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CIA death squads killing with “impunity” in Afghanistan

Monday, May 19th, 2008

By Joe Kay | A United Nations investigator released a preliminary report last week citing widespread civilian deaths in Afghanistan, often at the hands of unaccountable units led by the CIA or other foreign intelligence agencies.

The investigator is Philip Alston, a New York University professor serving as the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary execution. His report provides a partial glimpse into the illegal actions of intelligence agencies, occupying forces, and Afghan police, as they seek to repress opposition to the US-led occupation and US-backed government.

A more detailed final report will be released later this year.

Alston focused on civilian killings by US and other international military forces, citing 200 reported deaths in the first four months of 2008. This figure, however, was based on tabulations by the United Nations and other international organizations, and is undoubtedly a serious underestimation.

In addition to civilians killed in air raids—often targeted indiscriminately at civilian dwellings—Alston reported on “a number of raids for which no state or military command appears ready to acknowledge responsibility.”

In a press conference on Thursday, Alston elaborated, saying, “I have spoken with a large number of people in relation to the operation of foreign intelligence units. I don’t want to name them but they are the most senior level of the relevant places. These forces operate with what appears to be impunity.” The location of the incidents cited in the report indicate that the intelligence agencies in question include the CIA or US Special Operations Forces.

The report cited a few incidents as examples of extra-judicial killings. In January 2008, two brothers were killed in Kandahar province in a raid led by “international personnel.” Alston found that the victims “are widely acknowledged, even by well-informed Government officials, to have had no connection to the Taliban, and the circumstances of their deaths are suspicious. However, not only was I unable to get any international military commander to provide their version of what took place, but I was unable to get any international military commander to even admit that their soldiers were involved.”

Other incidents involved raids by Afghans led by unnamed “international intelligence services” out of bases in both Kandahar and Nangarhar provinces.

“It is absolutely unacceptable for heavily-armed internationals accompanied by heavily-armed Afghan forces to be wandering around conducting dangerous raids that too often result in killings without anyone taking responsibility for them,” the report stated.

The British Independent newspaper provided some additional information. It noted, “A Western official close to the investigation said the secret units are still known as Campaign Forces, from the time when American Special Forces and CIA spies recruited Afghan troops to help overthrow the Taliban during the US-led invasion in 2001. ‘The brightest, smartest guys in these militias were kept on,’ the official said. ‘They were trained and rearmed and they are still being used.’”

The Independent went on to cite one incident involving British forces. “In Helmand, where most of Britain’s 7,800 troops are based, Special Forces were accused of slitting a man’s throat in a botched night raid last year. Security sources now claim the operation was mounted by a secret spy unit.”

Alston also reported on the actions of Afghan police. “They function not as enforcers of law and order, but as promoters of the interests of a specific tribe or commander,” he reported. He cited one incident in which Afghan police massacred a group from a rival tribe. There was no investigation by the government or the occupying forces. In another incident, police killed nine and wounded 42 unarmed protestors in Sheberghan in May 2007.

In general, he found little to no interest among US or Afghan officials in monitoring or following up on civilian deaths. “The level of complacency in response to these killings is staggeringly high,” he said.

At the press conference, he noted, “When I asked for the number of reported civilian casualties over the past year or so, I was told that those figures are either not available in Afghanistan—which I was told by several senior military people—or that they are secret and cannot be provided to me. When I asked for the results of certain cases, to ascertain whether those involved have been punished, I was told that no such information is available here in Afghanistan and that perhaps I should read the newspapers of the countries concerned.”

The fact that the CIA is involved in covert operations in Afghanistan is neither new nor surprising. Already by the 1970s, the CIA had developed ties to sections of the Afghan population, and in particular Islamic fundamentalist elements, in an effort to undermine the Soviet-backed government. Later, the CIA was heavily involved in developing ties to anti-Taliban warlords prior to the US invasion and occupation in 2001.

Following the invasion, Afghanistan—and in particular the Bagram Air Force Base near Kabul—became a transit point for prisoners captured by the United States and destined for Guantánamo Bay, secret CIA prisons, or US-allied countries that practice torture. US intelligence agencies were reportedly also involved in the interrogation of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

In 2005, US media reported on the operations of US-backed deaths squads in Iraq, deployed to kill suspected opponents of the US occupation. Yasser Salihee, a special correspondent for news agency Knight Ridder who was investigating the death squads, was killed with a bullet to the head in June of that year. Separate reports related how the US military had modeled Iraqi units on the death squads deployed in Central America during the 1980s to eliminate left-wing opposition to US policies.

