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Your Privacy for Sale: Internet Providers Cash In

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

UPDATE: Thanks to information obtained by RINF readers, it appears Virgin Media are trying to distance themselves from Phorm.

Virgin Media stated: “Virgin Media has signed a preliminary agreement with Phorm to understand in more detail how this technology works but we have not yet decided if it will be introduced. This information has been clarified to ensure our customers have the full picture.”

However, Phorm had this to say: “We announced exclusive agreements with three major UK ISPs – BT, Talk Talk and Virgin Media, which represent nearly 70 per cent of the UK internet market, to adopt our online advertising platform, the Open Internet Exchange (OIX), and a consumer internet feature, Webwise.

“Implementation is on track and consumer trials are expected to begin in the near term, followed by roll-out across these networks.”

—–

By Mick Meaney - RINF | A new system that monitors your Internet activity in detail, and is possibly illegal under UK data protection laws, could be in widespread use within months.

Phorm, the company which developed the software, aims to provide detailed targeted-ads by building up surfer profiles from scanning every data packet on TCP Port 80. It is estimated that over ten million customers will be affected.

BT have used this software which scans and intercepts all internet traffic on a customer’s broadband connection, feeding back data to Phorm’s advertising network, the Open Internet Exchange, about which “keywords” were used by the customer.

The revenue gained will be an estimated £85m by 2010 for BT alone as the software sits on the ISP’s servers, which prevents Internet users from switching off the program.

The comparison between traditional Internet advertising services and Phorm has been described as “Checking which phone numbers someone has called and actually listening in to every word of every conversation.”

BT also carried out secret trails without informing their customers. Government experts stated this was a breach of criminal law yet the British Government has refused to investigate the covert wiretapping of thousands during 2006 and 2007.

Pete John, who raised the issue with the authorities, stated: “BT and Phorm seem to be above the law. No one wants responsibility for enforcing complaints against ISPs. ICO say the Home Office. The Police say the Home Office. The Home Office say they have no investigative role.”

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UK gets new James Bond-style data centre

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By Nicole Kobie | SAVVIS’ new data centre will use biometrics, weight-sensitive entrance floor panels, bullet-proof glass, ‘man traps’ and CCTV for security.

A newly-announced UK data centre set to open at the end of the year will feature top end physical security straight out of a spy film.

Set to open in the fourth quarter of this year, SAVVIS’ new data centre will be sited in Slough.

The data centre will include physical security features such as biometric entrance scanning, weight sensitive entrance floor panels, bullet-proof glass, always-on CCTV across the site, and a little something called ‘man traps’ - essentially a space between two doors where people are held if they aren’t authorised for access. Might not be enough to stop James Bond or Jason Bourne from sneaking through, but thankfully they’re fictional.

“Data centres are expensive to build and the data they hold is very important data,” Richard Warley, international managing director for SAVVIS, told IT PRO. “We do have a lot of customers in the financial sector and they look for physical and logical security.”

The facility will be connected to SAVVIS data centres near Reading and at London’s Docklands for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes. The first phase will cost £35 million pounds and cover 36,500 square feet on the first floor of the building, said Warley. The second phase will offer another 30,000 square feet on the ground floor.

SAVVIS offers technology-agnostic managed hosting and network services to companies in financial sector, media and entertainment and others. The firm offers the basic option of renting space as well as fully managed services and specialised utility-based services.

The firm said the financial services sector - including SAVVIS’ customers like the London Stock Exchange - are demanding more space and closer proximity to the grid.

The data centre is one of several the firm has built recently across Europe, Asia and North America as part of a two-year, $400 million (£205 million) investment.

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MoD begins full UFO-files public release

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By Lewis Page | The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has begun releasing its voluminous files regarding unidentified flying objects, aerial phenomena, possible alien visitations etc. The documents will all become available to the public via the National Archives over the next three years.

UFOs of various kinds have been sighted and reported to the MoD and its predecessors for at least a hundred years. In general, the number and nature of sightings is much more affected by things such as movie releases or war scares than by any other apparent factor, all the way back to the “Phantom airships” widely reported in the UK before and during World War One - when panic about German zeppelins was at its height.

Many of the MoD’s UFO files - including, probably, most of the good stuff - have already been revealed under Freedom of Information Act requests. In particular, the splendid conspiracy fodder surrounding the Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980 (”Britain’s Roswell”) has long been available, full of mysterious lights, strange marks left in the ground and traces of radiation. Even better, the cameras recording the British air-defence radar picture were switched off at the time, indicating an almost certain government conspiracy.

Anyway, the previously unseen bumf is all coming out from the National Archives here. The files will be free for a month after each one is released, after which there will be a fee for access, so enthusiasts should keep checking back and downloading the stuff as it comes out. (Be warned though, the MoD says upfront that it has never found any solid evidence of aliens, secret American hypersonic stealth spyplanes or anything else good.)

After three years, if you keep it up, you’ll be the proud owner of a complete uk.gov UFO archive.

Or, depending on your viewpoint, <tinfoil>you’ll be the owner of the biggest and most comprehensive cover-up ever compiled</tinfoil>. ®

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Ex-Guantanamo detainees to sue US

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By Akhtar Amin | Two former Guantanamo Bay prisoners from Sudan, who were picked up from Peshawar, are demanding an apology and planning to sue the United States after spending five years behind bars at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“We were detained for five years in Guantanamo. So many innocent prisoners were discharged over the past two years without giving any explanation after keeping them for years behind bars. But, we will sue the US for an apology and compensation,” said the two Sudanese nationals, Salim Mahmud Adam and Adel Hasan Hamad. Both were picked up in Peshawar on suspicion of having links with Al Qaeda. They were released from Guantanamo Bay five years later.

“We are planning to sue the US with the help of human rights groups,” said Adam. The Sudanese teacher told Daily Times that on May 27, 2002, when he opened the door of his house in the early morning hours, officials of “Pakistani intelligence agencies” handcuffed him immediately.

“At 1am they surrounded my house from all sides. My wife was pregnant at the time, but they showed no mercy,” said Adam, who was the principal of an orphanage school and residing in Hayatabad at the time. “I was blindfolded and taken into custody,” he said. He said he was interrogated before being shifted to Bagram, another notorious US detention camp and airbase in Afghanistan.

“My torture ordeal began early in Bagram and interrogations would sometimes last for three to four hours,” he said, adding that two months later, along with other Al Qaeda suspects, he was shifted to Guantanamo, “an inhuman place”.

He recalled the harsh interrogations, beating and screams of fellow detainees, and the loud music played at prayer times. Some interrogators, he said, would tell him they knew he was innocent, but this was a political game. Like Adam, compatriot Adel Hasan Hamad, 50, will always remember the day he was arrested in Pakistan, on July 18, 2002. He was working in a private hospital in Peshawar as an administrator.

