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Ron Paul: How Foreign Policy Affects Gas Prices

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

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US attacks China’s human rights record

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

ABC | The United States has launched a strongly-worded attack on China’s human rights record just hours before the Closing Ceremony of the Olympics.

In a written statement from its ambassador to China, the United States has attacked China’s human rights performance during the Olympic Games.

The statement also called for the immediate release of eight American pro-Tibet demonstrators who have been sentenced to ten to fourteen days detention for protesting in Beijing.

Ambassador Clark Randt said: “We are disappointed that China has not used the occasion of the Olympics to demonstrate greater tolerance and openness”.

The detainees have reportedly not claimed any mistreatment.

The British Government says one of its citizens has also received a 10 day sentence for protesting about Tibet.

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Doctors say ex-Bangladesh PM’s son crippled by torture

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

The eldest son and heir apparent of two times former Bangladeshi premier Khaleda Zia was partially paralysed when tortured in custody, doctors said Sunday.

Tareque Rahman was strung up blindfolded in a dark room, then dropped down and struck against a wall, fracturing two bones in his back, a doctor who treated him quoted from his medical report.

Rahman was partially paralysed by the impact of the fall, which has resulted in “gradual wasting of his right lower limbs,” Kazi Mazharul Islam Dolon said.

“He cannot stand for more than three to four minutes because of the acute pain due to the compression fracture. He has been on pain killers ever since he was admitted in the hospital in January”.

Rahman, who is joint secretary of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), has been detained since March last year on graft charges after the government launched an anti-corruption crackdown.

Although he did not have a ministerial role in his mother’s government, the 42-year-old was frequently referred to as the most powerful man in Bangladesh during Zia’s second tenure as prime minister between 2001 and 2005.

In June his lawyer told a court that Rahman had been energetic and fit before he was arrested, but was now physically unable to appear in court.

Serajuddin Ahmed, the doctor who headed three medical teams that treated Rahman, said Zia’s eldest son was injured 10 to 11 months ago when he was in police custody.

The army-backed government, which came to power in January 2007 after emergency rule was imposed and elections cancelled, has not made any comment on the torture claims.

It has hinted that it would release Rahman and his mother from custody, as it wants to secure participation of Zia’s party in general elections to be held in December.

Source

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Calls to drop ID card plans after prisoner data blunder

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

The Government was under pressure today to abandon its ID card plans after one of the main firms involved in the project lost thousands of criminals’ personal details.

The names, addresses and expected release dates of all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales were on a computer memory stick lost by Home Office external contractor PA Consulting.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the loss was “completely unsatisfactory”, adding that the information should not have been downloaded on to a memory stick.

The lost computer files also contain the names, addresses and dates of birth of 30,000 people with six or more convictions in the last year, as well as the names and dates of birth of 10,000 offenders regarded as prolific and the initials of people on drug treatment programmes.

“This was data that was being held in a secure form, but was downloaded on to a memory stick by an external contractor,” Ms Smith told the BBC.

“It runs against the rules set down both for the holding of government data and set down by the external contractor and certainly set down in the contract that we had with the external contractor.”

PA Consulting had the information as part of research it was carrying out for the Home Office on tracking offenders through the criminal justice system.

But the firm is also heavily involved in the ID card project, having been appointed to work on the design, feasibility testing, business case and procurement elements of the programme.

Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve said: “The public will be alarmed that the Government is happy to entrust their £20 billion ID card project to the firm involved in this fiasco, at a cost of millions of pounds to the UK taxpayer.

“This will destroy any grain of confidence the public still have in this white elephant and reinforce why it could endanger - rather than strengthen - our security.”

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said: “I’m just gobsmacked like everyone else is that the Government can be so systematically incompetent in failing to keep our data safe.

“Frankly the Keystone Cops would do a better job running the Home Office and keeping our data safe than this government, and if this government cannot keep the data of thousands of guilty people safe, why on earth should we give them the data of millions of innocent people in an ID card database?”

Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty, said: “With every new government data bungle, another ounce of public trust ebbs away.

“Ministers continue to make overblown claims for the preposterous ID card scheme - when will they ever learn?

“This is no ordinary scandal, heads need to roll.”

