimate. Thousands of “phantom” voters have just been removed or have disappeared from the register in Peterborough after the council drew up a new electoral roll.

The Electoral Commission has repeatedly demanded tougher laws to improve integrity. The Council of Europe said in January that British elections had become “childishly simple” to rig. The Government is resisting further reforms.

“It is very concerning that ministers tend to focus on ‘quick fixes’ to solve declining turnout and ignore genuine concerns about how easy it is to cheat the system,” the report’s author, Stuart Wilks-Heeg, says.

The document claims the Government has effectively turned a blind eye to electoral fraud, dismissing evidence as largely anecdotal.

The Times exposed allegations of widespread postal vote rigging in the 2004 local and European elections but Labour waited until it had won the 2005 general election before acting. Its Electoral Administration Act 2006, which introduced modest changes, is described by the trust as having “proved deficient in combating electoral fraud”.

Three men, including a former mayor, were jailed in Peterborough this month for attempted postal and proxy vote fraud. More election fraud trials are pending around the country.

The Rowntree trust calls for new safeguards against voting fraud that have been introduced in Northern Ireland to be extended to the rest of the UK.

The Electoral Commission said that more reforms were needed. “We continue to urge the Government to replace the system of household registration with individual voter registration,” a spokesman said. “In many parts of the UK, structures for delivering elections are stretched to breaking point.”

The Ministry of Justice said that the Government had taken significant steps to protect the electoral process, including new penalties for vote fraud.

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Blair thought Brown a liar, says Levy

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By Patrick Wintour | The foreign secretary, David Miliband, warned yesterday that disloyalty to the prime minister would be fatal after a former Labour party fundraiser claimed that Tony Blair regarded Gordon Brown as a liar who has no chance of defeating David Cameron at the next general election.

The claims, made by Lord Levy in his autobiography, A Question of Honour, which is being serialised by the Mail on Sunday, were hotly denied by Blair’s office. But the allegations mirror past accounts the peer has given to friends of Blair’s attitude towards Brown. Levy has previously reported that Blair believed Brown could win only if he made significant changes, but doubted his capacity to do so.

In the serialised extracts, Levy claims Blair regarded Brown as dishonest in assuring him he had no role in organising the plotting that led to his enforced announcement in 2006 that he would step down as Labour leader the following year. “He kept saying that he had never realised how duplicitous Gordon was, and what ‘a liar’,” Levy writes. “I know he was convinced that Gordon saw the cash for peerages crisis as a further weapon in getting him out of Downing Street.”

Levy claims that party treasurer Jack Dromey’s sudden explosive attack on the use of loans to fund the 2005 election was part of an attempt by Brown to weaken Blair before a vote in the Commons on his education reforms.

He also contends that Brown played a major private role in party fundraising, attending fundraising functions as chancellor, but slipping away before the formal dinner. Levy suggests Brown’s then special adviser, Spencer Livermore, and probably Brown himself, were informed by email that the 2005 election was being funded by loans.

Levy also reports that Blair “told me on a number of occasions he was convinced Gordon ‘could never beat Cameron’”. He says the former prime minister felt he could have won a fourth term had he not stood down last summer.

“But Gordon? ‘He can’t defeat Cameron,’ Tony told me. Blair believed Cameron had major strengths: political timing, a winning personality and a natural ability to communicate to Middle England that Gordon would be unable to match,” Lord Levy adds.

The peer also discloses that he made recommendations about honours to those responsible for them at No 10 , but stresses he was never involved in the final selection meetings.

He recounts sections of the note made by Ruth Turner, Blair’s political aide, after a meeting between Levy and Turner on May 24 2006. The note, the police hoped, might lead to charges of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

In it, Turner said that while Levy had made “suggestions that several people would make good Labour peers”, Levy “did not put pressure, push or follow up on any of these suggestions. I will confirm what Michael says, that I did not tell him who was on the list until after the decision was taken by Tony Blair.”