Leaving his family back in his homeland, Hamad came to Pakistan on July 16, 2002. “I only wanted to help refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said. Two days after my arrival, I was arrested, he added. He said “Pakistani intelligence officers” accompanied by an American official woke him up, told him not to move and asked for his travel documents.

Hamad said he was taken to a Pakistani prison, where he was held for over six days and questioned by intelligence officials.

Along with three others, handcuffed and blindfolded, he was boarded onto an American military plane headed for Bagram, a stopover for most people headed to Guantanamo. “There they started beating us,” he said. US soldiers and officials subjected him to constant interrogation, often coupled with beatings, verbal abuse and threats. “They would not let us sleep,” he added. After two months of repeated interrogation and punishment, he was shipped to Guantanamo, he said.

In Guantanamo, Hamad was again subjected to daily interrogation. Sometimes, twice a day. “They accused me of helping the Taliban and Al Qaeda,” he said. “I asked how so? They said that they learnt it through secret information”. However, charges were not officially levelled against him, he added.

In 2004, Hamad and Adam said they appeared before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal that cleared them of charges of being enemy combatants. However, it was not until September 2007 that a military court finally cleared them of charges of posing a threat to the United States.

They said the US had declared all Guantanamo detainees “unlawful enemy combatants” to deny them legal rights under the American legal system. Only three of about 750 people sent to Guantanamo since 2002 have faced formal charges.

Around 400 prisoners have been discharged over the past two years, but without any explanations offered for why they were detained, they said. Hamad was told that his daughter Fida passed away while he was languishing in Guantanamo. His family, which lost its source of income after Hamad was picked up, could not afford treatment for her after she became unwell. Adam is back in Peshawar again and says he is trying to move his Pakistani wife and three children to Sudan.

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UK to hold inquiry into Iraqi killings, victims of torture

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

IRNA | Defense Secretary Des Browne announced Wednesday an independent inquiry into the death and torture of Iraqi civilians in the custody of British soldiers. The inquiry will be held into the 2003 death of Basra hotel worker Baha Mousa, the alleged torture and ill treatment of his nine hotel colleagues and how it came about that the five techniques banned in 1972 were reintroduced in Iraq, Browne said.Responding to the announcement, human rights lawyer for the Iraqi victims, Phil Shiner warned that it will ‘not be sufficient if the inquiry has a narrow remit and does not look at all the cases and issues’ concerning abuse by British troops in Iraq.

“The public, as well as parliament, must be given the opportunity of fully understanding what went wrong in our detention policy in Iraq and what are the lessons to be learned for the future,” Shiner said.

The inquiry comes after the Ministry of Defense in March admitted ’substantive breaches’ of the European Convention on Human Rights over the death and torture of Iraqi civilians in the custody of British soldiers.

The admissions, after years of legal battles, included breaches of Article Two on the right of life and Article Three on the prohibition of torture over the killing of Mousa while being detained with eight other Iraqis by UK troops in September 2003.

Shiner said the inquiry would ‘need to get to the bottom of how it came about that the 5 techniques banned in 1972 — hooding, stressing, food and water deprivation, sleep deprivation and noise — were reintroduced as apparently Standard Operating Procedure’.

“Further it would need to establish what lessons are to be learned not just from the death of Baha Mousa, but the torture of his hotel colleagues, the sexual and religious humiliation in play in that incident,” he said.

It is claimed that Mousa had 93 identifiable injuries on his body and suffered asphyxiation. In March, Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth offered ’sincere apologies and sympathy’ to his families and the other eight Iraqi detainees.

The lawyer said there were other cases to answer, including the most serious allegations that ‘20 Iraqis were executed at Abu Naji facility in May 2004 another nine survivors tortured, and that bodies were mutilated’.

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Italian PM witness in CIA rendition trial

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

A Milan judge ruled Wednesday that Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi and his predecessor Romano Prodi, can be called as witnesses in a trial on the alleged abduction of a terrorism suspect by agents of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Berlusconi who returned to office as premier last week was in power in 2003 when an Egyptian imam, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr - better known in Italy as Abu Omar - was allegedly snatched from a Milan street.

A total of 33 defendants - including 26 CIA agents as well as several top Italian intelligence officials - are accused of Omar’s kidnapping, with the complicity of Italy’s military intelligence agency SISMI.

The trial began in June 2007, but was suspended that same month to allow Italy’s constitutional court to rule on allegations by Prodi’s centre-left government that prosecutors had violated state secrets in gathering evidence.

In March presiding judge, Oscar Magi, ruled the trial should resume so as to avoid its expiry due to statute of limitations while the constitutional court considered the case.

The trial is seen as a landmark since it represents the first involving the CIA and Washington’s controversial ‘extraordinary rendition’ policy.

All the American suspects are abroad, and have declined to appear in court in Italy.

Berlusconi has denied knowledge of any kidnap operation and has defended SISMI against wrongdoing. He has also criticized the trial on the grounds it could hurt Italy’s ability to cooperate with Western intelligence agencies in combating terrorism.

Omar, was on his way to Milan’s main mosque when he disappeared on February 17, 2003.

At the time he was being investigated by Italian prosecutors on terrorism charges.

According to prosecutors, after he was abducted in Milan, Omar was flown to Germany and eventually ‘rendered’ by the United States to his native Egypt, where he claims to have been tortured while in prison in a cell near Cairo.

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Data Mining Your Life

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By Carlton Meyer | Few Americans pay attention to the Bush administration’s effort to better monitor terrorist communications. In short, federal authorities want to indirectly void the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which requires a warrant signed by a judge before they can search a person’s home and other personal information. This seems harmless to most law abiding citizens, so why is this opposed by many in the U.S. Congress? The answer is that most people have skeletons in their closet, as New York Governor Eliot Spitzer recently demonstrated. Congressmen know that the U.S. government wants to learn every detail about everyone’s private life through the growth of massive computer databases and new search technology that allows “data mining.”Prior to the “war on terror,” the “war on drugs” was the excuse to gradually errode the U.S. Bill of Rights. Since drug lords do business in cash, a database called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) was established to monitor cash transactions in the USA.[1] Banks must submit a report on persons who make a cash transaction of $10,000 or more. Drug lords learned of this, so they limited transactions to less than $10,000. As a result, laws were passed that require banks to also report “suspicious” or multiple cash transactions below $10,000. Since money was often laundered through casinos and money transfer companies like Western Union, they are required to submit reports to FinCEN too.

