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Sri Lankan Humanitarian Crisis Deserves Attention

Friday, April 24th, 2009

The United States is finally paying attention to the massive humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka.

The civil war that has raged for a quarter-century and has claimed more than 70,000 lives in this South Asian island country may be entering its death throes. But the final stage of this bloody, vicious conflict is claiming a massive toll.

Both the sides in the war have again and again displayed a callous disregard for human lives and suffering.

The Tamil Tiger rebels—which claim to represent the interests of the Sri Lankan Tamil minority—are among the most dreaded terrorist organizations in the world. They have perfected the art of suicide bombings (successfully killing a Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, in 1993), and Al Qaeda is said to have studied their methods.

But successive Sri Lankan governments are also to blame for the war and the current catastrophe. Sri Lankan leaders practiced from the onset of independence in 1948 the most cynical brand of politics, favoring the Sinhalese Buddhist majority at the expense of the Tamil minority. The current regime of President Mahinda Rajapaksa is even more hardline, and has decided to fight the war to the ultimate end to drive the rebels out of their base in Northern Sri Lanka, regardless of the consequences.

“Tens of thousands of civilians were trapped in a situation the International Committee of the Red Cross called ‘nothing short of catastrophic,’ ” the New York Times recently reported. “The Red Cross said in a statement that hundreds of people had been killed or wounded in the fighting. At least 4,500 have been killed since mid-January, a senior United Nations official said.”

The Obama administration has condemned the Sri Lankan government for its callous attitude toward the civilians.

“I think that the Sri Lankan government knows that the entire world is very disappointed that in its efforts to end what it sees as twenty-five years of conflict, it is causing such untold suffering,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an astonishingly frank statement.

In the past, the United States has enjoyed good relations with the Sri Lankan government. The Tamil Tigers are on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, and Washington has provided some military training and aid to Sri Lanka, downplaying in the process human rights abuses by Sri Lankan security forces. But in recent months, as the contours of the human disaster caused by the government’s final offensive have become clearer, U.S. criticism has grown louder, along with human rights groups and many others in the international community.

Certainly, the Tamil Tigers bear a good share of the responsibility, too. They have been holding many civilians hostage to use them as human shields. U.N. appeals to the government to allow aid to the trapped civilians have been coupled with pleas to the rebels to lay down their arms (who are aiming for a cease-fire instead). So far, neither side has listened.

The real tragedy here is that even with the cessation of conventional hostilities, the violence will probably not end. The Tigers will reconfigure themselves and retreat to jungles to compensate for their loss of territory.

In a superb recent cover package in Himal magazine, the one publication that covers South Asia as a region, various analysts conclude that the defeat of the Tamil Tigers will be meaningless unless the government takes concrete steps to tackle the alienation and suffering of the Tamil minority.

“Today, most reasonable people in Sri Lanka would agree that the Tigers and the war with them arose as a consequence of a long-unresolved ethnic conflict,” writes activist and intellectual Jehan Perera. “As such, the Tigers are clearly but a symptom of a deeper problem. … Eliminating the Tigers will not terminate the ethnic conflict.”

But the rule of President Rajapaksa and his coterie (which includes two of his brothers!) has been thuggish and intolerant, and it is too much to expect him to be charitable in victory. January alone saw the ransacking of an MTV station and the assassination of a top editor, Lasantha Wickrematunga, whom the president had earlier called a “terrorist journalist.” Indeed, the situation for independent-minded media in the country is so precarious that a contributor to Himal, writing about human rights in Sri Lanka, preferred to remain anonymous.

The agony isn’t over for the people of this beautiful island nation.

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Obama, Top Officials Unite Against Torture Probe

Friday, April 24th, 2009

By by Jason Ditz |

Top officials from both parties have spoken out against the notion of an independent probe into the Bush-era policies which led to the repeated torture of detainees, making the chances of such a body being established extremely unlikely.

Shortly after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid criticized calls for an independent probe until at least the end of the year, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the growing furore over the past few days “might well be evidence of why something like this would likely just become a political back and forth.” President Obama has taken the evidence of widespread CIA torture under his predecessor extremely likely, calling it merely a potential “mistake” and saying “that’s how we learn.”

Top Republicans were at least as adamant against the potential probe as their Democratic counterparts. House minority leader John Boehner said he couldn’t imagine “what we’re going to learn that congressional leaders didn’t already know,” while top Senator Kit Bond criticized the administration for pointing out the previous administration’s torture without producing evidence he claimed proved the value of policy.

The policy, which began in 2002, sought to produce evidence of a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq which would be used as a pretext for war. Though no such evidence was ever found, the policy continued long after the US decided to invade Iraq in early 2003. Then-Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld were said to be at the center of the policy, though former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was the National Security Adviser at the time, was also among its early supporters.

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Muslims in fear of police terror

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Muslim leaders in Lancashire said on Thursday that the arrest, detention and subsequent release without charge of 12 people in police raids has created huge anxiety among the local community.

Hundreds of armed police raided addresses in Manchester, Liverpool and Lancashire during the operation, dragging the suspects from their homes and classrooms at gunpoint.

Images of the suspects being pinned to the ground with machine guns pointed to their head were beamed around the world.

In the immediate aftermath, the government commended the police on their prompt action in foiling a potentially imminent terrorist attack on British soil. Two weeks later, all 11 suspects plus a twelfth man - a British national - were released without charge. The 11 Pakistanis now face deportation.

Mr Abdul Hamed Kureshi of Lancashire Council of Mosques said: “Historically, arrests of Muslims are very high profile, it creates a lot of anxiety and there is a negative impact on community relations.