With just three days until the local elections, No 10 is likely to be relieved Levy’s revelations were not more specific, though they raise questions about Brown’s character.

Faced by the peer’s allegations and two weekend opinion polls showing Labour trailing the Tories by more than 10%, Miliband, seen by many as a future leadership contender, urged the party to be more disciplined.

“This is a test of character really, as well as a test of policy for the Labour party. We know what’s fatal: if we fail to defend the leader, if we lose sight of our core convictions, if we don’t follow through on what we started.”

Endorsing the decision to offer compensation to voters who lost out from the 10p tax band’s abolition, he said it was vital that the party stayed close to the voters, and recognised they were being hit by rising petrol and food prices.

Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner and a close ally of Blair, insisted yesterday that Brown should remain Labour leader, but issued a thinly coded attack on the prime minister’s failure to provide a coherent message. “I think the party has got to [pull] itself together and refocus. It must make sure it presents itself, and what it stands for, in a way the public can understand,” he said.

In a reference to the way in which Brown appears to endorse political campaigns by rightwing newspapers, Mandelson warned: “Jumping on passing bandwagons, hobby horses or marginal issues is not the way, in my view, for any government to present itself if it is going to sustain its support in the country.”

Extracts

He literally jumped up and down like a small kid who had been let out of school for the day, and shouted, laughing out loud, “I really did it. Can you believe it? I’m prime minister, I’m prime minister! I’m prime minister!”

Gordon was friendly, at least until I explained my mission. “Make up with Peter?” he hissed in an angry whisper. Then as his voice gradually rose from dispatch box volume to a near shout, he exclaimed: “Peter? He’s been going round telling everyone I am gay and I am not gay!”

The main worry was Tony, specifically gossip within Number 10, concerning visits Carole Caplin was making to Chequers to give an increasingly stressed prime minister long massages. When I went to see Tony, I told him there was a real danger that Carole could become an issue not just for Cherie but for you. Tony went bright red.

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Insects using plants as telephones

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By Roland Piquepaille | A team of Dutch ecologists has found that subterranean and aboveground herbivorous insects use plants to communicate. ‘Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, aboveground insects are alerted that the plant is already occupied.’ This means that by using ‘green telephone lines,’ the two kinds of insects can avoid to compete for the same plant, allowing for faster growth for both species. Fascinating, but read more…

You can see above an example of interaction between aboveground and belowground insects, using plant leaves as ‘green phone lines.’ (Credit: Roxina Soler, NIOO-KNAW) Here is a link to a larger version of this picture.

Let’s look first at the short Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) news release. “In recent years it has been discovered that different types of aboveground insects develop slowly if they feed on plants that also have subterranean residents and vice versa. It seems that a mechanism has developed via natural selection, which enables the subterranean and aboveground insects to detect each other. This avoids unnecessary competition. Via the ‘green telephone lines’, subterranean insects can also communicate with a third party, namely the natural enemy of caterpillars. Parasitic wasps lay their eggs inside aboveground insects. The wasps also benefit from the volatile signals emitted by the leaves, as these reveal where they can find a good host for their eggs.”

This research work has been conducted at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) in the Department of Multitrophic Interactions (MTI) of the Centre for Terrestrial Ecology. For those of you who don’t know what ‘multitrophic’ means, please read this page at Wikipedia. You’ll discover that ‘trophic’ comes from a Greek word meaning food or nutrition. “Multitrophic interactions are those which involve more than two trophic levels in a food web. The term is most often applied to interactions among plants, herbivores and predators.”

This particular project was led by Roxina Soler Gamborena, a PhD student at NIOO. Here is how she describes her expertise in plant-insect multitrophic interactions. “Plants and insects are part of a complex multitrophic environment, in which they closely and actively interact. However, a systematic tendency to study mainly aboveground insect interactions limited the ability to develop more predictive models to achieve a better understanding of ecology and evolution in a more realistic frame. In the project I am working in, we are interested in study the interactions between below and aboveground insects, and how they can affect each other.”