While most of the CIA’s actions remain shrouded in secrecy, one CIA contractor was prosecuted for torturing an Afghan prisoner to death in 2003. The contractor, David Passaro, interrogated and beat the prisoner, Abdul Wali, for two days, injuring him so severely that he died two days later.

In a separate development, the New York Times reported on Saturday that the Pentagon is moving forward with the construction of a 40-acre prison complex at the Bagram military base. The current prison, as well as separate prisons run by the Afghans and by the US, are reportedly insufficient to hold the massive number of individuals swept up by the occupying forces.

The facility may also be used for prisoners currently detained in Guantánamo Bay. It will be designed to hold as many as 1,100 people.

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Why should we pay the Orwellian licence fee?

Monday, May 19th, 2008

By Patrick West | Some government public information services or advertisements on behalf of state services never change. Drink-driving awareness adverts invariably feature a before-and-after narrative, beginning with people shown having a merry old time at the pub, and ending with the aforementioned revellers entombed in a bloodied, twisted hunk of metal. Army recruitment adverts have always suggested that by signing up you can become a kind of ersatz, global social worker, learn some skills, or drive an exciting tank; they never mention that being in the Army may actually involve killing people or getting your head blown off. And TV licence adverts have always relied on the trusty old message: ‘We Know Where You Live’.

The TV licence advert currently gracing our screens is the government’s most menacing and threatening to date. It depicts a city in the form of a computer’s innards, boasting that the government’s computers have access to all of our details, suggesting in the process that the state regards us not as citizens, but as numbers, pieces of data, cogs in the machine. Never mind identity cards, why don’t they just brand us with irons instead?

It is tempting to say that this is akin to Nazi Germany or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is true that these allusions are all too loosely and inappropriately bandied about. One thinks of Basil Fawlty’s response to guests who were merely complaining about his incompetence: ‘this is exactly how Nazi Germany started’. Yet in the case of the menacing license threats, one may argue that such comparisons with the past are merited. Out of all the forms of undesirable governance, one of the unique features of totalitarianism is its reliance on bureaucracy, technology, statistics and surveillance as means to dehumanise people. Our society may not be totalitarian to the extent that genocide is permitted, but it is becoming so in the way that the contract between state and citizen is interpreted. Certainly, the UK is beginning to resemble countries such as Singapore or China, where political and civil liberties are curtailed in exchange for economic liberalism.

On the other hand, one may interpret this latest advert as a sign of panic and of weakness (after all, who’s going to be afraid of notoriously cack government databases). The case for the abolition of the licence fee has never been stronger, and I suspect that the government knows it. The licence fee is in its death throes.

First of all, since many households have Sky, Freeview or Virgin, the BBC, just like its commercial counterparts, Channel 4 and ITV1, does not command the share of the audience they once did. People are watching other channels, and thus compulsorily paying for a channel they use less frequently. This is partly what made the old radio licence fee so unjustified, which, since the airwaves were liberalised in the 1960s, was abolished in 1971.

The expansion of the television network since the 1990s has also in turn dismissed the unfounded fear that commercial television is incapable of producing sensible and high-brow programmes. The wealth of documentary, news, foreign language and film channels suggests the market can provide - the quality found here is ironically highlighted by the fact the BBC now puts its sensible fare on its non-terrestrial BBC4 channel, and that in order to place EastEnders and its profusion of Casualty spin-offs in prime-time, Question Time comes out just when most people are going to bed, leaving poor old Andrew Neil’s jolly politics show, This Week, to languish in the middle of the night.

The BBC really is its own enemy at times, and antagonises those who are otherwise sympathetic to the Reithian spirit. Radio 4’s jaundiced, liberal-left take on the world is a particular scandal. I don’t mind people being left-wing, I just object to people thinking it is normal - and that anyone who is not is wicked or stupid and in need of re-education.

Auntie is shooting itself in the foot in another area currently, by reminding viewers that they can watch their favourite shows on the BBC website. By doing so, the Beeb is spreading the realisation that you don’t necessarily need a television set to watch television programmes anymore. Many teenagers and young adults are increasingly eschewing television altogether, preferring to watch YouTube. Just as landline telephone lines are vanishing from our homes as mobile phones have made them redundant, I suspect greater technological interactivity will one day see television sets go the same way. So with no TVs, why a TV licence?