Source

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MI5 report challenges views on terrorism in Britain

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

The Guardian | MI5 has concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in Britain, according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation seen by the Guardian.

The sophisticated analysis, based on hundreds of case studies by the security service, says there is no single pathway to violent extremism.

It concludes that it is not possible to draw up a typical profile of the “British terrorist” as most are “demographically unremarkable” and simply reflect the communities in which they live.

The “restricted” MI5 report takes apart many of the common stereotypes about those involved in British terrorism.

They are mostly British nationals, not illegal immigrants and, far from being Islamist fundamentalists, most are religious novices. Nor, the analysis says, are they “mad and bad”.

Those over 30 are just as likely to have a wife and children as to be loners with no ties, the research shows.

The security service also plays down the importance of radical extremist clerics, saying their influence in radicalising British terrorists has moved into the background in recent years.

The research, carried out by MI5’s behavioural science unit, is based on in-depth case studies on “several hundred individuals known to be involved in, or closely associated with, violent extremist activity” ranging from fundraising to planning suicide bombings in Britain.

The main findings include:

• The majority are British nationals and the remainder, with a few exceptions, are here legally. Around half were born in the UK, with others migrating here later in life. Some of these fled traumatic experiences and oppressive regimes and claimed UK asylum, but more came to Britain to study or for family or economic reasons and became radicalised many years after arriving.

• Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could actually be regarded as religious novices. Very few have been brought up in strongly religious households, and there is a higher than average proportion of converts. Some are involved in drug-taking, drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes. MI5 says there is evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation.

• The “mad and bad” theory to explain why people turn to terrorism does not stand up, with no more evidence of mental illness or pathological personality traits found among British terrorists than is found in the general population.

• British-based terrorists are as ethnically diverse as the UK Muslim population, with individuals from Pakistani, Middle Eastern and Caucasian backgrounds. MI5 says assumptions cannot be made about suspects based on skin colour, ethnic heritage or nationality.

• Most UK terrorists are male, but women also play an important role. Sometimes they are aware of their husbands’, brothers’ or sons’ activities, but do not object or try to stop them.

• While the majority are in their early to mid-20s when they become radicalised, a small but not insignificant minority first become involved in violent extremism at over the age of 30.

• Far from being lone individuals with no ties, the majority of those over 30 have steady relationships, and most have children. MI5 says this challenges the idea that terrorists are young men driven by sexual frustration and lured to “martyrdom” by the promise of beautiful virgins waiting for them in paradise. It is wrong to assume that someone with a wife and children is less likely to commit acts of terrorism.

• Those involved in British terrorism are not unintelligent or gullible, and nor are they more likely to be well-educated; their educational achievement ranges from total lack of qualifications to degree-level education. However, they are almost all employed in low-grade jobs.

The researchers conclude that the results of their work “challenge many of the stereotypes that are held about who becomes a terrorist and why”.

Crucially, the research has revealed that those who become terrorists “are a diverse collection of individuals, fitting no single demographic profile, nor do they all follow a typical pathway to violent extremism”.

The security service believes the terrorist groups operating in Britain today are different in many important respects both from Islamist extremist activity in other parts of the world and from historical terrorist movements such as the IRA or the Red Army Faction.

The “UK restricted” MI5 “operational briefing note”, circulated within the security services in June, warns that, unless they understand the varied backgrounds of those drawn to terrorism in Britain, the security services will fail to counter their activities in the short term and fail to prevent violent radicalisation continuing in the long term.

It also concludes that the research results have important lessons for the government’s programme to tackle the spread of violent extremism, underlining the need for “attractive alternatives” to terrorist involvement but also warning that traditional law enforcement tactics could backfire if handled badly or used against people who are not seen as legitimate targets.

The MI5 authors stress that the most pressing current threat is from Islamist extremist groups who justify the use of violence “in defence of Islam”, but that there are also violent extremists involved in non-Islamist movements.

They say that they are concerned with those who use violence or actively support the use of violence and not those who simply hold politically extreme views.

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Obama - Biden ’08

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

Barack Obama has chosen Joe Biden as his running mate. It’s an interesting choice, given that Obama is running a change campaign and Biden has been a Washington fixture for decades. Also because the two ran against each other in the primary, during which Biden famously had to apologize for unfortunate comments about his rival.