Her project, “A multitrophic approach linking below and aboveground organisms,” is described in the MTI’s student subjects page. Here is one part of the introduction. “Recently, there is an increasing interest in studying the interaction of aboveground and belowground compartments as a whole, rather than isolated aboveground studies. It is now acknowledged that insects can interact even when they feed on the host plant in different moments and parts of the plant, and some experiments had been carried out to study the interactions between belowground and aboveground insect herbivores. The main aim of this study is to determine if the oviposition behaviour of aboveground hyperparasitoids (and parasitoids) is affected by feeding damage by herbivores in the soil, as these affect parasitoid host and plant quality, using the follow multitrophic system as target for the study.” The above figure has been picked from this document.

For more information, you can read one of the technical paper co-authored by Soler and published in Functional Ecology under the title “Foraging efficiency of a parasitoid of a leaf herbivore is influenced by root herbivory on neighbouring plants” (Volume 21, Issue 5, Pages 969-974, October 2007). Here is an excerpt from the abstract. “Our results show that the interaction between an above-ground foliar feeding insect and its parasitoid can be influenced by the presence of non-host herbivores feeding on the roots of neighbouring conspecific plants.”

You also can read a paper published in Oikos, another Blackwell Publishing journal, under the title “Root herbivores influence the behaviour of an aboveground parasitoid through changes in plant-volatile signals” (Volume 116, Number 3, Pages 367-376, March 2007). Here is the last paragraph of the abstract. “Our results provide evidence that the foraging behaviour of a parasitoid of an aboveground herbivore can be influenced by belowground herbivores through changes in the plant volatile blend. Such indirect interactions may have profound consequences for the evolution of host selection behaviour in parasitoids, and may play an important role in the structuring and functioning of communities.”

Sources: The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), April 11, 2008; and various websites

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Pentagon cuts ties with mouthpieces

Monday, April 28th, 2008

The Pentagon has temporarily stopped feeding information to pundits who generate ‘favorable’ war coverage for the Bush administration. According to The New York Times, the Defense Department had been giving information to retired military officers serving as pundits for various media organizations in a bid to garner favorable media coverage of the White House wartime performance.

“Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show,” the Times article read.

In return, they echoed President Bush’s talking points, ’sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated’.

“Following the allegations, the story that is printed in the New York Times, I directed my staff to halt, to suspend the activities that may be ongoing with retired military analysts to give me time to review the situation,” said Principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs Robert Hastings in an interview with Stripes.

While mainstream US media has chosen to ignore the newfound information, the revelation has caused widespread anger among some high ranking US officials

“There is nothing inherently wrong with providing information to the public and the press,” Democratic US congressional representative Ike Skelton said.

“But there is a problem if the Pentagon is providing special access to retired officers and then basically using them as pawns to spout the administration’s talking points of the day,” continued the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

MD/HGH

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CIA torture given legal cover, newspaper says

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Reuters | Recent letters from the U.S. Justice Department to Congress state that intelligence agents working on counterterrorism can legally use interrogation techniques that might otherwise be banned by international law, The New York Times reported in its Sunday editions.

The Justice Department’s interpretation shows the Bush administration is contending that the boundaries should have a degree of latitude, the Times said, despite the president’s order last summer that he said meant the CIA would hew to international norms on the treatment of detainees.

The United States has faced heavy criticism from rights groups and some allies for its use of a simulated form of drowning known as “waterboarding” during interrogations and for holding hundreds of suspected militants in a prison camp at a U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A March 5 letter from the Justice Department to Congress makes clear the Bush administration has not set boundaries for which interrogation methods might violate the ban in the Geneva Conventions on “outrages upon personal dignity,” the Times reported.

“The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,” Brian Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in one letter.

The Times said the letters were provided by the staff of Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The committee had received classified briefings on the matter and Wyden had requested further information, which yielded the letters, the paper said.

