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Anti-Union Groups Run Orwellian Ads

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

PR Watch | The Center for Union Facts, one of lobbyist Rick Berman’s front groups, is railing against the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would “allow employees at a work place to unionize as soon as a majority signs cards expressing support to join a union.” Labor rights advocates say the bill is needed, because of employer intimidation and union-busting tactics. Berman’s Center, as the “Employee Freedom Action Committee,” says the bill would allow “union bosses” to “stand over workers’ shoulders and use coercion.”

It’s launched a $30 million campaign, including radio, television, print and online ads and “a substantial grassroots organizing effort.” The “Coalition for a Democratic Workplace,” which is comprised of “virtually hundreds of businesses, chambers of commerce and trade associations,” is also spending millions to defeat the bill. Both groups are targeting Senators “in what they see as key states,” including Maine and New Hampshire. The bill has passed the House and is before the Senate. “The folks behind the ad campaign fear that if Sen. Barack Obama, an Employee Free Choice Act sponsor, is elected president and power shifts to the Democrats in the Senate, the bill will become law.”

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Sweatshops on Trial in North Carolina

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

By Phil Mattera | In April, I wrote about the efforts of my son Thomas and other students at the University of North Carolina to get UNC’s administration to endorse the Designated Suppliers Program (DSP), an initiative that seeks to improve the abysmal working conditions of employees at companies that produce university logo apparel—a big business for schools such as Carolina.

After pressing the matter for many months without getting a response, UNC student activists launched a sit-in this spring at the building containing the office of Chancellor James Moeser. The hope was that Moeser, who was planning to leave UNC, would resolve the DSP issue before departing. The administration tolerated the occupation (with certain ground rules) but dragged its feet on the supplier issue. Finally, on May 2, after the sit-in had continued for 16 days, Moeser announced he would not act on the DSP. This prompted students to occupy his personal office. After police arrived and arrested one activist, most of the protesters left. Those who remained, including Thomas, were eventually arrested and charged with “failure to disperse.” Salma Mirza, the only one who went limp when taken into custody, was also charged with resisting arrest.

Yesterday, the five anti-sweatshop activists had their day in court in Chapel Hill. The charges, all misdemeanors, were heard in Orange County District Court right across from campus on Franklin Street, the main student shopping strip and the place where UNC fans celebrate major basketball victories. District Court normally deals with mundane matters such as traffic violations, so it caused a stir when the five defendants, all wearing blue t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Justice for All Workers,” showed up with their pro bono legal team—led by veteran civil rights lawyer Al McSurely—and supporters who filled the gallery.

The defendants’ plea of not guilty was followed by a three-hour trial presided over by Judge Pat Devine without a jury. The prosecution’s case consisted of the testimony of four police officers and a video of the arrests. As his first defense witness, McSurely called on Mirza, who started to give a detailed description of the sweatshop problem and the campaign to get universities to sign on to the DSP (around 45 have done so). When the prosecution objected, Judge Devine refused to rule the background testimony irrelevant but said that no more than five minutes could be devoted to it. In doing so, the judge made it clear she was taking it for granted that the students were justified in arguing that supplier factories were abusive and that the UNC administration was complicit. The administration, though not a party to the case and not represented at the trial, was in effect being found guilty of enabling worker exploitation.

McSurely’s other objective was to have the charges against the five students dismissed. He sought to do this in several ways: he argued that the exact charge of “failure to disperse” was inappropriate in the circumstances; he elicited testimony from the students that they had never heard a final warning that they would be subject to arrest if they did not leave the chancellor’s office; he had Linda Gomaa, the first to be arrested, testify that she was taken into custody before any kind of warning was given; and he argued that Mirza’s behavior did not constitute resisting arrest.

McSurely also presented a necessity defense, arguing that even if the students technically broke the law, they should be found not guilty because their actions were in pursuit of a higher good. This was buttressed, for example, by the testimony of defendant Tim Stallmann that the university had previously improved the working conditions of the campus housekeeping staff after students staged protests and engaged in civil disobedience.

Judge Devine did not accept any of those arguments. She concluded that the defendants knew they were crossing a line when they moved the sit-in to the the chancellor’s office; that the police adequately warned the students they would be arrested if they didn’t leave the premises; and that Mirza’s behavior constituted resisting arrest. She also rejected the necessity defense, agreeing with the prosecutor that there was insufficient “nexus” between the actions of the students and the ending of worker exploitation.

The judge, however, made it clear she had enormous respect for the five students, each of whom had been called by McSurely to testify about their commitment to social and economic justice. Sarah Hirsch, for example, described her work with Witness for Peace, and Thomas mentioned that he had just completed a ten-week program with a non-profit called Bike and Build, during which he and others cycled across the country and worked on Habit for Humanity-type housing projects along the way.

After the prosecutor indicated the state was not seeking harsh penalties, Judge Devine in effect imposed no sentences at all. Instead, she entered a “prayer for judgment continued,” a procedure—unique to North and South Carolina, it seems—in which there is a finding of guilt but no formal conviction is entered on the defendant’s record.

All parties got what they wanted. The prosecutor got a finding of guilt, the police were vindicated in their actions, and the students got an opportunity to highlight the sweatshop issue in court and ended up with the mildest possible adverse ruling. The only real loser was the UNC administration, whose intransigence on the DSP issue emerged from the trial looking even more unreasonable.