By watching programmes on the internet, we can by-pass irritating commercial breaks, whose presence on the other channels has always been cited as a reason to keep the BBC as it is. But commercial breaks will also soon be a thing of the past. The internet and the Sky+ record and fast-forward facilities are making them obsolete, which Sky knows all-too-well, hence the bulk of its revenue comes from subscription charges. There are moves afoot at present to lift the ban on product placement on television programmes, a direct reaction to the waning influence of commercial breaks. So, soon, viewers of Coronation Street may no longer have to endure the unrealistic spectacle of someone asking for ‘a pint of bitter’ at the Rover’s Return (no-one asks for generic beers in pubs) but, perhaps, ‘a pint of Boddington’s’ or ‘a pint of John Smith’s’.

I won’t predict that the licence fee is definitely on its way out. Nor will I necessarily applaud it if it does go, because you know what’s going to happen as a consequence. Australia abolished its TV licence fee in 1974, but its government still funds the Australian Broadcasting Commission to the tune of A$800m per year. India abolished its in 1977, Portugal in 1992, Holland in 2000, Hungary in 2002: all of these countries replaced it with direct state funding. The only difference this made was to cut down on administrative costs, and to alter a tax on televisions from a regressive tax to a proportional one.

So, in a way the issue is not whether to abolish the TV licence fee. The real question is: what should come after? In essence, the quandary remains: should we be taxed to watch television?

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Firms await verdict on £2 billion ID cards project

Monday, May 19th, 2008

The Independent | The technology industry will next week learn who the Government has awarded contracts to supply the £2bn biometric identity card programme, the last and among the most secretive of the recent crop of major public-sector IT schemes.

The framework deals under the hammer do not guarantee a role in the ID programme, but only those companies that win a place on the list will be eligible to compete for the lucrative work.

According to insiders, best and final offers have been submitted by the shortlist of Fujitsu, IBM, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), Thales and EDS. A decision is expected next Monday.

The programme has been politically and technologically controversial from the start, and the procurement process has not been smooth either. Of the eight companies shortlisted last October, three – Accenture, BAE Systems and Steria – have dropped out. Should the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) team stick to the original plan for a group of five major suppliers, it is in danger of undermining the credibility of the programme by letting through all the companies still in the race.

Insiders tip CSC as the most likely loser. The company took more than £2bn-worth of NHS IT contracts from Accenture in 2006, giving it responsibility for three out of the five geographical regions of the world’s largest healthcare technology programme. According to sources, CSC’s first main subcontractor, Siemens, dropped out six months ago, and Unisys, which took over from Siemens, stepped down last month.

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I was tortured to confess, Pervez tells appeal court

Monday, May 19th, 2008

By Kim Sengupta | Pervez Kambaksh, the Afghan student sentenced to death after being accused of downloading internet reports on women’s rights, yesterday pleaded innocent to charges of blasphemy. He told an appeal court in Kabul that he had been tortured into confessing.

Mr Kambaksh, 24, vehemently denied that he had been responsible for producing anti-Islamic literature. He insisted the prosecution had been motivated by personal malice of two members of staff and their student supporters at the university in Balkh, where he was studying journalism.

He was convicted in proceedings behind closed doors in a trial which he said had lasted just four minutes and where he had been denied legal representation.

Yesterday, in the first public hearing of the case, the prosecution claimed that Mr Kambaksh had disrupted classes at the university by asking questions about women’s rights under Islam. It also said he distributed an article on the subject after writing an additional three paragraphs including the phrase “This is the real face of Islam … The prophet Mohamad wrote verses of the holy Koran just for his own benefit.”

In a highly emotional statement, Mr Kambaksh said: “I’m Muslim and I would never let myself write such an article. These accusations are nonsense, [they] come from two professors and other students because of private hostilities against me. I was tortured by the intelligence service in Balkh province and they made me confess that I wrote three paragraphs in this article.”

Mr Kambaksh represented himself because his family are having difficulties finding a lawyer to represent him after threats by fundamentalist groups that anyone taking on the job would be killed.