The Obama campaign is likely to exploit Biden’s experience, particularly in the area of foreign affairs. The elder senator has already been an effective advocate for the Democratic nominee, and his plain-spoken (if gaffe-prone) style will surely be useful against John McCain.

Update: Obama’s campaign confirmed his pick early Saturday morning with an image of Biden and Obama on the campaign Web site’s splash page and a request for support and donations.

AP via Google:

Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware is Barack Obama’s pick as vice presidential running mate, The Associated Press has learned.

Biden, 65, is a veteran of more than three decades in the Senate, and one of his party’s leading experts on foreign policy, an area in which polls indicate Obama needs help in his race against Republican rival John McCain.

Read more

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Madrid plane crash: Pilot’s union warned months before that cut-backs placing passengers at risk

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

By Marcus Morgan | After the worst Spanish air tragedy in 25 years on Wednesday, accident investigators have begun examining the wreckage of the plane that crashed at Madrid’s Barajas airport, killing 153 passengers. Just 19 passengers have survived the crash, 5 of whom are said to be in a critical condition, with horrific injuries. The captain and co-pilot are confirmed among the dead.

Flight JK5022 was bound for Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, off the West African coast, and was carrying mostly Spanish and German tourists, as well as nationals from another 10 countries.

Witnesses said the left engine burst into flames seconds after the plane left the ground. It got a short distance into the air before veering suddenly to one side and splitting in half at the end of the runway. The survivors were flung into the air and landed in a nearby stream, which saved them from being burned alive in the huge fireball that erupted.

Dozens of emergency vehicles were prevented from immediately accessing the site because the whole area was in flames. The situation was made worse by the field of dry grass that caught fire.

One emergency services worker said, “It’s the closest thing to Hell I’ve seen. The corpses were boiling, everything was burning. There was nothing left that resembled a plane, it was in pieces. It’s a miracle anyone survived.”

A woman said, “I saw it take off and it climbed to about 200 metres when flames appeared in the engine. It then crashed to the ground and disappeared from view in a hollow past the end of the runway.”

Ligia Palomino, 41, a doctor with Madrid’s ambulance service, was rescued by her own colleagues who wept as they treated her, surrounded by lifeless bodies.

She reported, “The plane left the gate for take-off at 1.20 pm but then the pilot apologised and said he would have to return because of a technical problem.”

“An hour later, we went to take off. I heard a horrible noise and the next thing I remember was being flung from the aircraft. I must have passed out but woke when there was a loud explosion.

“I could hardly move but lifted my head and saw other bodies around me. There was incredible heat and I heard people and children crying for help. I lifted my head and all I saw were scattered bodies.”

Distraught families of the victims have begun the ordeal of identifying burned body parts, which have been taken to a Madrid congress centre. Only 39 of the 153 bodies have been formally identified.

The crash is the deadliest in Spain since 1983, when a Boeing 747 crashed in Madrid, killing 181 people.

The flight operator Spanair said that the plane had been taxiing for take-off when the pilot Antonio Luna reported an air-valve, which regulates pressure in the engine, had overheated. The plane was then diverted to a maintenance shed for about an hour.

Passengers were warned they could have to disembark and change planes, but they were kept onboard, despite reports that some passengers asked to leave the aircraft.

One woman said her husband had been forced to stay on the flight. The unidentified woman told Spanish media that her husband had texted her almost two hours before the incident saying, “My love, there’s a problem with the plane.”

When she suggested he get off, he replied, “They won’t let me off.”

Company technicians turned off the gauge, and the plane was then cleared for take-off. Spanair said this was done in compliance with standard procedure. According to one report, the plane was seen coming out of the maintenance shed just moments before its second attempt.

At this early stage, it is unclear whether the reported defect was a factor in the tragedy. Javier Mendoza, Spanair’s deputy director, declined to comment on whether the problems that led to the initial take-off being aborted could have played a role in the crash.

Javier Fernandez Garcia, the flight coordinator at Barajas airport, told a Spanish newspaper that unspecified problems had kept the aircraft grounded on two previous occasions.