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Mobile Phones and the Orwellian Society

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

By Daniel Soar | For a moment in the late 1990s, it looked as though mobile phones might make us free. You could work in the park, be available when you wanted to be, choose who you answered to. You could be anywhere while you did anything. If location was mentioned it was gratuitous chatter (‘I’m on the train!’) or a handy lie (‘I’m in the office’). Back then, a phone in your pocket was an expensive novelty. Ten years later, there are 3.3 billion active mobile phones, meaning that – if you ignore the show-offs who have several – half the planet has one; 85 per cent of the million new subscriptions taken up each day come from the developing world. Three billion people are just a few button presses away, and where they are doesn’t matter. But if you’re the retiring type, the trouble is that the phone companies and interested others do know exactly where you are, at any given second, so long as you have your handbag with you and your phone switched on: even the most basic technology, phone mast triangulation, locates you to within a couple of hundred metres; newer phones, with GPS built in, will tell any system that asks whether you’re in the kitchen or the loo.

You might assume that this information is either of interest to no one or, at the very least, protected by privacy laws and accessible only by the agencies that hunt suicide bombers and paedophiles. But you’d be wrong. Anyone can, for instance, sign up – at £29.99 a year – to mapAmobile.com (‘you’ll always know where your loved ones are’), which allows you to follow the movements of your ‘family and friends’ on a computer screen. The safeguard, from your friend’s point of view, is that he has to consent to being tracked, a process which involves his replying to a text message alerting him to the request; this shouldn’t be much of a hindrance to you as would-be stalker if he happens to leave his phone lying around. That this sort of enterprising solution is possible is the result of the major networks – in the UK, Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile – having decided, in around 2002, to sell their location data to any company willing to pay for it.

Such services are obscure, and barely legal, but it’s about to be brought home to the majority of mobile users that what they’re up to isn’t private information. Owners of the latest version of Apple’s iPhone – avidly queued for at stores around the world last month – can now download an application that displays a friend’s location as a bright green dot on a map. In 2009, phones running Google’s Android operating system will be able to show you in pictures how to reach that green dot while avoiding traffic snarl-ups and stray hurricanes; they’ll also tell you how much a drink will cost when you get there. Along the way you might have to dodge a virtual attack from a passing stranger who, like you, has signed up to an urban espionage ‘immersive game’ and has pegged you in the street as a target. If all this sounds like unnecessary gimmickry, and you’re perfectly happy with your phone the way it is, or would be if only you knew how to make it ring like a phone rather than a wheezing horse or a three-dimensional aural representation of the rings of Saturn, then you’re out of luck: the information your phone provides is out there anyway. It doesn’t belong to you, and anyone with the required resources can do with it what they will.

At a very rough estimate half a trillion calls are made each day on the world’s mobile networks: their origin and destination, their time and duration and all identifying codes are logged on telecom provider hard-drives and generally retained, under emerging legislation, for up to two years. It’s impossible to exaggerate the value of these data. In most countries no one can listen in to your conversation – though it’s technically trivial to do – without a warrant, but given what most of us talk about most of the time what we actually say when we’re on the phone may be the least interesting thing about the call. Certainly this is the view of the growing Intelligence Support Systems industry (ISS), which sells analysis tools to government agencies, police forces and – increasingly – the phone companies themselves. Take the case of ThorpeGlen, a company headquartered in a business park outside Ipswich that also hosts research divisions of BT and Nokia Siemens Networks. At the frequent ISS conferences – Dubai, Qatar, Washington, Prague – one of the key topics of discussion tends to be how to identify targets for LI (that’s ‘lawful intercept’) in the first place: it’s a cinch to bug someone, but how do you help a law enforcement agency decide who to bug?

To help answer that question, companies like ThorpeGlen (and VASTech and Kommlabs and Aqsacom) sell systems that carry out ‘passive probing’, analysing vast quantities of communications data to detect subjects of potential interest to security services, thereby doing their expensive legwork for them. ThorpeGlen’s VP of sales and marketing showed off one of these tools in a ‘Webinar’ broadcast to the ISS community on 13 May. He used as an example the data from ‘a mobile network we have access to’ – since he chose not to obscure the numbers we know it’s Indonesia-based – and explained that calls from the entire network of 50 million subscribers had been processed, over a period of two weeks, to produce a database of eight billion or so ‘events’. Everyone on a network, he said, is part of a group; most groups talk to other groups, creating a spider’s web of interactions. Of the 50 million subscribers ThorpeGlen processed, 48 million effectively belonged to ‘one large group’: they called one another, or their friends called friends of their friends; this set of people was dismissed. A further 400,000 subscriptions could be attributed to a few large ‘nodes’, with numbers belonging to call centres, shops and information services. The remaining groups ranged in size from two to 142 subscribers. Members of these groups only ever called each other – clear evidence of antisocial behaviour – and, in one extreme case, a group was identified in which all the subscribers only ever called a single number at the centre of the web. This section of the ThorpeGlen presentation ended with one word: ‘WHY??’

Once you’ve found your terrorist, how do you know that he won’t, say, pass on his phone, or get a new number or use a throwaway pay-as-you-go handset (as British Olympic officals were advised to do by MI6 in an attempt to evade Chinese spies)? ThorpeGlen has a solution for that too. It also sells ‘profiling’ systems, which measure the behaviour pattern of an individual subscriber and, using statistical analysis, determine whether that same pattern is now appearing from another source. In other words, if your terrorist gets a new phone you’ll still know it’s him. If he keeps the same phone and starts changing his pattern, then he’s about to blow up Jakarta International Airport. This is important stuff. If you want to see how ThorpeGlen’s systems work for yourself, just log on to https://81.143.55.50:58443; all you need to do is figure out a username and password. Who isn’t a spy now?