The head of the panel of three judges at Kabul, Abdul Salaam Qazizada, adjourned the trial until next Sunday to allow Mr Kambaksh further attempts to find a lawyer. As of last night they had not succeeded. The original trial took place in January. Mr Kambaksh’s appeal was moved to Kabul at his own request, amid fears for his safety in Mazar after international outrage at the sentence. A petition by The Independent to secure justice for him has attracted more than 100,000 signatures.

Prosecutor Ahmad Khan Ayar told the appeals court that the primary provincial court sentence to hang him was “the right decision” according to Islamic law and the Afghan constitution. “Kambaksh has insulted Islam by writing these paragraphs, and he has insulted the Prophet Mohamed. I ask the appeals court to uphold the decision of the primary court of Balkh and sentence him to death.”

Under Islamic law, stipulated in Afghanistan’s constitution, blasphemy is punishable by death. Two other Afghan journalists, accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death, escaped prison and have been given asylum in the West.

Mr Kambaksh’s case has been raised with President Hamid Karzai by Foreign Secretary David Miliband and the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

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Iran busts CIA terror network

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Tehran Times - TEHRAN | The Intelligence Ministry on Saturday released details of the detection and dismantling of a terrorist network affiliated to the United States. In a coordinated operation on May 7, Iranian intelligence agents arrested the terrorist network’s members, who were identified in Fars, Khuzestan, Gilan, West Azerbaijan, and Tehran provinces, the Intelligence Ministry announcement said.

The group’s plans were devised in the U.S., according to the announcement, which added that they had planned to carry out a number of acts such as bombing scientific, educational, and religious centers, shooting people, and making public places in various cities insecure.

One of the terrorists was killed in the operation, but the rest are in detention, the Intelligence Ministry said, adding that the group’s main objective was to create fear among the people.

The United States Central Intelligence Agency comprehensively supported the terrorist group by arming it, training its members, and sponsoring its inhumane activities in Iran, the Intelligence Ministry stated.

The terrorists had maps, films, pictures, and sketches of important and sensitive sites in various cities in their possession when they were arrested.

They also had a large number of weapons and ammunition and a great deal of highly explosive chemicals and cyanide.

The blast at a religious center in Shiraz last month was carried out by this group, and it also had plans to carry out similar attacks on the Tehran International Book Fair, the Russian Consulate in Gilan Province, oil pipelines in southern Iran, and other targets, the communiqué stated.

Thirteen people were killed and over 190 others wounded in a bombing carried out on April 12 at the Rahpuyan-e Vessal religious center, which is part of the Seyyed-ul-Shohada Mosque complex, located in a residential area of Shiraz.

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Propaganda and the media

Monday, May 19th, 2008

By Joseph L. Galloway | Once upon a time, it was widely believed that one of the greatest sins the U.S. government or its temporary political masters could commit was to turn a propaganda machine loose on the American people.

Congress viewed this so seriously that every appropriations bill passed since 1951 has contained language that says no public money “shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States” without the lawmakers’ prior approval.

The Bush administration has been caught violating the propaganda ban before, notably in 2005 in the case of radio host Armstrong Williams, who was paid to endorse President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law.

Particularly abhorrent to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which oversees compliance with the ban, is an agency’s use of “covert propaganda” or “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.”

This is why alarm bells should be ringing all over Washington about The New York Times’ disclosure that then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld encouraged a secret Pentagon program to care for and spoon-feed more than 50 retired senior military officers whom the administration deemed reliable friends who could be counted on “to carry our water” on the television and cable networks.

Feeding the military analysts “key and valuable information” in secret briefings by Pentagon and White House officials, the idea went, would make them the go-to guys for the networks and encourage the networks to “weed out the less reliably friendly analysts . . . .”

This 2005 memorandum, addressed to then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Larry DiRita, added: “This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter.”

Asked about the case of Col. Bill Cowan, who says he was fired as a military analyst for Fox News and cut off from the briefings for criticizing the war effort, DiRita told Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com: “I don’t know anything. I saw that in the story. I’ve heard other assertions to that effect. It was certainly not the intent.”

In a follow-up e-mail exchange between DiRita and Greenwald, Rumsfeld’s former mouthpiece — now Bank of America’s chief spokesman — elaborated on what he said he didn’t remember: “I simply don’t have any recollection of trying to restrict him (Cowan) or others from exposure to what was going on.”