A senior Justice Department official, speaking to the Times on condition of anonymity, said of the classified information: “I certainly don’t want to suggest that if there’s a good purpose you can head off and humiliate someone.”

But he said “the fact that you are doing something for a legitimate security purpose would be relevant.”

“There are certainly things that can be insulting that would not raise to the level of an outrage on personal dignity,” the official said.

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Emails suggest cover-up of Vets suicide rate

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By Naomi Spencer | Internal emails from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) turned over to a federal district court in San Francisco this week reveal that the agency’s mental health unit saw a staggering 1,000 suicide attempts every month among veterans receiving government care last year. emails also indicated that among all US veterans, the VA was aware of a suicide rate of 6,570 per year, or 18 suicides every day on average.

This figure—which corresponds to the suicide estimate CBS News arrived at independently last fall and which VA officials vehemently contested—further underscores the social costs of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The emails also reveal the attitudes and policies of Bush administration and military officials regarding the suffering of veterans and the public’s right to know.

The emails were reviewed by the federal District Court of Northern California on Monday, where a lawsuit against the VA is being heard. The suit, brought by the veterans’ advocacy groups Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, is seeking to force a restructuring of the veterans’ medical system in light of an enormous backlog of healthcare claims, large numbers of suicides and cases of untreated mental trauma among military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the most damning emails, made available by CBS on its web site April 21, was written by VA Mental Health director Ira Katz and headed with the subject line “Not for the CBS News Interview Request.”

Katz sent the message to the agency’s media relations chief February 13: “Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”

Everett Chasen, the VA’s chief communications officer, replied: “I think this is something we should discuss among ourselves, before issuing a release…. It might be something we drop into a general release about our suicide prevention efforts, which (as you know far better than I) prominently include training employees to recognize the warning signs of suicide.”

In November, CBS News published the results of a study it commissioned of state-by-state death statistics for 2005. Among the 45 of 50 states for which data was returned, the study found that at least 6,256 veterans had committed suicide that year.

By the network’s calculations, 120 veterans took their own lives each week on average, or about 17 every single day.

At the time of the CBS report, Katz insisted that “Their number is not, in fact, an accurate reflection of the rate.” According to the network, three days after making this statement, Katz admitted in an email, “there are about 18 suicides per day among America’s 25 million veterans,” or about 6,570 per year. This figure, Katz wrote, “is supported by the CBS numbers.”

In contrast, when asked by CBS why the military had not conducted a national study of suicides, Katz told the network, “There is no epidemic of suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem.”

Another email exchange turned over to the court, between Katz and VA undersecretary Michael Kussman from December 15, further confirms that top VA officials knew the suicide rate they publicly disclosed was far lower than the actual rate. Kussman wrote, “McClatchy [news agency] alleges that 18 veterans kill themselves everyday and this is confirmed by the VA’s own statistics. Is that true? Sounds awful but if one is considering 24 million veterans.”

In his reply, Katz confirmed the validity of the reports and added that “VA’s own data demonstrate 4-5 suicides per day among those who receive care from us.”

Yet on February 5, VA Secretary James Peake issued a letter to Congress stating that between October 2001 and December 2005, VA records indicated only 144 combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan had committed suicide. In March, the VA provided CBS data suggesting that among recently treated VA patients, there were 790 attempted suicides for 2007.

The disparity between the content of internal correspondence and public statements of VA officials suggests a cover-up. Indeed, in one email reviewed by the court, dated March 10, communications officer Chasen commented, “I don’t want to give CBS any more numbers on veterans suicides or attempts than they already have—it will only lead to more questions.”

Since Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth filed suit against the government last July, the Bush administration has sought to have the case dismissed. According to the Justice Department, the advocacy groups did not have the right to sue because they were associations rather than individuals. The Justice Department further declared that veterans were not legally entitled to bring a class action lawsuit against the government. These arguments were rejected in district court, but it is likely that the administration will challenge any unfavorable ruling.