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McCain’s Mostly Ignored Gambling Problem

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

By Stephen C. Rose | Today the Internet is rife with speculation about whether John McCain heard the questions Rick Warren asked Barack Obama. McCain seems to have done predictably well answering the questions, whether he knew them or not. In fact anyone would think the man had a permanent pass. All he does is say how imperfect he is, engage in a Chaplinsque facial self-denigration, and all is well.

Even the polls seem to be with him. Three days tied in Gallup and a boost in Ohio.

This despite evidence that the man is a raving neocon, the admission that he will do what he can to wrest choice from the province of women and his fatuous notion that we can run a government on fumes.

But what most sticks in my craw is the plain proof that the man is close to being a compulsive gambler, certified as such by at least some of our mainstream media, and no one to my knowledge has directly confronted him on the subject.

McCain is a documented craps player. He has been known to play craps on impulse for 14 hours at a stretch.

Of the game of craps, Anthony Holden comments, “We poker players don’t call poker gambling. It is a game of skill. Craps is an absurd game of luck. You may have thrilling short term wins but only madmen play craps.”

Matthew Yglesias notes, “The McCains own eleven houses and spent over $200,000 on ‘household staff’ in 2007 so I suppose he can afford tens of thousands of dollars in gambling losses every year. At the same time, you wouldn’t want someone to enjoy ‘playing against the odds’ with the country’s public policy. The fact that McCain seems to think there’s some kind of ‘betting strategy’ that can turn craps into a winning game also raises some questions about his math.”

How serious is the gambling urge for McCain? What does the love of craps say about his “realism” regarding actual battles and conflicts? Would McCain be willing to gamble with human lives?

Connie Bruck puts it like this:

The moment the car stopped at McCain’s hotel in downtown New Orleans, he set out at his usual fast clip for Harrah’s, across the street. McCain is an avid gambler. Wes Gullett, a close friend who worked for McCain for years, told me that they used to play craps in Las Vegas in fourteen-hour stints, standing at the tables from 10 a.m. to midnight. ‘Craps is addictive,’ McCain remarked, and he headed for the fifteen-dollar-minimum-bet tables.

Image of McCain at The Tables

Michael Scherer and Michael Weisskopf says:

“Over time he (McCain) gave up the drinking bouts, but he never quite kicked the periodic yen for dice. In the past decade, he has played on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and along the length of the Las Vegas Strip. Back in 2005 he joined a group of journalists at a magazine-industry conference in Puerto Rico, offering betting strategy on request. ‘Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in John’s life,’ says John Weaver, McCain’s former chief strategist, who followed him to many a casino. ‘Taking a chance, playing against the odds.’ Aides say McCain tends to play for a few thousand dollars at a time and avoids taking markers, or loans, from the casinos, which he has helped regulate in Congress. ‘He never, ever plays on the house,’ says Mark Salter, a McCain adviser. The goal, say several people familiar with his habit, is never financial. He loves the thrill of winning and the camaraderie at the table.
“Only recently have McCain’s aides urged him to pull back from the pastime. In the heat of the G.O.P. primary fight last spring, he announced on a visit to the Vegas Strip that he was going to the casino floor. When his aides stopped him, fearing a public relations disaster, McCain suggested that they ask the casino to take a craps table to a private room, a high-roller privilege McCain had indulged in before. His aides, with alarm bells ringing, refused again, according to two accounts of the discussion.

“He clearly knows that this is on the borderline of what is acceptable for him to be doing,” says a Republican who has watched McCain play. ‘And he just sort of revels in it.’”

Another Image of McCain Playing Craps — In Las Vegas.

A survey of McCain’s gambling with many links.

Does McCain have a record of wins and losses? If so, should these be shared with the public? McCain has said craps is addictive. Is he craps addict? Has his gambling led to any questionable conflicts of interest?

I have found that mention of McCain’s gambling habit is a persuasive argument to people who are on the fence and wondering who to vote for. The association of gambling with the term neocon and observation of McCain’s growing synchronicity with Bush positions is generally enough to convince an inquirer. But these days the teflon mantel seems to be moving to McCain. And to my knowledge no one has raised these questions directly.

Yet.

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Marijuana gave cancer sufferer her life back

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Legalise Cannabis Alliance | A BREAST cancer victim made medical history recently, as the first person in Scotland to be prescribed cannabis as a treatment for chronic pain.

Former National Health Service nurse Jeanie Rae, 57, has been taking a purified extract of the controversial drug to treat the agonising nerve damage in her right arm caused by an operation and radiotherapy to beat her cancer.

The pain left her virtually imprisoned in her home in Balfron, Stirlingshire, for nearly four years because she could not bare even the lightest touch.

Standard medications given to her to help deal with the suffering had little effect. But but in 2007 she was offered the cannabis-based drug Sativex by doctors at the pain management clinic in Gartnaval Hospital, Glasgow, as part of a clinical trial.

Rae became one of the first people in the UK to be given the drug on prescription after doctors allowed her to continue taking it after the trial, given the improvements to her condition.

A few sprays of the drug under her tongue each day has enabled Rae to lead a normal life.

“Before, the pain was totally restricting my life and what I could do,” said the mother of two. “It was so bad that I could not bare to have someone touch me or even brush against my arm in the street.

“When the doctors suggested that cannabis might be of benefit I wasn’t sure, but I knew I did not want to keep living like that. Within a week of taking it I started noticing a big difference - I felt infinitely better.”