Structuring

This data provided federal agents with leads to possible criminal activity, but they were often unable to link cash transactions to a specific crime. As a result, a vague law prohibiting “structuring” was enacted, in which it became illegal to structure transactions to avoid the $10,000 reporting requirement. This little understood law is a favorite tool of law enforcement because few Americans know that depositing or withdrawing a few thousand dollars in cash a few times a year may land them in prison. Once such activity is detected, federal agents demand an explanation, while threatening to imprison the suspects for “structuring.” As a result, thousands of uncooperative or unconvincing Americans have been imprisoned for nothing more than suspicious cash transactions.

A good example occurred in 2003 when famous talk show radio host Rush Limbaugh was investigated. He had become addicted to pain killers and purchased them on the black market with the help of his maid. He withdrew cash 30 to 40 times from his bank account at amounts just under the $10,000 bank reporting requirement. FinCEN tipped off federal officials and an investigation was launched. “I was not laundering money. I was withdrawing money for crying out loud,” Limbaugh said in his three-hour broadcast, soon after he returned from five weeks of drug rehab.[2] Limbaugh is an influential multi-millionaire with close ties to President Bush, so criminal charges were never filed.

However, there are thousands of cases where law enforcers abused the intent of money laundering laws. Foreign exchange dealers, car dealers, or local wire transfer dealers may be offered a bonus by undercover agents if they promise not to file the required report. If they agree, they are arrested. People attempting to hide money from the IRS or their wife or debt collectors are often investigated. Large cash withdrawals by Eliot Spitzer for his expensive prostitution flings were detected by FinCEN, which led to his downfall.

Washing Money

Money laundering is a federal crime with heavy penalties. It was sold to Congress as an essential tool to use against elusive drug dealers and organized crime bosses. Nowadays, it is part of almost every federal indictment that involves cash transactions as part of criminal activity. It is routinely abused by federal prosecutors to entice a guilty plea for minor crimes. Suspects, who insist on innocence and a trial, face the prospect of ten years in prison for money laundering, even though the penalty for their root crime is less than a year in prison. The most serious count facing Eliot Spitzer is money laundering.

Most federal agents and prosecutors are not zealots, but professionals doing their best. They want every tool Congress will allow, which is why most criminal laws in the USA are not written by congressmen responding to concerns of citizens, but by federal employees in the U.S. Justice Department. The 9-11 terror attack provided them with a unique opportunity to amass a wish list of new powers that became known as the “Patriot Act.” This further weakened the Bill of Rights, but did not eliminate the requirement for search warrants.

Data Mining

The 4th Amendment requirement for search warrants has become the key issue in a political battle between the Bush administration and Congress. Law enforcers desperately want authority to engage in widespread “data mining.” New computer search-engine technology now allows massive databases to be easily mined for information. Data mining is routinely used by private companies for marketing and credit reporting purposes. It is also used by government agencies to pursue tax evaders and criminals using their own databases, such as FinCEN. However, using government computers to browse private sector databases is illegal, since judges refuse to issue a blanket warrant allowing the random search of all information of all American citizens.

 

The media has produced hundreds of stories about “warrantless wiretapping” during terrorist investigations. However, the central issue is not terrorism, but the desire by federal agencies to engage in unlimited data mining. There are numerous examples where agencies already conduct private sector data mining without obtaining search warrants or complying with federal laws such as the Privacy Act. This was revealed in a 2005 report from the General Accounting Office, which reviewed the policies of five government departments in regards to data mining and found clear violations of federal law. The report did not delve into data mining details, but a graphic toward the end shows that the IRS already mines data from state driver’s license records and telephone databases.[3]

 

Credit Card Money Laundering

In recent years, the IRS became aware of the widespread use of credit cards to evade taxes and launder money. Credit card payments are not scrutinized like bank deposits, and records exist in computers separate from traditional banking records. Thousands of small businessmen discovered that they can mail a customer check as a payment to their personal credit card account, so that taxable income disappears from their business books. In addition, criminals can mail money orders purchased with cash to pay credit card bills.

This is small-time money laundering, yet the problem is massive and IRS and other federal agencies have no legal authority to sift through credit card records without a specific warrant, while banks have no obligation to report suspicious activities. The credit card payment process is completely automated, so payments are accepted even if the payee name does not match the cardholder.

Credit cards were a favorite method of obtaining money from secret overseas bank accounts until 2004. Customers used them to pay for anything and even take cash advances using a system outside traditional banking channels. This infuriated the IRS until they found a judge with no fondness for the Bill of Rights, probably one with serious tax problems. He brazenly waived the 4th Amendment and issued a blanket summons to secure all offshore transaction data from MasterCard International Inc. and Visa USA for 31 countries that are known tax havens.[4]

A blanket summons for all records is certainly a violation of the 4th Amendment and the Privacy Act. In these cases, the IRS does not pursue a lead against a specific taxpayer; it uses data mining to fish for information. Now that a legal precedent has been set, the IRS wants access to all domestic bank credit card computer systems for data mining. This would allow income claimed on returns to be matched with spending. In addition, airline travel, automobile fuel charges, and hotel stays could be matched against travel claims.

The IRS Loves Data Mining

The American people have no desire for the IRS to sift through their credit card records, so a “telecommunications” act to allow warrantless searches is the best route to legalize what the IRS already does to some extent. The IRS already data mines its own database and several others with software called “REVEAL” to spot anomalies in tax returns. If someone earned $50,000 in 2006 plus $45 in bank interest, yet in 2007 they earned $14,000 in interest, the IRS wants to know where that money came from. Or if they have a $30,000 mortgage interest deduction, the IRS wants to know how they afford such a huge house.

The IRS does not need proof of income tax evasion to assess taxes and penalties. It simply makes allegations that a taxpayer must disprove, which is why accountants tell taxpayers to keep all records for their entire life. “Lifestyle Audits” are extremely intrusive as they require taxpayers to refute anomalies detected by IRS computers.[5] While the IRS is restricted to audits going back just three years, it can demand proof of income for everything a persons owns, meaning one must keep a financial record of their entire life. If the taxpayer refuses or is unable to prove how his assets were obtained with declared income, an agent assesses a tax based on speculation.

The IRS refuses to disclose what other databases it mines, but does pay private sector data miners for information. Databases exist that detail every car, boat, airplane and property each taxpayer and their children own. Databases of insurance policies and claims offer additional clues. Even frequent flyer databases are of interest, because the IRS considers frequent flyer awards as income.

Snooping Technology Keeps Growing

Even more intrusive technology has appeared over the past couple of years. Several court cases revealed that companies like Yahoo and Google keep a record of every search term ever made from every computer address, and links it to an account if that person is logged on. Their databases keep copies of all e-mails as well, even after the user deletes them. Most people do not even realize copies of deleted e-mails remain in their account within their SENT or the TRASH section. Even if these are cleared, the data remains on their computer hard disk and can be retrieved by experts.