It was also disclosed that a sister plane of the one that crashed in Madrid had to make an emergency landing only a week ago after suffering suspected engine problems. That plane diverted to an airport in Gran Canaria after losing power in mid-air.

Public concern is mounting amid suggestions Spanair opted to fly despite detecting problems. “I’d kill the bastard who did this” was a typical reaction from a driver outside a makeshift morgue.

Amid this growing controversy the official investigation by Spanish authorities has begun. The two black box flight recorders have been recovered, though one is partially damaged. These contain the crucial dialogue between the pilots and air traffic control as well as all the telemetry data of the aircraft instruments. Footage taken by the Spanish civil air authority AENEAS is also being examined.

Chris Yates, aviation analyst for Jane’s Information Group, says it could be some time before definitive answers can be found.

Speaking on the BBC website, he said, “Such engine fires are extremely rare, but when they do occur they are, invariably, the result of some form of mechanical failure.”

Analysing the data and wreckage from the site is a long process, typically taking months to reach a conclusion.

Kieran Daly, the editor of Flight International, said it would be premature to speculate on the cause of the accident, but in the absence of dangerous weather conditions, a likely source of the problem could be inferred.

“Accidents on takeoff are relatively rare,” he said. “The obvious suspicion is some kind of engine problem. The suspicion is that for whatever reason the aircraft had insufficient power to pull away.”

The McDonnell Douglas MD-82, generally considered by industry experts to be a reliable though ageing workhorse, has a very low rate of accidents and incidents. Since coming into service in 1981, the MD-80 series has been involved in 11 serious crashes in a history of 20 million flights, making the plane one of the safest in the sky. It is commonly used on short trips around Europe.

Majorca-based Spanair, which has operated since 1988, is Spain’s second biggest airline. Spanair is owned by parent company Scandinavian Airlines Systems (SAS).

Like many airlines operating on increasingly thin profit margins, Spanair has been struggling with high fuel prices and tough competition during the economic slowdown.

It recently announced it was laying off up to 1,200 staff, more than a quarter of its workforce, and cutting routes after losing US$80 million in the first half of this year.

After a year of failing to attract any acceptable bids, SAS announced it would be forced to keep the subsidiary, which flies 371 daily departures between 36 airports, sending its share price tumbling.

SAS and Spanair executives appeared on national television to deny that safety had been sacrificed in its quest to cut costs, but the evidence produced so far is grounds for serious concern.

Just hours before the crash, Spanair’s pilots threatened to strike over plans by SAS to cut costs. Representatives of the pilots’ union, Sepla, said, “The organised chaos in which the company exists can’t continue.”

The pilots alleged that company bosses were forcing cockpit and maintenance staff to work abusively long hours, in order to compensate for “endemic problems” of organisation and structure.

These claims were backed up by a series of e-mails published by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo and republished in the Times of London on Friday. These revealed how, in the months before the fatal crash, airline workers had repeatedly warned management that passenger safety was being put at risk, and described the airline’s daily operations as a “disaster.”

It quoted from an April 2007 e-mail to Lars Nygaard, then Spanair chief executive, by a union representative. It had warned, “The lack of resources and their quality on the ground, the repeated AOGs [grounded planes] in the fleet, the scarcity of crews and the system of movement of crew members mean that the general feeling is one of operational chaos that places the passengers at risk.”

This was followed one month later by another letter from the union stating, “The operation continues to be a disaster and is getting worse by the day.”

The union also complained that the older planes were not being replaced fast enough. In January, the union wrote, “The MD fleet has not been renewed in favour of A320s in the agreed timeframe.”

It is not known how management responded to the concerns.

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McCain’s Plan to Privatise Veterans’ Health Care

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

(IPS) | If John McCain is elected the next U.S. president, wounded veterans could be in for a world of hurt.

On the campaign trail, the Republican’s presumptive nominee has talked of a new mission for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and argued that veterans with non-combat medical problems should be given vouchers to receive care at private, for-profit hospitals — in other words, an end to the kind of universal health care the government has guaranteed veterans for generations.

“We need to relieve the burden on the VA from routine health care,” McCain told the National Forum on Disability Issues last month. “If you have a routine health care need, take it wherever you want, whatever doctor or health care provider and get the treatment you need, while we at the VA focus our attention, our care, our love, on these grievous wounds of war.”