Canada recently became the first country in the world to approve a cannabis-based painkiller when health bosses gave Sativex the green light for use.

It was given approval for the symptomatic relief of pain in MS sufferers, and the UK’s medicine authorities are currently considering a similar application. Doctors hope the drug will then be approved for prescription for other types of chronic pain.

But Rae has been allowed to use the drug on prescription as part of an extended ‘open label’ trial since the initial three-month clinical trial finished last year.

As the wife of a doctor in a quiet rural village, she said she was wary about taking the drug, and its hardly surprising as the newspapers are filled daily with tales of woe regarding cannabis, which is enough to put some people off seeking relief from their conditions.

She said: “As someone who had never smoked or taken cannabis before, I did not want to become addicted to it.

“There is a lot of controversy surrounding cannabis because it is an illegal drug, but in comparison to other drugs it is quite tame.”

Rae was diagnosed with breast cancer five yeas ago, forcing her to give up her job as a nurse at the Western General Hospital in Glasgow.

Her husband Allan, a retired doctor, and their sons Fraser, 36, and Neil, 32, have supported her after she had a lumpectomy to remove cancerous cells from her breast.

The surgeons also removed lymph glands from under her right arm, but together with radiotherapy it caused her nerve endings to become inflamed and damaged. Each day Rae must take about 10 sprays of Sativex to ease her pain - less than a quarter of the maximum daily dose. But she admits it does have some side-effects.

She said: “It does make me sleepy and hungry - it gives me the munchies.”

Multiple sclerosis sufferers have been campaigning for years to be allowed to use cannabis to ease their symptoms.

One sufferer, Biz Ivol (now deceased), from Herston, South Ronaldsay in Orkney, sparked a furious debate when she admitted making cannabis-laced chocolates for other patients with the same condition.

She later stood trial for the possession and supply of cannabis in 1997 but was admonished by the court after admitting growing cannabis plants to relieve her pain.

At the time, the British Medical Association appealed for leniency for MS sufferers facing drug charges for using cannabis. Another case against Ivol was abandoned last year after her health began to fail and she died in September last year.

Paul Cruikshank, a friend of Ivol and a member of the Legalise Cannabis Alliance, said: “Patients should be able to get hold of a medicine without fear of being prosecuted. Putting people in jail for using a medicine that alleviates their pain and symptoms is totally wrong and against their human rights.”

Former Home Secretary Charles Clarke ordered a rethink on the government’s decision to downgrade cannabis to a class C drug.

Fears that the psychotic effects of the drug could lead to long-term mental illnesses such as schizophrenia caused anti-drug campaigners to call for a reversal of the legislation.

They also fear use of the drug can lead to abuse of other harder drugs. A point which has since been disproven many times.

But Alistair Ramsay, director of Scotland Against Drugs, said distinctions had to be made between abusing drugs for recreation and using them for medical need.

He said: “It is hardly surprising that cannabis is having a proper medical effect on people who suffer pain.

“Other drugs derived from opium like morphine have been used for similar purposes. It is only when they are used improperly that the problems can occur. Like many drugs currently available on prescription, doctors will need to use caution to ensure it is not being misused.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland found even cannabis-based medicines used for pain relief can cause symptoms such as paranoid delusions and severe anxiety.

But Dr Mick Serpell, the consultant who led the Sativex clinical trial at Gartnaval, believes the drug could help patients with few other choices.

He said: “We had some good results in our patients - it helped about one in three.

“These are patients who have tried everything else, so to get that kind of response can help a lot of people who have no other choices. The type of people who use it to treat pain are totally different from those who use it for recreation.”

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Bush Covered up Musharraf Ties with Qaeda, Khan

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

(IPS) - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation Monday brings to an end an extraordinarily close relationship between Musharraf and the George W. Bush administration, in which Musharraf was lavished with political and economic benefits from the United States despite policies that were in sharp conflict with U.S. security interests.

It is well known that Bush repeatedly praised Musharraf as the most loyal ally of the United States against terrorism, even though the Pakistani military was deeply compromised by its relationship with the Taliban and Pakistani Islamic militants.

What has not been reported is that the Bush administration covered up the Musharraf regime’s involvement in the activities of the A. Q. Khan nuclear technology export programme and its deals with al Qaeda’s Pakistani tribal allies.

The problem faced by the Bush administration when it came into office was that the Pakistani military, over which Musharraf presided, was the real terrorist nexus with the Taliban and al Qaeda. As Bruce Riedel, National Security Council (NSC) senior director for South Asia in the Bill Clinton administration, who stayed on the NSC staff under the Bush administration, observed in an interview with this writer last September, al Qaeda “was a creation of the jihadist culture of the Pakistani army”.

If there was a state sponsor of al Qaeda, Riedel said, it was the Pakistani military, acting through its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate.

Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservative-dominated Bush Pentagon were aware of the intimate relationship between Musharraf’s regime and both the Taliban and al Qaeda. But al Qaeda was not a high priority for the Bush administration.

After 9/11, the White House created the political myth that Musharraf, faced with a clear choice, had “joined the free world in fighting the terrorists”. But as Asia expert Selig S. Harrison has pointed out, on Sep. 19, 2001, just six days after he had supposedly agreed to U.S. demands for cooperation against the Taliban regime and al Qaeda, Musharraf gave a televised speech in Urdu in which he declared, “We are trying our best to come out of this critical situation without any damage to Afghanistan and the Taliban.”

In his memoirs, published in 2006, Musharraf revealed the seven specific demands he had been given and claimed that he had refused both “blanket overflight and landing rights” and the use of Pakistan’s naval ports and air bases to conduct anti-terrorism operations.