DiRita added: “There are plenty of examples to the contrary — reaching out to people who specifically disagreed with us. One example I recall is Joe Galloway — a persistent critic and apparently popular with military readers. He came in and met Secretary Rumsfeld and we had other interactions.”

Now that’s a real knee-slapper: Me as a poster boy for how Rumsfeld and DiRita “reached out” to their harshest critics even as they stroked and promoted and schemed to embed the old reliables to wax enthusiastic about a war that was going from bad to worse.

Let the record show that Rumsfelds’ folks reached out to me on these few occasions:

In early summer of 2003, half a dozen of us were invited to an off-the-record lunch with Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. The defense secretary seemed to have a poor grasp of the reality on the ground in Iraq and was still declaring that we’d do no nation-building there. He saw no insurgency, only a handful of “dead-enders”.
In October 2005, DiRita called to invite me to travel with Rumsfeld to the Middle East and Australia. I declined because it conflicted with a long-booked graduation speech I was to give at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz. to a class of new Air Force F-16 fighter pilots that included my nephew. DiRita was stunned that I wouldn’t drop a bunch of fighter pilots to be schmoozed by his boss.
In November 2005, DiRita invited me to a “one-on-one” lunch with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. This one I accepted. I arrived to find across the table Rumsfeld, the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace; Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody; Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp and DiRita. We went at it hammer and tongs for an hour and a half over their conduct of the war and the errors that were costing the lives of American soldiers. As I left, I told Rumsfeld that I’d continue to point out those mistakes every week in my column.
In April 2006, DiRita sent me an e-mail telling me that my most recent column was “silly”. That column had discussed an expensive war game the Pentagon conducted about a U.S. attack on a thinly disguised country that obviously was Iran.

A retired Marine general, Paul Van Riper, had been the commander of the “enemy” forces, and he used unconventional tactics to destroy the U.S. Navy flotilla in the Persian Gulf, leaving thousands of sailors and Marines dead. At that point, the commanders stopped the war game, reset everything and imposed new rules forbidding Van Riper from employing those tactics.Van Riper walked out, furious, and requested an investigation. DiRita complained in his e-mail that I was silly to blame Rumsfeld for this and for covering up the investigators’ report. After all, he wrote, Rumsfeld couldn’t be expected to know retired generals several levels below him or to bear responsibility for such matters. His complaint sparked an escalating e-mail war that most reckon DiRita lost. The entire exchange was posted on the Internet and can still be found there.

So much for the Rumsfeld/DiRita outreach to their critics. They were much too busy hand-feeding horse manure to their TV generals, who in turn were feeding the same product to the American public by the cubic yard.

There’s little doubt that this program violated the laws against covert propaganda operations mounted against the American public by their own government. But in this administration, there’s no one left to enforce that law or any of the other laws the Bush operatives have been busy violating.

The real crime is that the scheme worked. The television network bosses swallowed the bait, the hook, the line and the sinker, and they have yet to answer for it.

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Cluster Bomb Ban Opposed by US, China, Russia

Monday, May 19th, 2008

By Nick Cumming-Bruce - GENEVA | Believe the advocates of a treaty banning cluster munitions, and the international community is about to take a decisive step toward curbing the use of a weapon that inflicts terrible suffering, particularly on civilians. Believe the US government, and the measure they propose threatens to undermine the NATO alliance that has underpinned Western security since World War II.

Delegates from more than 100 countries will open a conference in Dublin tomorrow that will try to hammer out a treaty banning the production, use, stockpiling, or transfer of cluster munitions - bombs or artillery shells packed with up to several hundred bomblets or submunitions that are sprayed over wide areas of territory.Major producers and stockpilers of cluster munitions, the United States, Russia, and China, will be absent and are opposed to a treaty, but disarmament specialists liken the cluster treaty to the Ottawa Treaty of 1997 banning land mines, which was shunned by the major powers but has proved influential in shaping the policies of countries outside the convention.

Support for a ban on cluster weapons has risen sharply since the 2006 conflict between Israel and Lebanon, when, according to United Nations estimates, Israeli troops fired some 4 million Vietnam War-era submunitions, of which a quarter failed to explode.

These have reportedly caused more than 200 casualties since the end of the war and required a costly and hazardous cleanup operation by international aid agencies - often funded by Western governments.