The Republican senator argues that giving veterans a VA card that they can use at private doctors would shorten the long wait times many veterans face in seeing government doctors, who are nearly universally viewed as among the best in the world.

A recent study by the RAND Corporation found that “VA patients were more likely to receive recommended care” and “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow up” than that delivered by other U.S. health care providers.

Virtually all veterans groups oppose McCain’s plan. The Veterans of Foreign Wars’ national legislative director has said the VA card would “undermine the entire system”.

According to the Centre for Responsive Politics, Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contribution than has Republican John McCain.

This may seem odd to some since McCain is a former naval officer, prisoner of war, and Vietnam War veteran.

However, Paul Sullivan, a Gulf War veteran and executive director of the non-partisan Veterans for Common Sense, says that for McCain, free market ideology is more important than providing care for former soldiers.

“Ideologues like John McCain and George Bush hate the fact that the VA exists,” Sullivan told IPS, noting that the Republican candidate also wants to partially privatise social security and offer private school vouchers to students currently enrolled in public schools.

“They hate the fact that there’s a functional example out there of the government providing better care at a lower cost than the private sector,” Sullivan said. “The problem that the VA faces now is that the Bush administration failed to hire enough doctors and disability claims adjusters when they chose to go to war with Iraq. If these doctors had been hired, the VA would be an example of the government doing good work. Bush and McCain don’t want the public to see that.”

McCain has also never spelled out what he means by a “combat injury”, leading many veterans worried they could be left out in the cold.

“If I’m driving a Humvee in Iraq and a roadside bomb explodes and I veer off the road and crush my arm and end up losing it and needing a prosthetic, is that a combat wound according to Sen. McCain?” asked retired Air Force Colonel Richard Klass, the president of the Council for a Livable World’s VETPAC, which has endorsed Obama.

Official Pentagon policy calls such an incident a non-combat injury. Technically speaking, the only soldiers “wounded” in combat are those hit by direct enemy fire. As of Aug. 5, Department of Defence statistics showed 32,799 U.S. soldiers had been “wounded” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another 10,685 had sustained “non-hostile” injuries which required a medical evacuation, while 29,881 were classified as “ill” enough to be airlifted out of the war-zone.

Veterans are also sceptical of McCain’s plans because as a senator, he has repeatedly voted against fully funding veterans’ health care. In 2005 and 2006, McCain voted against expanding mental health care and readjustment counseling for service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, efforts to expand inpatient and outpatient treatment for injured veterans, and proposals to lower co-payments and enrollment fees veterans must pay to obtain prescription drugs.

McCain’s vote also helped defeat a proposal by Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow that would have made veterans’ health care an entitlement programme like social security, so that medical care would not become a political football to be argued over in Congress each budget cycle.

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) gave him a D+ when they scored his voting record (whereas Obama got a B+). He’s voted with the interests of Disabled American Veterans only 20 percent of the time.

“If McCain would work to properly fund VA care, there would be no issue about a VA card,” said Larry Scott, who edits the website VAWatchdog.org. “McCain, by wanting to give vets private care, is walking away from the VA and ignoring the problem. He is admitting that he will not properly fund the VA to the level where it can care for all qualified vets. ”

Scott is sharply critical of the VA’s often cumbersome and ineffective bureaucracy, but like most veterans’ advocates, believes the VA system needs to be strengthened. He sees McCain’s plan as a way to phase out the government’s commitment to those who’ve served.

“For every vet who would get a VA card, that would be one less vet using the VA,” he wrote in an e-mail to IPS. That “would mean, in a short period of time, a smaller budget, fewer locations…and the eventual dismantling of the best health care system in the country.”

*IPS Correspondent Aaron Glantz is author of the upcoming book “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans”.

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Identity Politics in Climate Change Hell

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

By George Monbiot |

If you want a glimpse of how the movement against climate change could crumble faster than a summer snowflake, read Ewa Jasiewicz’s article, published yesterday on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site(1). It is a fine example of the identity politics that plagued direct action movements during the 1990s, and from which the new generation of activists has so far been mercifully free.