Musharraf also famously wrote that, immediately after 9/11, Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage had threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” if Musharraf didn’t side with the United States against bin Laden and his Afghan hosts. But Armitage categorically denied to this writer, through his assistant, Kara Bue, that he had made any threat whatsoever, let alone a threat to retaliate militarily against Pakistan.

For the next few years, Musharraf played a complicated game. The CIA was allowed to operate in Pakistan’s border provinces to pursue al Qaeda operatives, but only as long as they had ISI units accompanying them. That restricted their ability to gather intelligence in the northwest frontier. At the same time, ISI was allowing Taliban and al Qaeda leaders to operate freely in the tribal areas and even in Karachi.

The Bush administration also gave Musharraf and the military regime a free ride on the A. Q. Khan network’s selling of nuclear technology to Libya and Iran, even though there was plenty of evidence that the generals had been fully aware of and supported Khan’s activities.

Journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins wrote in their book “The Nuclear Jihadist” that one retired general who had worked with Khan told them there was no question that Khan had acted with the full knowledge of the military leadership. “Of course the military knew,” the general said. “They helped him.”

But the Bush administration chose to help Musharraf cover up that inconvenient fact. According to CIA Director George Tenet’s memoirs, in September 2003, he confronted Musharraf with the evidence the CIA had gathered on Khan’s operation and made it clear he was expected to end its operations and arrest Khan.

The following January and early February, Khan’s house arrest, public confession of guilt and pardon by Musharraf was accompanied by an extraordinary series of statements by high-ranking Bush administration officials exonerating Musharraf and the military of any involvement in Khan’s activities.

That whole scenario had been “carefully orchestrated with Musharraf”, Larry Wilkerson, then a State Department official but later Colin Powell’s chief of staff, told IPS in an interview last year. The deal that had been made did not require Musharraf to allow U.S. officials to interrogate Khan.

But the Bush administration apparently conveyed to the Pakistani military after that episode that it now expected the Musharraf regime to deliver high-ranking al Qaeda officials — and to do so at a particularly advantageous moment for the administration. The New Republic magazine reported Jul. 15, 2004 that a White House aide had told the visiting head of ISI, Ehsan ul-Haq, that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of any HVT [high value target] were announced on 26, 27 or 28 July.” Those were the last three days of the Democratic National Convention.

The military source added, “If we don’t find these guys by the election, they are going to stick the whole nuclear mess up our a**hole.”

Just hours before Democratic candidate John Kerry’s acceptance speech, Pakistan announced the capture of an alleged al Qaeda leader.

Meanwhile, Musharraf was making a political pact with a five-party Islamic alliance in 2004 to ensure victory in state elections in the two border provinces where Islamic extremist influence was strongest. This explicit political accommodation, followed by a military withdrawal from South Waziristan, gave the pro-Taliban forces allied with al Qaeda in the region a free hand to recruit and train militants for war in Afghanistan.

Yet another deal with the Islamic extremists in 2006 strengthened the pro-Taliban forces even further.

But Bush chose to reward Musharraf by designating Pakistan a “Major Non-NATO Ally” in 2004 and by agreeing to sell the Pakistani Air Force 36 advanced F-16 fighter planes. Prior to that, Pakistan had been denied U.S. military technology for a decade.

In July 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that al Qaeda’s new “safe haven” was in Pakistan’s tribal areas and that the terrorist organisation had reconstituted its “homeland attack capability” there. That estimate ended the fiction that the Musharraf regime was firmly committed to combating al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Had the Bush administration accurately portrayed Musharraf’s policies rather than hiding them, it would not have avoided the al Qaeda safe haven there. But it would have facilitated a more realistic debate about the real options available for U.S. policy.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

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The US Missile Defence System

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

The Guardian | It’s a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.

The American government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to defend Europe and the US against the intercontinental ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don’t possess. This is why they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states.

They permit us to look forward to a glowing future, in which missile defence, according to the Pentagon, will “protect our homeland … and our friends and allies from ballistic missile attack”; as long as the Russians wait until it’s working before they nuke us. The good news is that, at the present rate of progress, reliable missile defence is only 50 years away. The bad news is that it has been 50 years away for the past six decades.

The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has achieved a grand total of nothing. You wouldn’t know it if you read the press releases published by the Pentagon’s missile defence agency: the word “success” features more often than any other noun. It is true that the programme has managed to hit two out of the five missiles fired over the past five years during tests of its main component, the ground-based midcourse missile defence (GMD) system. But, sadly, these tests bear no relation to anything resembling a real nuclear strike.

All the trials run so far - successful or otherwise - have been rigged. The target, its type, trajectory and destination, are known before the test begins. Only one enemy missile is used, as the system doesn’t have a hope in hell of knocking down two or more. If decoy missiles are deployed, they bear no resemblance to the target and they are identified as decoys in advance. In order to try to enhance the appearance of success, recent flight tests have become even less realistic: the agency has now stopped using decoys altogether when testing its GMD system.

This points to one of the intractable weaknesses of missile defence: it is hard to see how the interceptors could ever outwit enemy attempts to confuse them. As Philip Coyle - formerly a senior official at the Pentagon with responsibility for missile defence - points out, there are endless means by which another state could fool the system. For every real missile it launched, it could dispatch a host of dummies with the same radar and infra-red signatures. Even balloons or bits of metal foil would render anything resembling the current system inoperable. You can reduce a missile’s susceptibility to laser penetration by 90% by painting it white. This sophisticated avoidance technology, available from your local hardware shop, makes another multibillion component of the programme obsolete. Or you could simply forget about ballistic missiles and attack using cruise missiles, against which the system is useless.