 

Experts had long assumed that federal agencies could infect personal computers with “spyware” programs that automatically forward all activity for government review. This was confirmed last year in a court affidavit where:

“FBI agent Norman Sanders describes the software as a ‘computer and internet protocol address verifier,’ or CIPAV. Sanders wrote that the spyware program gathers a wide range of information, including the computer’s IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer’s registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL. The CIPAV then settles into a silent ‘pen register’ mode, in which it lurks on the target computer and monitors its internet use, logging the IP address of every computer to which the machine connects for up to 60 days.“[6]  

Since this was used in common case of an e-mail bomb threat to a high school, citizens must assume it is used in all cases. Many techies fear that the newest version of the unwanted Yahoo toolbar is part of a government program because it collects user information. This toolbar has infected most personal computers and Yahoo’s instructions on methods to remove this data collection “spyware” do not work for the new version.

Databases of medical records are mined by insurance companies to verify applicant information so the sickly can be denied coverage. Mining medical databases may uncover embarrassing details, like: treatment for venereal diseases, treatment for drug or alcohol abuse, psychiatric counseling, cosmetic surgery, and what prescription drugs a person has used. Some fear databases that include DNA will soon exist so that insurers can deny coverage to healthy people who have a greater genetic chance of succumbing to deadly diseases.

Internet usage by employees is widely monitored by businesses to prevent hours of casual browsing and shopping on company time. In addition, e-mail sent from company computers is considered company property, and can be read by bosses. Data mining technology under development by the U.S. Air Force monitors e-mail traffic to uncover social networks among employees and outsiders. Unusual traffic or a change in traffic indicates a troubled or disgruntled employee, who warrants investigation. E-mails that express interest in a sensitive topic may indicate espionage or a whistleblower.[7]

A major problem is that these databases are filled with errors caused by data entry typos, identity theft, or similar names. One can see this problem by paying any of the dozens of on-line background check companies to provide a report on oneself. The data provided by these simple checks is frightening, as well as the large number of errors. The ease in which this personal data can be retrieved explains why identify theft has become rampant. As a result, each year millions are denied jobs, loans, or medical coverage, or are investigated and even arrested because of database errors. Mass illegal immigration to the USA has made this problem far worse as undocumented workers use documents from citizens to function in society.

Blackmail

Last year, an article in Sanders Research explained the growing danger of databases for blackmail.[8] This may explain why most Congressmen are afraid to confront abuses by the executive branch led by President Bush. Julian Sanchez recently provided an excellent overview of why Congress passed various laws in support of the 4th amendment over the years:

“…for decades, intelligence analysts — and the presidents they served — had spied on the letters and phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices — even Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Church Committee reports painstakingly documented how the information obtained was often ‘collected and disseminated in order to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency or the administration, and to influence social policy and political action.’”[9]

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is a recent example of a prominent American whose career was destroyed by intrusive government surveillance. He had harmed no one, yet his desire to have sex with beautiful women is deemed criminal. Like most Americans, he had violated one of thousands of federal statutes that can be legally interpreted as a heinous offense. On the other hand, this particular case is ironic since Spitzer was known for abuse of statute intent during his years as a federal prosecutor.

While the Spitzer story received widespread media coverage, the intriguing inner story was ignored, even after it was mentioned in the Washington Post, which revealed: “The FBI placed a surveillance team on Spitzer at the Mayflower Hotel for the first time on Jan. 26, after concluding from a wiretapped conversation that he might try to meet with a prostitute when he traveled to Washington to attend a black-tie dinner, the source said Tuesday.”[10]

Americans have a federal government near bankruptcy, yet it dispatches several $100,000 a year FBI agents to spy on a senior political rival in hopes of ruining his career. This is the same government that continually informs citizens that a major terror attack is imminent, and claims that all available resources are focused on this threat. The American media did not critically pursue this story, perhaps because owners, editors, and reporters fear they may become “data mined” and placed under surveillance. This fear was confirmed when it was recently revealed that the FBI searches telephone records of reporters in hopes of finding their sources of information.[11] One must read news from Hong Kong where Asia Times writer, F. William Engdahl, clarified the issue with an article entitled “Why Spitzer was Bushwhacked,” where he wrote:

“Spitzer was likely the target of a White House and Wall Street dirty tricks operation to silence one of the most dangerous and vocal critics of their handling of the current financial market crisis. A useful rule of thumb in evaluating spectacular scandals around prominent public figures is to ask who might want to eliminate that person”

Spitzer was quoted as saying “The Bush administration let the housing bubble inflate and now that it’s deflating we’re dealing with the consequences. The real failure, the genesis, the germ that has spread, was the subprime scandal,”[12] Spitzer has made no bold comments in recent weeks, as he hopes to stay out of jail. Meanwhile, fear has assured that no other prominent American political figure or journalist suggests that the Bush administration is to blame for the current financial crisis.

[1]  The existence of FinCEN is not secret; it has its own website http://www.fincen.gov that explains its crime-fighting purpose.

[2]  “Limbaugh investigated for money laundering”; CNN.com; Nov. 20, 2003.

[3]  “Data Mining”; GAO; Aug. 2005; http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05866.pdf

[4]  “IRS and Agriculture efforts strike pay dirt”; GCN; Sept. 27, 2004; http://www.gcn.com/print/23_29/27421-1.html

[5]  “Audits; Can Your Life Pass Muster?”; Businessweek; Feb. 3, 1997; http://www.businessweek.com/1997/05/b3512138.htm

[6]  “FBI’s Secret Spyware Tracks Down Teen Who Made Bomb Threats”; Wired; Jul.18, 2007.

[7]  “Sniffing Out Insider Threats May Improve Public Safety, Prevent Terrorism”; Medical News Today; Feb. 23, 2008;

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/97961.php

[8]  “Super Snoopers“: SRA, Apr. 17, 2007.

[9]  “Wiretapping’s True Danger”; LA Times; Mar. 16, 2008; http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/itsonlyfair/latimes0160.html

[10]  “FBI Watched Spitzer Before February Incident“; Washington Post; Mar. 12, 2008.

[11]  “Leak Inquiry Said to Focus on Calls with Times”; New York Times; Apr. 12, 2008.

[12]  “Why Spitzer was Bushwhacked”; Asia Times; Mar. 20, 2008.

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VIDEO: The Corporation

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

This is an extraordinary film about the creation of the American corporation, its legal organizational model, its global economic dominance and its psychopathic tendencies, and its incredible ambition to influence every aspect of culture in its unrelenting pursuit of profit.

After viewing this film, it becomes all too evident that these large corporations have too much power, whose mandate is not the common good of the people, and who will go to any lengths, legally and otherwise, in the pursuit of profit and the bottom line. Reviewer: C. Middleton (Australia)

Go here to watch or download this video 

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Feds to Collect Millions of DNA Profiles Yearly

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By Ryan Singel | The feds will soon be collecting about one million DNA samples a year under a new program that lets federal agents collect cheek swabs from citizens merely arrested for any federal crime or from any non-citizen detained by federal agents — including visitors to the country who have visas.