In court this week, VA officials were defensive about the agency’s mental health management system. In an opening statement Tuesday, Justice Department lawyer Richard Lepley told the court that medical claims have increased at the VA by 25 percent since 2001, from 675,000 to 838,000 in 2007. The defense maintained that this increase was mainly attributable to aging Vietnam veterans seeking medical care.

Because of this increase, Lepley said, the VA had failed to reduce the long waiting period for claims processing as it had pledged to do last year. The agency had announced it would shorten the average processing time to 125 days. According to Gordon Erspamer, an attorney representing the veterans’ groups, the VA takes as long as 15 years before compensating veterans for psychological disorders.

Lepley told the court the VA currently took 185 days on average to attend to medical claims. The defense called this processing time “reasonable.”

Kerri Childress, a spokesperson for the California VA in attendance at the trial, told the New York Times Tuesday that, in the newspaper’s words, “News coverage from the current wars has also led to new mental health problems among Vietnam veterans.” Referring to the war in Iraq, Childress told the Times, “I don’t think anybody had any idea how long the war was going to go on,” adding that, as the paper put it, “there was no way to fully anticipate the demand for medical care from Vietnam veterans.”

The connection between the brutality of war, especially colonial war, and psychological trauma is historically well established. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged among sections of the military brass that current US forces are being stretched to the breaking point, and the entire political establishment agrees that the so-called “war on terror” and particularly the occupation of Iraq are intentionally open-ended.

A multitude of social problems and military policies account for the large number of suicides among returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans: the recruitment of soldiers with preexisting psychological problems, long and repeated deployments, widespread reliance upon anti-depressants and other drugs to dull mental trauma, as well as the underfunding of post-deployment mental health care and the stigmatization of mental illness within the military. Fundamentally, however, both the mounting social crisis among returning veterans and the VA’s negligence have their source in the nature of the war itself.

In light of the publication of the VA internal emails, Senate Democrats have called for the resignation of Mental Health director Katz. On Wednesday, during a Veterans’ Affairs committee hearing, Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray told VA officials that the agency faced a credibility crisis. “The culture of the VA has to change…. The whole culture is repressing information. We are not your enemy. We are your support system.”

Katz was not present at the hearing. Deputy VA secretary Gordon Mansfield offered to “apologize for the implications here,” but denied that the agency made any effort to stonewall or obfuscate suicide data.

VA personnel undersecretary David Chu suggested that although suicides have increased, it was “good news” that the rate was lower than the national average. This is a gross distortion. The CBS News survey found that among veterans aged 20-24, the suicide rate was between 2.5 and 4 times higher than for non-veterans of the same age. For a subgroup of the population that is young, fit and ostensibly screened for mental problems, the suicide rate is alarmingly high—between 23 and 33 per 100,000 young veterans killed themselves in 2005.

On April 17, the RAND Corporation think-tank released a study that found symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression among 300,000 returned military personnel—nearly a fifth of all those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Based on interviews of 1,965 service members from 24 areas throughout the US, the study found that of those reporting PTSD or depressive symptoms, only 53 percent have sought treatment for their trauma.

The RAND survey also found that 19 percent of returned veterans—320,000 individuals—had experienced possible traumatic brain injury (TBI), called the “signature wound” of the Iraq occupation because of the frequency of improvised explosive devices, the primary cause of active-duty troop brain injuries. According to the report, “Of those reporting a probable TBI, 57 percent had not been evaluated by a physician for brain injury.”

Despite the fact that the VA has handled some 300,000 cases from Iraq and Afghanistan, the RAND findings suggest that the majority of mentally traumatized veterans go without care. Furthermore, the report notes, “Even when individuals receive care, too few receive quality care. Of those who have a mental disorder and also sought medical care for that problem, just over half received a minimally adequate treatment. The number who received quality care (i.e., a treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective) would be expected to be even smaller.”

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