Missile defence is so expensive and the measures required to evade it so cheap that if the US government were serious about making the system work it would bankrupt the country, just as the arms race helped to bring the Soviet Union down. By spending a couple of billion dollars on decoy technologies, Russia would commit the US to trillions of dollars of countermeasures. The cost ratios are such that even Iran could outspend the US.

The US has spent between $120bn and $150bn on the programme since Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1983. Under George Bush, the costs have accelerated. The Pentagon has requested $62bn for the next five-year tranche, which means that the total cost between 2003 and 2013 will be $110bn. Yet there are no clear criteria for success. As a recent paper in the journal Defense and Security Analysis shows, the Pentagon invented a new funding system in order to allow the missile defence programme to evade the government’s usual accounting standards. It’s called spiral development, which is quite appropriate, because it ensures that the costs spiral out of control.

Spiral development means, in the words of a Pentagon directive, that “the end-state requirements are not known at programme initiation”. Instead, the system is allowed to develop in whatever way officials think fit. The result is that no one has the faintest idea what the programme is supposed to achieve, or whether it has achieved it. There are no fixed dates, no fixed costs for any component of the programme, no penalties for slippage or failure, no standards of any kind against which the system can be judged. And this monstrous scheme is still incapable of achieving what a few hundred dollars’ worth of diplomacy could do in an afternoon.

So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail? I’ll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. It persists because it doesn’t work.

US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe. But under Bush, the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won’t run out, however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work.

To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations that have no means of nuking it - and ignore the likely responses of those that do. Russia is not without its own corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets. Poor old Poland, like the Czech Republic and the UK, gets strongarmed into becoming America’s groundbait.

If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government’s interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.

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US Accused of War Crimes Over Torture Methods

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

The use of torture by the US Government in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 has come under increasing criticism.

In 1863 at the height of the US civil war, president Abraham Lincoln set the principles for interrogation of prisoners with a famous instruction “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”.

It took the September 11 attacks to change those principles and Vice-President Dick Cheney said the US would now have to work through the dark side.

In response, government lawyers drew up the so-called torture memos that would ultimately unleash the abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and at a host of secret CIA “black sites”.

In his new book, lawyer Philippe Sands argues that the responsible officials, and the lawyers who advised them, should be charged with war crimes.

Popular TV drama ‘24′ regularly show terror suspects being tortured so the hero can save the day but does this reflect a new tolerance of torture tactics in the United States?

At the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq there was little heroism on display among those who humiliated and tortured Iraqi prisoners.

The US Government blamed rogue soldiers but its own top officials had made it plain that US standards dramatically changed following the September 11 terror attacks.

“We also have to work the the dark side if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world,” said Mr Cheney shortly after the New York attacks in 2001.

“A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we’re going to be successful.”

The former director of the CIA Counterterrorist Centre, Cofer Black, echoed Mr Cheney’s words.

“All you need to know is that there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off,” he said.

As a result, terror suspects held by the US endured what US officials termed “aggressive coercion”.

Former US Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora describes some some of the interrogation techniques.

“[Guantanamo Bay detainee] Al-Qahtani was interrogated for and I’m illustrating now, not the exact, something like 48 out of 52 days, often for stretches exceeding 12 to 14 or even 16 hours a day,” he said.

“He was kept in cold rooms such that he was shivering uncontrollably, his heart rate would drop; he was provided fluids intravenously without the opportunity to go to the bathroom. He was sexually humiliated by female US guards and other treatments of this sort.”

In December 2002 then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a now infamous memo which justified these new methods.

The memo detailed a variety of enhanced interrogation techniques such as leaving people standing for up to four hours.

Mr Rumsfeld wrote at the bottom “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?”.

The US Justice Department declared treatment only amounted to torture if it intentionally resulted in pain equivalent to serious injury, organ failure or death.

Some are now questioning whether the officials who authorised these techniques may be open to being charged with war crimes.

ABC

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Data From Checkpoints To Be Kept for 15 Years

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

By Ellen Nakashima | The federal government has been using its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations.

Officials say the Border Crossing Information system, disclosed last month by the Department of Homeland Security in a Federal Register notice, is part of a broader effort to guard against terrorist threats. It also reflects the growing number of government systems containing personal information on Americans that can be shared for a broad range of law enforcement and intelligence purposes, some of which are exempt from some Privacy Act protections.

While international air passenger data has long been captured this way, Customs and Border Protection agents only this year began to log the arrivals of all U.S. citizens across land borders, through which about three-quarters of border entries occur.

The volume of people entering the country by land prevented compiling such a database until recently. But the advent of machine-readable identification documents, which the government mandates eventually for everyone crossing the border, has made gathering the information more feasible. By June, all travelers crossing land borders will need to present a machine-readable document, such as a passport or a driver’s license with a radio frequency identification chip.

In January, border agents began manually entering into the database the personal information of travelers who did not have such documents.

The disclosure of the database is among a series of notices, officials say, to make DHS’s data gathering more transparent. Critics say the moves exemplify efforts by the Bush administration in its final months to cement an unprecedented expansion of data gathering for national security and intelligence purposes.

The data could be used beyond determining whether a person may enter the United States. For instance, information may be shared with foreign agencies when relevant to their hiring or contracting decisions.

Public comments are being taken until Monday, when the “new system of records will be effective,” the notice states.