The intent is build a massive database of DNA samples (.pdf) that police can use to catch rapists and murderers, but even the innocent should fear being in the database, due to the vagaries of how cold case DNA searches can easily pinpoint an innocent person.

Thanks to an amendment in the Violence Against Women Act of 2005 that was sponsored by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), the feds now have the authority to immediately take DNA from any arrestee or ‘detained’ non-citizen and immediately upload it to the FBI’s CODIS database.  That database is currently fed by federal law enforcement agencies and all 50 states, a few of which collect and upload DNA samples from people arrested, but not convicted of a crime. 

DNA profiles are composed of 13 genetic markers that are meant not to reveal genetic makeup or disease. Like fingerprints, DNA are very powerful and scientifically sound evidence, when used to connect a known suspect to evidence found at the scene of the crime. Jurors are easily persuaded to accept the DNA link for someone who had already been suspected of a crime scene when told the odds against a false identification are 1 in millions or billions.

But DNA is far less certain when you compare one sample against all of the profiles in the database typically known as one-to-many. In that case the chances that a match between a DNA sample — especially an incomplete one — and a person in a DNA database could nab an innocent person has different math. Very different math.

So if you have a probability of 1 in 1.1 million chance of people having a certain sequence of DNA markers and you have a database of 550,000 people, you have a 50% chance of making a match. That’s great, if you know that the perpetrator is in that database. But what it also means is that as you start testing DNA profiles against more and more people, the chances that you will match an innocent person to a DNA profile from a crime scene gets higher.

A recent L.A. Times story about a cold case prosecution of a 1972 rape and murder in California, where 30 years later, police matched a DNA sample from the scene to that of a convicted rapist in its 338,000 profile strong DNA database. Given the number of markers that were used there was a one in three chance that some profile in the database would match. In this case, it matched John Puckett, who lived in the same city.

The jury however, wasn’t told about the probability that someone in the database would match against the profile (The L.A. Times story erroneously says that there was a 1/3 chance that someone innocent would be fingered in such a search. If one knew for a fact that every person in the database were innocent, then there was a 1 in 3 chance that an innocent person would get fingered, but in Puckett’s case, one simply knows that there was a one in three chance someone in the California criminal database would be fingered.)

And that’s a problem when the government starts collecting millions of DNA samples, sticking them in a massive database and finding ‘cold hits.’

Imagine the innocent man facing down a jury of his peers, hoping that they understand something about statistics.

The Justice Department is taking comments on the proposed DNA rules until Monday, May 19.

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Extradition of Paramilitary Chiefs - a Blow to Truth

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By Constanza Vieira | Fourteen former paramilitary chiefs were quietly extradited from Colombia to the United States before dawn on Tuesday on drug trafficking charges, in a move that drew criticism from human rights experts.

The militia chiefs were safe from extradition as long as they respected the 2005 “justice and peace law” that governed the demobilisation of the far-right paramilitary groups, which are blamed by the United Nations for 80 percent of the human rights crimes committed in Colombia’s four-decade civil war.

President Álvaro Uribe said the 14 leaders were extradited because they continued committing crimes after demobilising, were not providing full confessions as required by the justice and peace law, and had failed to compensate their victims, “by hiding assets or delaying their handover.”

“Manipulated truth is no longer truth. Truth has to be told without calculations of timing, without delays,” said the president.

“The government has requested, and the United States has agreed, that the wealth that the extradited persons agree to hand over through accords with judges in that country be dedicated to reparations for victims in Colombia,” he said.

“There is nothing standing in the way of moral reparations being made from the United States,” added Uribe, to calm the worries of the victims of the paramilitaries, who include nearly four million people forcibly displaced from their homes.

Taken by surprise by the extradition, Rodrigo Tovar, alias “Jorge 40″, known for killing off Kankuamo Indians in the northern Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains, cursed and shouted that they had been betrayed, which would seem to indicate that there was no negotiation with the paramilitary chiefs for their extradition.

According to Tovar’s lawyer, Hernando Bocanegra, the paramilitary leaders were confessing to their crimes “little by little” because that is how the justice and peace law was designed.

In the confession hearings, each survivor had the right to personally ask the paramilitary chiefs about their loved ones who had been killed. The defendants only responded when they personally knew about that particular murder, and had to consult with their subordinates when they didn’t, “which was the reason for the delay,” said the attorney.

“They were talking,” said Bocanegra, who added that there was a “timeframe that was being followed. In the stage of confession, they had gotten to the chapter of murders, massacres and genocidal crimes.”

Some had started to give details on joint actions carried out by paramilitary groups and military units, another point on the agenda. Others had already announced that they would implicate local businessmen in their testimony.

Among those who were extradited Tuesday were several top leaders, like Salvatore Mancuso, Diego Murillo, alias “Don Berna” — the heir to late druglord Pablo Escobar — and the commander of the paramilitary militias on the north coast of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Hernán Giraldo.

Iván Cepeda, spokesman for the Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State (MOVICE), complained to the press that the extraditions would “seriously affect” the rights of survivors, and said they were aimed at keeping the paramilitary leaders from continuing to provide the names of military, political and business accomplices and allies.

Eduardo Carreño, vice president of the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective, a human rights group, told IPS that “this move confirms what we have said from the start: that a Congress with a strong paramilitary presence legislated on its own behalf, and that the victims are the forgotten ones in this process.”

More than 60 lawmakers, nearly all of them pro-Uribe, are under investigation for their ties to the paramilitaries, as part of what has been dubbed the “parapolitics scandal.”

They include the rightwing president’s cousin and main political ally, former senator Mario Uribe.

Carreño said that “no one has ever talked to the victims, offered them guarantees, or made sure that there will be no repetition” of war crimes like torture, massacres, forced disappearances, targeted killings of community leaders, activists and trade unionists, and the forced displacement of rural families and communities to seize their land.

According to the paramilitaries and their defenders, the war crimes were committed against “subversives,” people who collaborated with the leftist insurgent groups that emerged in the 1960s.

“To think that reparations for the victims can be achieved from the United States is a total fallacy. And it is impossible for the victims to take out passports and apply for visas” to the United States, said Carreño, referring to the possibility of survivors and family members of victims attempting to seek justice in that country.

“This is a mockery,” Gustavo Gallón, director of the Colombian Commission of Jurists, another leading human rights organisation, told IPS.

“It was clearly spelled out: if they were really committing crimes after demobilising — as they were doing — they were to be referred to the ordinary courts, as established by the justice and peace law,” where they would face sentences of up to 40 years rather than the light sentences, of no more than eight years, provided for by the agreement with the government, he said.