In Laos, where the United States dropped 2 million tons of ordnance in the 1970s, including an estimated 260 million submunitions, unexploded weapons still kill and maim people and hinder economic development.

As many as 10 percent to 15 percent of cluster munitions normally fail to explode on impact but those who support the treaty say the figure could be much higher. A study by Handicap International, a nongovernmental organization based in Belgium, found that 98 percent of recorded victims were civilians and one-third of casualties were children.

But after a series of international and regional conferences that have mapped out the broad parameters of a treaty, Dublin is the venue where negotiators have to refine rhetoric into a legally binding instrument governing a weapon system that represents a substantial part of the arsenal of the United States and some of its NATO allies.

“It’s going to be a bruising conference,” said Patrick McCarthy, coordinator of the Geneva Forum, a disarmament research body.

A handful of issues loom as key battlegrounds. One will be the definition of what constitutes a cluster munition, with richer Western nations like Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland pressing for exclusion of sophisticated weapons that have self-destruct mechanisms, target sensors, or a small number of submunitions.

Others, like Germany, want a transition period of up to 10 years during which they can continue to use such weapons while they find replacements.

Among the most contentious is a proposed clause that would prevent those who sign onto the treaty from engaging in joint operations with forces still employing cluster munitions.

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Is the Creative Internet Just About Dead?

Monday, May 19th, 2008

By Annalee Newitz | A couple of weeks ago I went to the annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, an event where people from all over the world gather for a giant DIY technology show-and-tell extravaganza. There are robots, kinetic sculptures, rockets, remote-controlled battleship contests, music-controlled light shows, home electronics kits, ill-advised science experiments (like the Mentos-Diet Coke explosions), and even a barn full of people who make their own clothing, pillows, bags, and more. Basically, it’s a weekend celebration of how human freedom combined with technology creates a pleasing but cacophonous symphony of coolness.

And yet the Maker Faire takes place against a backdrop of increasing constraints on our freedom to innovate with technology, as Oxford University researcher Jonathan Zittrain points out in his latest book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press). After spending several years investigating the social and political rules that govern the Internet — and spearheading the Net censorship tracking project OpenNet Initiative — Zittrain looks back on the Net’s development and predicts a dystopian future. What’s chilling is that his dystopia is already coming to pass.

Zittrain traces the Net’s history through three phases. Initially it was composed of what he calls “sterile” technologies: vast mainframes owned by IBM, which companies could rent time on. What made those technologies sterile is that nobody could experiment with them (except IBM), and therefore innovation related to them stagnated.

That’s why the invention of the desktop PC and popularization of the Internet ushered in an era of unprecedented high-tech innovation. Zittrain calls these open-ended technologies “generative.” Anybody can build other technologies that work with them. So, for example, people built Skype and the World Wide Web, both software technologies that sit on top of the basic network software infrastructure of the Internet. Similarly, anybody can build a program that runs on Windows.

But Zittrain thinks we’re seeing the end of the freewheeling Internet and PC era. He calls the technologies of today “tethered” technologies. Tethered technologies are items like iPhones or many brands of DVR — they’re sterile to their owners, who aren’t allowed to build software that runs on them. But they’re generative to the companies that make them, in the sense that Comcast can update your DVR remotely, or Apple can brick your iPhone remotely if you try to do something naughty to it (like run your own software program on it).

In some ways, tethered technologies are worse than plain old sterile technologies. They allow for abuses undreamed of in the IBM mainframe era. For example, iPhone tethering could lead to law enforcement going to Apple and saying, “Please activate the microphone on this iPhone that we know is being carried by a suspect.” The device turns into an instant bug, without all the fuss of following the suspect around or installing surveillance crap in her apartment. This isn’t idle speculation, by the way. OnStar, the manufacturer of a car emergency system, was asked by law enforcement to activate the mics in certain cars using its system. It refused and went to court.

Zittrain’s solution to the tethering problem is to encourage the existence of communities like the ones who participate in Maker Faire or who edit Wikipedia. These are people who work together to create open, untethered technologies and information repositories. They are the force that pushes back against companies that want to sterilize the Internet and turn it back into something that spits information at you, television-style. I think this is a good start, but there are a lot of problems with depending on communities of DIY enthusiasts to fix a system created by corporate juggernauts. As I mentioned in my column (”User-Generated Censorship,” 4/30/08), you can’t always depend on communities of users to do the right thing. In addition, companies can create an incredibly oppressive tethering regime while still allowing users to think they have control. Tune in next week, and I’ll tell you how Zittrain’s solution might lead to an even more dystopian future.