“People expect to be checked when they enter the country and for the government to determine if they’re admissible or not,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “What they don’t expect is for the government to keep a record for 15 years of their comings into the country.”

But DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said the retention period is justified.

“History has shown, whether you are talking about criminal or terrorist activity, that plotting, planning or even relationships among conspirators can go on for years,” he said. “Basic travel records can, quite literally, help frontline officers to connect the dots.”

The government states in its notice that the system was authorized by post-Sept. 11 laws, including the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act of 2002, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001, and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.

Nojeim said that though the statutes authorize the government to issue travel documents and check immigration status, he does not believe they explicitly authorize creation of the database.

“This database is, in a sense, worse than a watch list,” he said. “At least in the watch-list scenario, there’s some reason why the name got on the list. Here, the only thing a person does to come to the attention of DHS is to lawfully cross the border. The theory of this data collection is: Track everyone — just in case.”

Under the system, officials record name, birth date, gender, date and time of crossing, and a photo, where available, for U.S. travelers returning to the country by land, sea or air. The same information is gathered about foreign travelers, but it is held for 75 years.

DHS and other agencies are amassing more and more data that they subject to sophisticated analysis. A customs document issued last month stated that the agency does not perform data mining on border crossings to glean relationships and patterns that could signify a terrorist or law enforcement threat. But the Federal Register notice states that information may be shared with federal, state and local governments to test “new technology and systems designed to enhance border security or identify other violations of law.” And the Homeland Security Act establishing the department calls for the development of data-mining tools to further the department’s objectives.

That raises concerns, privacy advocates say, that analyses can be undertaken that could implicate innocent people if appropriate safeguards are not used.

The border information system will link to a new database, the Non-Federal Entity Data System, which is being set up to hold personal information about all drivers in a state’s database. States that do not agree to allow customs to have such large amounts of information may allow the agency to query their databases in real time for information on a traveler.

Because of privacy concerns, Washington state earlier this year opted for the queries-only approach. The Canadian government made the same decision. “There was absolutely no way they should have the entire database,” said Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s privacy commissioner, who learned about the Canadian government’s decision in April.

“Once you have data in a database you don’t need, it lends itself to unauthorized use,” she said. “You have no idea of the data creep.”

Vermont opted to allow access to its driver’s licenses because the state could not guarantee the “nanoseconds” response time DHS required, said Bonnie L. Rutledge, the state’s commissioner of motor vehicles. She said drivers are informed up front of the data sharing.

“A person opts to go over the border, their information is going to be collected and held anyway,” she said. “If you don’t want to go over the border, you don’t have to.”

The notice states that the government may share border records with federal, state, local, tribal or foreign government agencies in cases where customs believes the information would assist enforcement of civil or criminal laws or regulations, or if the information is relevant to a hiring decision.

They may be shared with a court or attorney in civil litigation, which could include divorce cases; with federal contractors or consultants “to accomplish an agency function related to this system of records”; with federal and foreign intelligence or counterterrorism agencies if there is a threat to national or international security or to assist in anti-terrorism efforts; or with the news media and the public “when there exists a legitimate public interest in the disclosure of the information.”

Homeland Security is proposing to exempt the database from some provisions of the 1974 Privacy Act, including the right of a citizen to know whether a law enforcement or intelligence agency has requested his or her records and the right to sue for access and correction in those disclosures.

A traveler may, however, request access to records based on documents he or she presented at the border.

The notice is posted at the Government Printing Office’s Web site.

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The Most Dangerous Man in America

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Werther | The first crisis over North Korea’s nuclear program arose in late 1994. It was obvious there was not much the United States could do to step in unilaterally and disarm the North Korean regime. Sanctions, the normally inevitable option short of war, had no meaning – the United States had no trade with the North in the first place and the regime followed a policy of economic autarky (Juche) in any case. There was really only one feasible course of action: gather as many regional allies as possible, agree to a process of inducing North Korea to freeze its nuclear program, and tender an offer to the North Koreans on the basis of a quid pro quo.

When the Clinton administration outlined its proposed course of action to Congress there was some grumbling. Arm-waving professional patriots of the American political class do not like seeing the slightest diminution of their country’s God-given prerogative to impose its will abroad when and as it likes. But there was no rational alternative, and apart from a few obscure, back-bench House Republican members a general consensus emerged that the administration’s Agreed Framework was the best of a bad series of options.

Only one politician of any political standing dissented. His name was John Sidney McCain III. His modest proposal was that the United States should be prepared to bomb the North Korean reactor sites. Never mind that he could be condemning several thousand U.S. troops (and tens of thousands of South Korean civilians) in the vicinity of the Demilitarized Zone to a virtual death sentence. It had never occurred to this self-proclaimed military expert that the North Korean regime had amassed thousands of long-range artillery pieces and rocket launchers and concealed them in tunnels north of the DMZ. From these positions the North Korean military could unleash an avalanche of fire south of the border. The result would probably have been a repeat of the Korean war of 1950-53 but with even more murderously lethal weapons.

Fast forward to 1999 and the Clinton administration’s great crusade in the Balkans (carefully calculated to target a weak and isolated country – Clinton was no fool). Humanitarian intervention was all the rage but it had to be designed to minimize the exposure of U.S. troops; after all, with no conceivable vital U.S. interest at stake, the public would not contemplate the spilling of American blood without an attendant drop in Clinton’s all-important poll numbers.