The Uribe administration says it will send prosecutors and lawyers to the United States to collect the testimony of the former paramilitary chiefs, in order for the justice and peace law process to continue.

Santiago Rodríguez, the former lawyer of Colombian drug trafficker Hernando Gómez Bustamante, who was extradited to the United States in mid-2007 after being deported to Colombia from Cuba, pointed out that a person cannot be tried for the same crime in two different places.

Furthermore, said Rodríguez, everything that the extradited paramilitaries say from this moment on can be used against them.

“I would not allow a client of mine to talk” about crimes committed in Colombia other than drug trafficking offences, for which the 14 were extradited, the Cuban-American lawyer said in a telephone interview from the United States with the Bogotá station W Radio.

He said he would only allow his client to talk if there were a written agreement approved by the U.S. Justice Department guaranteeing protection from prosecution for other crimes.

He pointed out that according to the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence, testimony on other crimes provided by defendants during a trial — like the kind of confessions required by the justice and peace law — can be used against them.

According to Rodríguez, that means the former paramilitary chiefs extradited to the United States should not have to cooperate with the Colombian justice system, which could complicate their legal situation in the United States. “Protections would have to be put in writing,” he reiterated.

Leftwing Senator Gustavo Petro said President Uribe “dealt several blows in one” with the extraditions.

“The first blow,” he told IPS, “is against truth.”

“If Uribe says there is a pact with the United States” for the prosecution of war crimes to continue in that country, which does not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, “it is a secret pact, because no one knows about it. The only thing the U.S. is interested in is curbing drug trafficking,” he said.

“The second blow is against the victims and the possibility of compensation, which becomes even more remote if the truth is not revealed,” and “the third is against Colombian justice,” because with this decision, the president is “disregarding the Colombian justice system and recognising the U.S. system,” said the senator.

The National Commission for Reparations and Reconciliation (CNRR), created by the justice and peace law, called for “a cooperation agreement between the U.S. Justice Department and Colombia’s Attorney-General’s Office, so that the rights of the victims are placed in a central spot on the judicial agenda.”

Another agreement that should be reached, said the CNRR, would provide a guarantee that the victims “can move ahead with civil and criminal lawsuits against the extradited paramilitary chiefs and thus achieve respect for their rights.”

* With additional reporting from Helda Martínez.

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Guantánamo Has Backfired Dreadfully

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By George Monbiot | When we learned last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The Pentagon says his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp’s prisoners. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place.

Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former Guantánamo detainees who have “taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving US detention”. Given that the majority of the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were detained, that’s one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality, it turns out that “anti-coalition militant activities” include talking to the media about their captivity. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guantánamo. But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taliban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US government.

The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men “successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years”. The US government’s intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of innocence, without charges, representation, trials, or due process of any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is guilty. The abuses at Guantánamo not only deny justice to the inmates, they also deny justice to the world.

Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan. He admitted that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made “under pressure and threats”. When the Americans released him from Guantánamo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissible evidence required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he nor his interrogators had signed his supposed testimony. The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.

All evidence obtained in Guantánamo, and in the CIA’s other detention centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a wide range of coercive techniques - devised or approved at the highest levels in Washington - have been used to make inmates tell the questioners what they want to hear.

In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantánamo and described by the authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as “the 20th hijacker”. By the time his interrogators started using “enhanced techniques” to extract information from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he “was talking to nonexistent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end”. He was abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further 54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted from a man in this state?

The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made before blowing himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in Guantánamo. “Twelve thousand kilometres away from Mecca, I realised the reality of the Americans and what those infidels want,” he said. He claimed he was beaten, drugged and “used for experiments” and that “the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the Qur’an and threw it in dirty places.” Al-Ajmi’s lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying.

The accounts of people released from Guantánamo describe treatment that would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him on his arrival with these words. “Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews? That’s exactly what we’re going to do with you.” There were certain similarities. “I knew a man from Morocco,” Kurnaz writes, “who used to be a ship captain. He couldn’t move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.” The young man - scarcely more than a boy - in the cage next to Kurnaz’s had just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp’s Immediate Reaction Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more.

Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, “maybe the guy who goes into Guantánamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He’s going to come out a fully fledged jihadist.”

In reading the histories of Guantánamo, and of the kidnappings, extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a process that generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.

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Executions sought for 9/11 defendants

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By Carol J. Williams | The head of the Pentagon’s war crimes tribunal approved death penalty charges Tuesday against five alleged Sept. 11 conspirators, including confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Prosecution of a sixth suspect, so-called 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani, was dropped.

The tribunal’s convening authority, Susan Crawford, referred to trial the cases against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and alleged Al Qaeda collaborators Waleed bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi. All are in jail at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the defendants must be arraigned within 30 days of the referral of charges, and trials must begin within four months.

The arraignments, at the Guantanamo war crimes court, will be the first public appearance of the defendants since their captures after the attacks. They are accused of plotting the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a crash site in Pennsylvania.

Crawford noted that the charges against Qahtani in February were dismissed “without prejudice,” meaning the Pentagon could reinstate them later.

Mohammed and the four others face trials for alleged conspiracy, murder in violation of the laws of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property, terrorism and material support for terrorism.

All but Hawsawi also are charged with hijacking aircraft for their alleged roles in preparing the attacks.

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How Pot Became Demonized

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

The following is an excerpt from “Dying to Get High” by Wendy Chapkis and Richard J. Webb (NYU Press, 2008). (c) 2008 NYU Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.

For many modern critics, the concept of “medical marijuana” is a contradiction in terms. Medicine is standardized, synthetic, and pure; marijuana involves the unrefined and promiscuous coupling of more than four hundred components rooted in the dirt. Medicine — in its most powerful and privileged forms — rests in the hands of men, while the most potent form of marijuana is found in the female flowering plant. Medicine engages in heroic battles against death. Marijuana claims only to enhance the quality of life.

Medicine presents itself as an objective science safeguarded by the ritual of the double-blind, randomized clinical trial. The therapeutic value of marijuana relies largely on the “soft science” of subjective experience and anecdotal evidence. From the perspective of its critics, then, cannabis is an effeminate interloper in the masculine world of real medicine, a dangerous drug pushed on a credulous public by illegitimate quacks.

But this story is too simple. The line separating regular doctors from snake oil salesmen, good drugs from bad, is as much the product of politics as it is of science. The dominance of politics in determining the value of marijuana as a medicine was first demonstrated in the 1930s when the federal government began to restrict the medical use of marijuana, against the recommendations of the American Medical Association (AMA).

The struggle between politics and science over the use of cannabis as a medicine continues. In the final decade of the twentieth century, the federal government threatened physicians with the loss of their license for recommending marijuana to patients, made criminals of patients who followed their doctor’s advice, and actively blocked scientific research into the therapeutic value of cannabis, while insisting that it was an established scientific fact that marijuana is not a medicine.