Ewa rightly celebrates the leaderless, autonomous model of organising that has made this movement so effective. The two climate camps I have attended – this year and last – were among the most inspiring events I’ve ever witnessed. I am awed by the people who organised them, who managed to create, under extraordinary pressure, safe, functioning, delightful spaces in which we could debate the issues and plan the actions which thrust Heathrow and Kingsnorth into the public eye. Climate camp is a tribute to the anarchist politics that Jasiewicz supports.

But in seeking to extrapolate from this experience to a wider social plan, she makes two grave errors. The first is to confuse ends and means. She claims to want to stop global warming, but she makes that task 100 times harder by rejecting all state and corporate solutions. It seems to me that what she really wants to do is to create an anarchist utopia, and use climate change as an excuse to engineer it.

Stopping runaway climate change must take precedence over every other aim. Everyone in this movement knows that there is very little time: the window of opportunity in which we can prevent two degrees of warming is closing fast. We have to use all the resources we can lay hands on, and these must include both governments and corporations. Or perhaps she intends to build the installations required to turn the energy economy around – wind farms, wave machines, solar thermal plants in the Sahara, new grid connections and public transport systems – herself?

Her article is a terryifying example of the ability some people have to put politics first and facts second when confronting the greatest challenge humanity now faces. The facts are as follows. Runaway climate change is bearing down on us fast. We require a massive political and economic response to prevent it. Governments and corporations, whether we like it or not, currently control both money and power. Unless we manage to mobilise them, we stand a snowball’s chance in climate hell of stopping the collapse of the biosphere. Jasiewicz would ignore all these inconvenient truths because they conflict with her politics.

“Changing our sources of energy without changing our sources of economic and political power”, she asserts, “will not make a difference. Neither coal nor nuclear are the “solution”, we need a revolution.” So before we are allowed to begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions, we must first overthrow all political structures and replace them with autonomous communities of happy campers. All this must take place within a couple of months, as there is so little time in which we could prevent two degrees of warming. This is magical thinking of the most desperate kind. If I were an executive of E.On or Exxon, I would be delighted by this political posturing, as it provides a marvellous distraction from our real aims.

To support her argument, Jasiewicz misrepresents what I said at climate camp. She claims that I “confessed not knowing where to turn next to solve the issues of how to generate the changes necessary to shift our sources of energy, production and consumption”. I confessed nothing of the kind. In my book Heat I spell out what is required to bring about a 90% cut in emissions by 2030. Instead I confessed that I don’t know how to solve the problem of capitalism without resorting to totalitarianism.

The issue is that capitalism involves lending money at interest. If you lend at 5%, then one of two things must happen. Either the money supply must increase by 5% or the velocity of circulation must increase by 5%. In either case, if this growth is not met by a concomitant increase in the supply of goods and services, it becomes inflationary and the system collapses. But a perpetual increase in the supply of goods and services will eventually destroy the biosphere. So how do we stall this process? Even when usurers were put to death and condemned to perpetual damnation, the practice couldn’t be stamped out. Only the communist states managed it, through the extreme use of the state control Ewa professes to hate. I don’t yet have an answer to this conundrum. Does she?

Yes, let us fight both corporate power and the undemocratic tendencies of the state. Yes, let us try to crack the problem of capitalism and then fight for a different system. But let us not confuse this task with the immediate need to stop two degrees of warming, or allow it to interfere with the carbon cuts that have to begin now.

Ewa’s second grave error is to imagine that society could be turned into a giant climate camp. Anarchism is a great means of organising a self-elected community of like-minded people. It is a disastrous means of organising a planet. Most anarchists envisage their system as the means by which the oppressed can free themselves from persecution. But if everyone is to be free from the coercive power of the state, this must apply to the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The richest and most powerful communities on earth – be they geographical communities or communities of interest – will be as unrestrained by external forces as the poorest and weakest. As a friend of mine put it, “when the anarchist utopia arrives, the first thing that will happen is that every Daily Mail reader in the country will pick up a gun and go and kill the nearest hippy.”

This is why, though both sides furiously deny it, the outcome of both market fundamentalism and anarchism, if applied universally, is identical. The anarchists associate with the oppressed, the market fundamentalists with the oppressors. But by eliminating the state, both remove such restraints as prevent the strong from crushing the weak. Ours is not a choice between government and no government. It is a choice between government and the mafia.