Some politicians were actually able to set aside their reflexive jingoism and smell the scent of wag-the-dog in the sanctimonious statements of Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Richard Holbrooke. The vote on an authorization of the use of force against Serbia failed in the House on a tie vote of 215-215 — the only time the equivalent of a war declaration failed in either house in U.S. history.

In the other chamber John McCain was also critical of the administration’s Balkan policy. Only for him, it wasn’t bellicose enough. Rather than limiting it to a bombing campaign he introduced a joint resolution to authorize the introduction of ground troops into a full-scale war with Serbia, something the Clinton administration did not even ask for. Fortunately, in a rare show of good sense, the Senate tabled the McCain resolution by a vote of 78-22.

McCain’s unbridled, almost manic, bellicosity with respect to the quagmire in Iraq is too well known to require elaboration. But the sophistication of his military strategy with respect to that country can be inferred from his remarks to a group of bikers in Sturgis, S.D.: “We’ll win it the right way, and that’s by winning it!”

Apparently, though, McCain’s neoconservative handlers have already grown tired of the generational struggle against “Islamofascism” (not to mention their long-planned intention to bomb Iran), for they are already pivoting McCain into a stance of maximal belligerence against Russia.

Much has been made about McCain’s relationship with his principal foreign policy handler, Randy Scheunemann, heretofore a paid lobbyist of the Republic of Georgia, and who still benefits financially from part ownership of the lobbying firm that continues to service the Georgia account. This is clearly a conflict of interest and indicates the corruption that is endemic to political campaigns of both parties. But to try to explain McCain’s actions in this way is to misunderstand the man.

Scheunemann is merely a toad overstuffed by one too many lunches at the Capitol Grill, in sum, a typical Washington success story. But McCain is sui generis. If Scheunemann had never existed someone else would be writing precisely the same talking points for the presumptive Republican candidate. McCain’s love of war and diplomatic brinkmanship is nothing if not sincere. Perhaps it is the only sincere thing about the man.

Democrats are finally stumbling onto the fact, although the press has yet to discover it, that McCain is a serial flip-flopper and prevaricator. Across virtually the entire spectrum of domestic policy McCain has held one position and then jumped to the polar opposite, apparently without noticing the inconsistency (and his pals on the press bus are too polite to bring it up):

A recipient of cash and favors from savings and loan fraudster Charles Keating, McCain reminted himself as the Conscience of the Senate, to the hosannas of an adoring and amnesiac press.
McCain could not in good conscience support tax cuts that disproportionately favored the rich – until he began to sniff the incense of a Republican presidential coronation ceremony.
He was against offshore oil drilling before he was for it.
Wearing the garb of the Serious Centrist (a mythical species that David Broder venerates), McCain railed against “agents of intolerance” like Jerry Falwell, but crawled to Canossa when Republican base-pandering mandated that he must give a cringing speech at Falwell’s Liberty University.
Even on his signature issue of torture McCain postured as an implacable foe of the Bush policy right up until the primary season commenced. Since then he has voted “no” on measures that would ban torture or confine CIA interrogation techniques to those permitted by the U.S. Army Field Manual.

And so on. McCain’s hypocrisy is perhaps somewhat more egregious than the practices of the average politician, but not markedly so. After all, politicians do not have principles, they have positions. No doubt the Democrats will make heavy weather of these flip-flops, as they are clearly entitled to. But in so doing they miss the central point about John McCain.

All these flip-flops illustrate McCain’s near-total lack of sincerity: he doesn’t really care about the issues at all. In practice he changes positions so easily because the positions themselves are throwaways. He is required to have them for political purposes, but they mostly bore and annoy him.

There is only one thing he cares about, and that is building an altar to Mars. War is the one fixed star in the McCain universe. You will find no flip-flopping or prevaricating there.

While McCain admits he doesn’t understand the economy (and then denies that he doesn’t), he claims unlimited expertise in national security matters. His belligerent megalomania with respect to the Georgian crisis has now, finally, even earned him a mild reproof from the neocon-friendly Washington Post: “Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president.”

In a development little reported in the U.S., Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili “claimed that Georgia’s ports and airports would be placed under U.S. military protection, a suggestion quickly denied by the Pentagon.” Assuming that the Department of Defense is telling the truth (and granted that it is difficult to determine whether the Pentagon or Saakashvili is more prone to fabrication), then where did the Georgian president get his information that the United States would be militarily intervening? Given that McCain claims to talk to Saakashvili every day, and given a string of grandiose pronouncements by McCain and his handlers regarding Georgia, is it possible that he misled Saakashvili, either deliberately or by implication, to believe that U.S. military intervention would be forthcoming?

It is still unclear whether McCain promised Saakashvili anything, or whether it was simply the Georgian president’s own delusion that he was the apple of Washington’s eye, but McCain’s buttinski tactics would already have been a major scandal if any other American politician who was not the sitting president had made such inflammatory pronouncements on foreign policy. As it is, McCain is already, in his campaign ukases, dramatically downgrading relations with Russia in a manner that suggests he thinks he is president.

The public is inclined to believe the worst of a politician when he is insincere, inconsistent, or dishonest; indeed, such personality traits are virtually what makes the typical politician as we know him today. But such creatures are merely nuisances, like mosquitoes. The really dangerous politician is one with an idée fixe, and when that obsession centers on the desirability of perpetual war, the possibility of catastrophe is all too real.

Given who he is, what makes him tick, and the potential that he might actually realize his ambitions on the world stage, John McCain is the most dangerous man in America.

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Bush Hustling the Bureaucracy to Advance Rightwing Agenda

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Have Your Say: Bush Hustling the Bureaucracy to Advance Rightwing Agenda
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