During the opening of a 2004 congressional hearing on medical marijuana, this ongoing battle over cannabis was described by committee chair Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) as a critical front in the War on Drugs and consistent with the modernization of medicine:

This hearing will address a controversial topic, the use of marijuana for so-called medicinal purposes. In recent years, a large and well-funded pro-drug movement has succeeded in convincing many Americans that marijuana is a true medicine to be used in treating a wide variety of illnesses …. Marijuana was once used as a folk remedy in many primitive cultures, and even in the 19th century was frequently used by some American doctors, much as alcohol, cocaine, and heroin were once used by doctors. By the 20th century, however, its use by legitimate medical practitioners has dwindled, while its illegitimate use as a recreational drug has risen.

Souder thus sets the stage for a morality tale populated by primitive practitioners and legitimate doctors, dangerous drug fiends and decent drug warriors.

Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly invoked a similar cast of characters in his 2004 discussion of medical marijuana with U.S. Deputy “Drug Czar” Dr. Andrea Barthwell. That year, voters in Oregon were to be presented with a ballot measure to amend their state’s already-existing medical marijuana law. The proposed amendment (which ultimately failed) was intended both to increase the amount of marijuana a patient could have over the course of a year and to redefine which health professionals could legally recommend marijuana for medical use.

O’Reilly scoffed at the idea that licensed health practitioners other than physicians might be authorized to recommend the use of cannabis to their patients: “Even a shaman could grant permission for you to toke in Oregon. I mean, this is, you know, any health practitioner. So you’re a shaman from the Amazon and you set up shop. Come on, I mean, everybody knows this is a ruse. Am I wrong?” Andrea Barthwell confirmed for viewers that O’Reilly’s concerns were quite legitimate: “No, you’re absolutely right, Bill. This is what we’ve been trying to make clear to people when they have these proposals presented to them. This is not about getting medicine to people who are sick and dying. This is about making marijuana legal.”

While both host and guest shared the belief that the Oregon proposal was no more than a thinly disguised attempt to legalize marijuana, O’Reilly asked whether cannabis itself might not be a legitimate medicine if prescribed by a legitimate physician to a patient with a legitimate need: “But there is a legitimate issue here, Doctor. We had Montel Williams [another popular TV talk show host] on a few weeks back. He has MS [multiple sclerosis]. And I believe Montel Williams when he says, ‘Look, medical marijuana helps me, helps me cope with this disease, cope with my suffering. There’s no reason why I should be denied it.’ And I agree with Montel Williams that if this is the case, if a doctor — a doctor — says that he needs it for his MS, he should have it. You don’t disagree with that, do you?” Barthwell’s response was uncompromising: “Well, I do, actually. There is nothing that tells us from the science now that smoked, crude botanical should be a medication. We have a process that has been in place for 100 years in this country that protects the sick and dying from snake oil salesmen. And just because something makes you feel better doesn’t make it medicine.”

In this short exchange, the terms of the debate for dismissing cannabis therapeutics are neatly laid out: medical marijuana is a ruse; cannabis is the modern day equivalent of “snake oil”; “crude botanicals” are not real medicine; licensed alternative health practitioners are not legitimate healers; marijuana is reduced to and synonymous with smoking as a delivery system; and “feeling better” isn’t always therapeutic. Taken together, these claims create a neat division between marijuana and “real medicine,” with medicine narrowly defined as that which is practiced by physicians prescribing pharmaceuticals to patients who will not necessarily feel better as a result.

The rise of “regular” medicine and the battle against botanicals

According to Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, an Israeli research chemist who performed much of the original work in the early 1960s isolating the active ingredients in marijuana: From ancient times to the early 20th Century, cannabis was used for a wide variety of medical purposes including the treatment of pain and swelling, depression, arthritis, impotence, kidney stones, hemorrhaging in childbirth, irregular bowel movements, cold sores, distending stomach, dropsy, headaches, diseases of the respiratory organs, hysteria, neuralgia, sciatica, tetanus, dysentery, fatigue, disorders of the female reproductive system, convulsions, cholera, delirium tremens, vomiting, spasmodic asthma, and a host of other ailments. Most of these therapeutic claims were either based on folklore or were anecdotal, but the use of cannabis as a therapeutic agent in the past provides an insight for future drug development. More recently, some of the historical therapeutic properties of cannabis have been verified with pure natural or synthetic cannabinoids; however, in several fields no modern scientific work exists.

In order to understand why marijuana, a promising medicinal botanical, should now be excluded not only from the modern pharmacopeia but also from much formal scientific study, it is necessary to ask why some drugs, but not all, get labeled “medicine”; why some healers, and not others, are “regular doctors”; why some effects, but only some, are understood as “therapeutic”; and why some risks are acceptable while others are prohibited under penalty of law. The answers cannot be found in a simple appeal to scientific standards. Instead, in order to understand what counts as “legitimate” medicine, it is useful to ask who, beyond the patient, might benefit from such distinctions. In our exploration of the role of organized medicine, state regulatory agencies, the courts, and the pharmaceutical industry in the demonization of marijuana, the intent is not to perform the reverse process, demonizing modern medicine. Over the past century, during which organized medicine consolidated its authority and cannabis was first marginalized and then removed from the pharmacopeia, astonishing medical advances have been made. Unquestionably, the public would be ill served by a return to a time of unregulated medicine practiced by poorly trained doctors with recourse to few effective drugs.

Nonetheless, it is also the case that the healing arts remain an impure science. The most striking difference between marijuana and “real medicine” is not the physical but the social effects the plant has on users and healers alike. Association with marijuana marks those it touches as illegitimate — a distinction with deep historical roots. Prior to the professionalization of medicine, lay healers — often women — made extensive use of medicinal plants. But as modern medicine moved into the ranks of the professions, and into hands of men, botanicals were discredited along with the women who had used them. In their pathbreaking study of the rise of the male medical expert, For Her Own Good, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English note that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, anxiety over women’s knowledge of medicinal botanicals contributed to the European witch hunts: charges against the accused often included the provision of herbs.

In Colonial America and the early republic, health and healing practices also rested largely in the hands of lay women practicing herbal medicine. Historian Carol Smith-Rosenberg observes that “women as midwives and as family nurses, women wise in the ancient herbal pharmacopoeia, had always cared for their own and neighboring families. A survey of cookbooks and women’s diaries for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries shows that women collected and exchanged recipes for medicines as routinely as they did for pies and cookies.”

By the nineteenth century, however, as medicine entered the marketplace, male physicians with little formal training claimed for themselves the designation “Regular doctor” while moving all others to the margins of the healing arts. In North America, midwives, bonesetters, and “root and herb” doctors were thus gradually displaced by the self-proclaimed “Regulars,” not through the violence of witch burnings, as happened in Europe, but rather through professionalization. This challenge was, according to Ehrenreich and English, “at bottom, economic. Medicine in the 19th century … [became] a thing to be bought and sold.”