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Hybrid embryos ’should be banned’

Monday, May 19th, 2008

BBC News | Allowing scientists to carry out stem cell research using hybrid human-animal embryos “is a step too far and should be banned”, the Commons has been told.

Senior Tory MP Edward Leigh said there was “no evidence yet to substantiate” the claims this could lead to treatment for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Gordon Brown has urged MPs to back the work, saying it is a “moral endeavour” that could save thousands of lives.

MPs are voting on a series of reforms to embryology laws that date from 1990.

The measures, part of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, are aimed at updating laws in line with scientific advances.

‘Useless’

They will be voted on in the House of Commons over the next two days.

Ex-minister Mr Leigh opened the debate on Monday, with an amendment prohibiting outright the creation of hybrid “admixed” embryos.

He said he believed the move was “ethically wrong and almost certainly medically useless, and if not useless, there is no evidence yet to substantiate it”.

The bill would allow regulated research using hybrid or “admix” embryos, where the nuclei of a human cell are inserted into an animal egg.

The resulting embryos would be kept for up to 14 days to harvest stem cells.

But Mr Leigh said: “We do not believe that regulation is enough. We believe this is a step too far and therefore should be banned.” “In embryos, we do have the genetic make up of a complete human being and we could not and should not be spliced together with the animal kingdom.”

Labour’s Chris Bryant, a former Anglican curate, said Mr Leigh’s arguments were like those used by church leaders against the smallpox vaccine.

“They were wrong and I think you are wrong today,” he said.

In a separate amendment, Tory shadow health minister Mark Simmonds is calling for true hybrids, made by fertilising a human egg with animal sperm, or visa-versa, to be outlawed.

MPs are being given a free vote on four controversial parts of the bill after warnings that some Catholic MPs and cabinet ministers were ready to rebel.

The other three areas are:

Saviour siblings: These are babies born from embryos selected because they are a tissue match for a sick older brother or sister with a genetic condition. Debate on Monday from about 1830 BST, with vote at about 2200 BST.
Role of fathers in fertility treatment: Would end the requirement for IVF clinics to consider the “welfare” of any child created in terms of need for a father. Debate from 1530 BST Tuesday, with vote at about 1830 BST.
The upper limit for abortion: Amendments have been put down to the bill to cut from 24 weeks the time limit for abortions. Debate on Tuesday from 1830 BST, with votes at about 2200 BST.

The Roman Catholic Church has branded the use of hybrid embryos as “monstrous” and says tinkering with life in this way is immoral.

Catholic bishops in Britain and the Irish Republic have given £25,000 to scientists using adult stem cells, which is less controversial than using immature ones.

Such cells can be used to create brain, skin, heart and other tissue for treating diseases.

After making a strong personal case for using hybrid embryos at the weekend, Mr Brown is expected to be backed on this part of the bill.

Writing in the Observer newspaper, Mr Brown called on MPs to back the use of hybrid embryos, saying such scientific advances could speed up treatment for cancer and conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

Cameron’s position

“The scientists I speak to are committed to what they see as an inherently moral endeavour that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions,” he said.

Mr Cameron said he would be voting in favour of admix embryos and the creation of saviour siblings.

Speaking as he visited Birmingham, he said: “My own approach to this is the law needs updating and the importance of science and research and getting to grips with genetic disease… I want to see the research go forward.”

However, he said he would be voting “against some of the things that won’t be necessary”.

Leading medical research charities, including the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council, have issued an open letter also urging MPs to back such research, saying advances in the “understanding and treatment of diseases must not be closed down”.

Scientists at Newcastle University announced last month that they had created the first part-human, part-animal hybrid embryos in the UK.

They were created by injecting DNA derived from human skin cells into eggs taken from cows’ ovaries which had had virtually all their genetic material removed.

Researchers say these human-animal “admixed” embryos could help solve the current problem of the lack of human eggs from which to generate embryos.

The vote on hybrid embryos and “saviour siblings” will take place on Monday, while the vote on the role of fathers in IVF treatment and abortion limits will be held on Tuesday. If the proposals are approved, the new legislation could come into force next year.

Have Your Say: Hybrid embryos ’should be banned’
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