Over the past year I have been working with groups of climate protesters who have changed my view of what could be achieved. Most of them are under 30, and they bring to this issue a clear-headedness and pragmatism that I have never encountered in direct action movements before. They are prepared to take extraordinary risks to try to defend the biosphere from the corporations, governments and social trends which threaten to make it uninhabitable. They do so for one reason only: that they love the world and fear for its future. It would be a tragedy if, through the efforts of people like Ewa, they were to be diverted from this urgent task into the identity politics that have wrecked so many movements.

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Pentagon’s intelligence arm steps up lie detecting

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

The Pentagon’s intelligence arm is adding more polygraph studios and relying on outside contractors for the first time to conduct lie detection tests in an attempt to screen its 5,700 prospective and current employees every year.

The stepped-up effort by the Defense Intelligence Agency is part of a growing emphasis on counterintelligence, detecting and thwarting would-be spies and keeping sensitive information away from America’s enemies.

A polygraph is not foolproof as a screening tool. The test gives a high rate of false positives on innocent people, and guilty subjects can be trained to beat the system, according to expert Charles Honts, a psychology professor at Boise State University.

The National Research Council noted these deficiencies in a 2003 report. The council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lie detectors can be useful for ferreting out the truth in specific incidents, but are unreliable for screening prospective national security employees for trustworthiness.

“Its accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies,” the council concluded. “Polygraph testing as currently used has extremely serious limitations in such screening applications, if the intent is both to identify security risks and protect valued employees.”

John Sullivan, a polygrapher with the CIA for 31 years, noted that turncoat Aldrich Ames, a CIA mole for the Soviets, beat a polygraph test twice.

But the prospect of facing a polygraph can deter future security violations, according to the council’s report. That prospect also increases the frequency of admission of violations — taking home classified documents, for example — and discourages people who may be security risks from applying.

“Right now the polygraph is the best tool they have at their hands but it’s not a tool that’s without problems,” Honts said.

The increase in lie detection at the DIA is three years in the making. In 2005 the agency’s director announced plans to test every prospective new DIA hire, whether a permanent federal worker or contract employee.

The DIA would not say how many prospective, current and past employees are screened annually, but a 2002 report to Congress said the agency conducted 1,345 counterintelligence polygraphs. It also said the Defense Department had an average of about 160 government polygraphers on its payroll annually for the last decade. The Pentagon’s polygraphing institute trains all polygraphers for the government. It produced 84 new examiners in 2002, according to the latest publicly available statistics.

Until 2004, Congress severely limited the Pentagon’s authority to conduct polygraphs for counterintelligence purposes. From 1988 to 1990, it could conduct 10,000 a year. From 1990 to 2004, that number was cut to 5,000. Congress lifted that cap in 2004 at the request of the Defense Department.

Polygraph sessions are typically three- to four-hour interrogations. A person is hooked up to a machine that measures physiological responses. The subject is asked a series of “yes” and “no” questions. The machine records changes in blood pressure, respiration and heart rate and electrical activity in the skin. The polygrapher interprets that data to determine whether the answers show inconsistencies or indicate deception, based on established parameters

An unclassified DIA document describing the new effort says the contractor hired to perform the exams will conduct a minimum of 4,550 a year in 13 new polygraph studios. The polygraphers would have to work at a brisk pace to meet the target: Each studio would need to complete 350 sessions a year to meet contract specifications. Those 13 new studios would be added to the eight now manned by DIA polygraphers. All would be overseen by DIA personnel.

The document says that the agency will, for the first time, hire contractors to administer the tests rather than relying on government polygraphers.

Mark Zaid is a lawyer who represents federal employees in lawsuits against the government, many involving disputed polygraphs. He said the government’s reliance on lie detection tools is an easy way around the more reliable, but more time-consuming, security background investigations. There is a massive backlog for these.

“It’s a cheap fix to a broken system,” Zaid said.

The problem, Zaid said, is that there is no process for government employees to challenge a polygrapher’s interpretation of a test. “They get labeled a liar, and that’s it,” Zaid said.

AP

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