Professionalization required that the Regulars distinguish themselves from midwives and herbalists; they did so through “heroic medicine,” a practice involving dramatic (though not necessarily beneficial) techniques such as bloodletting, blistering, purging, and the use of toxic mercury-based medicines. These interventions were intended to produce “the strongest possible effect on the patient.” Though such therapies were not only dangerous and often ineffective, Ehrenreich and English observe that they gave “regular doctors something activist, masculine, and imminently more salable than the herbal teas and sympathy served up by rural female healers.” In fact, despite the very serious risks of heroic medicine, Smith-Rosenberg notes that the Regulars insisted that it was they who were protecting “the lives of innocent citizens from ill-trained, irresponsible ‘irregulars,’ and hysterical midwives.”

The Regulars prospered during the first two decades of the nineteenth century and succeeded in securing licensing laws in many states restricting the practice of medicine to those in their ranks and limiting membership to men. But growing dissatisfaction with the results of “heroic medicine,” and populist misgivings about monopolies and elites, led to the temporary repeal of such laws during the 1830s. The “Popular Health Movement” of the period challenged the position of Regulars by emphasizing “self-help” (through better hygiene and healthy living) and by embracing the therapeutic approaches of alternative medical sects, including those advocating botanical treatments.

As sociologist Carol Weisman notes, under the banner of science, Sectarians or Irregulars “were attacked by mainstream physicians as ‘quacks,’ although the therapeutics of the regular physicians were not generally more effective than those of the irregulars.” The Regulars reinforced their claim that they, and they alone, were legitimate physicians by founding a national professional organization in 1847 — the American Medical Association — explicitly excluding both women and sectarian practitioners.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, economic competition intensified as both Regulars and their rivals — now known as the “Eclectics” — opened medical schools to train practitioners. The Eclectics, who advocated the use of botanical therapies, also represented a more populist and egalitarian politics — for example, they admitted women to their medical schools. During this same period, in 1854, cannabis joined other herbal remedies in the national pharmacopeias and was freely prescribed for a large number of medical conditions ranging from insomnia to neuropathic pain. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dozens of research papers were published on the various medicinal uses of marijuana.

This corresponds to a period in which Regulars began to consolidate the power of the newly organized medical profession, in part by absorbing Eclectics into their ranks. As Paul Starr observes in his landmark study, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Eclectics “succumbed to quiet cooptation; they were only too glad to be welcomed into the fold.” By co-opting much of the opposition, physicians were able to secure new licensing laws restricting the practice of medicine. But Eclectics paid a significant price; with the consolidation of control by conventional medicine, botanical therapies were increasingly marginalized by mainstream medicine.

The allopathic approach of the Regulars was not only dominant but also institutionalized in the early twentieth century when organized medicine completed its process of professionalization by gaining control over medical education, access to hospitals, and the right to prescribe drugs. The dominance of this paradigm was reflected in the growing strength of the American Medical Association. In 1900 the AMA had no more than eight thousand members, but by 1910 membership reached seventy thousand, and by 1920 the majority of physicians in the United States had become members. In fact, by 1931 only about 5 percent of all cases of illness were handled by non-MD practitioners.

This exponential increase in the power and professional authority of regular doctors surprisingly did not rest primarily on the provision of more effective medicines; these were slow to be developed. Instead, doctors were forced to find other ways to assert their newly established social and cultural legitimacy. One strategy was to position themselves as experts in not only the physical but also the moral health of the nation. In the nineteenth century, condemnation of birth control and abortion, for instance, provided physicians with a clear moral platform that allowed them to denounce practices still largely in the hands of “irregulars.” According to Carol Smith-Rosenberg, these efforts to limit women’s reproductive choices became a key arena “in the war between the allopaths and the ‘irregulars’ for patients and for power …. The ‘irregular’ physician and the ‘irregular’ wife, the ‘regulars’ insisted, conspired together against public order and national well-being.” As Carol Weisman observes, this claim of medical and moral expertise “provided regular physicians with an element of social respectability and moral authority, which was enhanced by publicly criticizing the abortion practices of other practitioners and the crass commercialism of purveyors of contraceptives and abortifacients.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, flush with its legislative success against abortion, the AMA turned its attention to another arena that neatly linked morality and public health: the provision of drugs. Physicians enhanced their professional authority by speaking out against the dangers of addictive drugs frequently found in “patent medicines” and available directly to the public. Because the formulae of proprietary medicines were secret, it was impossible for patients to judge the safety of those drugs. The practitioners of organized medicine thus joined forces with muckraking journalists to bring to the public’s attention the possible risks of patent medicines. This important public service had a significant payoff for the profession as well, reinforcing a growing distinction in the public mind between good drugs (dispensed by doctors) and bad drugs (available directly to the public by unlicensed practitioners).

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Bush warns of Iraq exit terror risk

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

By Elizabeth Stewart | The US president, George Bush, today claimed the Democratic presidential candidates’ plans for a quick withdrawal of troops from Iraq could lead to another terrorist attack on America.

In an online interview for the Yahoo News and Politico websites, Bush said a “premature” withdrawal from Iraq would “embolden” extremists throughout the Middle East, which would “eventually lead to another attack on the United States”.

Not maintaining a “forward presence” in the region would send out “the wrong signals”, he said, adding: “It would shake everybody’s nerves, and it would embolden the very same people that we’re trying to defeat.”

Hillary Clinton - who originally voted in favour of invading Iraq - has spoken out during her campaign against the continued US presence in the country, urging an “orderly withdrawal”.

“The administration often talks about the cost of leaving Iraq, yet ignores the greater costs of continuing the same failed policy,” Clinton told a recent Senate armed services committee hearing.

She is also against the Bush administration’s plans to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

Clinton’s rival, Barack Obama - who spoke out against the war in 2002, warning of an occupation of “undetermined length and consequences” - last year pledged the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq if he became president.

However, he left the door open for maintaining a US base in the country if al-Qaida sought to establish a presence in the region.

In a question and answer session with the websites’ users, Bush said he did not believe US intelligence agencies had intentionally misled him about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

“Misled is a strong word,” he said. “It almost connotes some kind of intentional.” However, he admitted he was “disappointed” to discover how flawed US intelligence had been.

The president revealed he had given up playing golf because it “sent out the wrong signal” to the families of soldiers fighting overseas.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them.”

He admitted it was “tough” hearing that people had lost loved ones as a result of his decision to go to war, but said his Christian faith had helped him through.

“If you’re a faithful person, you try to empathise with the suffering that that person is going through,” he added.

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