“If these people are arrested, as in this case, on what appears to be very poor intelligence, what effect will it have on their lives?

“If they are innocent they should be released.

“We have called on the authorities to be balanced and offered our support but whenever we tried to raise these issues we hardly get any response at all.

“We have been told nothing about why these arrests took place. We have excellent relations with Lancashire Constabulary but these arrests were carried out by different forces with little knowledge of the community in a negative and ruthless manner.”

Mr Mohammed Ayub of Chambers Solicitors in Bradford, which represented three of the men, said his clients had been through hell and vowed to fight the extradition proceedings.

He said: “My clients were locked in their cells 24 hours a day with only limited chance to exercise.

“They faced uncertainty and confusion and frequent questioning. It was near enough hell, especially when you are innocent. They are now ambivalent about their situation.

“They are extremely relieved that the police investigation is at an end but, at the same time, they are facing an unclear future in a detention centre waiting for possible deportation.

“These men were conducting lawful pursuit of studying in the UK and they have no criminal history.

“If the police have got it wrong they should hold their hands up and say so. You have to bear in mind that the police have acknowledged there is insufficient evidence to charge my clients with any of the 50 or so terror-related offences.”

Terror watchdog Lord Carlile has announced he is to conduct an inquiry into the raids but has declined to say whether the findings will be made public.

The Star contacted the Home Office for comment but received no new statement other than the official line that it is “seeking to remove these individuals on grounds of national security.”

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Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Friday, April 24th, 2009

By MARJORIE COHN |

When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zabaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks that I didn’t believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury’s 2005 memos asserted that “enhanced techniques” on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003. That link was never established.

President Obama released the four memos in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. They describe unimaginably brutal techniques and provide “legal” justification for clearly illegal acts of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In the face of monumental pressure from the CIA to keep them secret, Obama demonstrated great courage in deciding to make the grotesque memos public. At the same time, however, in an attempt to pacify the intelligence establishment, Obama said, “it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

In startlingly clinical and dispassionate terms, the authors of the newly-released torture memos describe and then rationalize why the devastating techniques the CIA sought to employ on human beings do not violate the Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. sec. 2340).

The memos justify 10 techniques, including banging heads into walls 30 times in a row, prolonged nudity, repeated slapping, dietary manipulation, and dousing with cold water as low as 41 degrees. They allow shackling in a standing position for 180 hours, sleep deprivation for 11 days, confinement of people in small dark boxes with insects for hours, and waterboarding to create the perception they are drowning. Moreover, the memos permit many of these techniques to be used in combination for a 30-day period. They find that none of these techniques constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Waterboarding, admittedly the most serious of the methods, is designed, according to Jay Bybee, to induce the perception of “suffocation and incipient panic, i.e. the perception of drowning.” But although Bybee finds that “the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death,” he accepts the CIA’s claim that it does “not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard.” One of Bradbury’s memos requires that a physician be on duty during waterboarding to perform a tracheotomy in case the victim doesn’t recover after being returned to an upright position.

As psychologist Jeffrey Kaye points out, the CIA and the Justice Department “ignored a wealth of other published information” that indicates dissociative symptoms, changes greater than those in patients undergoing heart surgery, and drops in testosterone to castration levels after acute stress associated with techniques that the memos sanction.

The Torture Statute punishes conduct, or conspiracy to engage in conduct, specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. “Severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from either the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering, or from the threat of imminent death.

Bybee asserts that “if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent.” He makes the novel claim that the presence of personnel with medical training who can stop the interrogation if medically necessary “indicates that it is not your intent to cause severe physical pain.”

Now a federal judge with lifetime appointment, Bybee concludes that waterboarding does not constitute torture under the Torture Statute. However, he writes, “we cannot predict with confidence whether a court would agree with this conclusion.”

Bybee’s memo explains why the 10 techniques could be used on Abu Zubaydah, who was considered to be a top Al Qaeda operative. “Zubaydah does not have any pre-existing mental conditions or problems that would make him likely to suffer prolonged mental harm from [the CIA’s] proposed interrogation methods,” the CIA told Bybee. But Zubaydah was a low-ranking Al Qaeda operative, according to leading FBI counter-terrorism expert Dan Coleman, who advised a top FBI official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.” This was reported by Ron Suskind in his book, The One Percent Doctrine.

The CIA’s request to confine Zubaydah in a cramped box with an insect was granted by Bybee, who told the CIA it could place a harmless insect in the box and tell Zubaydah that it will sting him but it won’t kill him. Even though the CIA knew that Zubaydah had an irrational fear of insects, Bybee found there would be no threat of severe physical pain or suffering if it followed this procedure.

Obama’s intent to immunize those who violated our laws banning torture and cruel treatment violates the President’s constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

U.S. law prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and requires that those who subject people to such treatment be prosecuted. The Convention against Torture compels us to refer all torture cases for prosecution or extradite the suspect to a country that will undertake a criminal investigation.

Obama has made a political calculation to seek amnesty for the CIA torturers. However, good faith reliance on superior orders was rejected as a defense at Nuremberg and in Lt. Calley’s Vietnam-era trial for the My Lai Massacre. The Torture Convention provides unequivocally, “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification for torture.”

There is evidence that the CIA was using the illegal techniques as early as April 2002, three to four months before the August memo was written. That would eliminate “good faith” reliance on Justice Department advice as a “defense” to prosecution.

The Senate IntelligenceCommittee revealed that Condoleezza Rice approved waterboarding in July 17, 2002 “subject to a determination of legality by the OLC.” She got it two weeks later from Bybee and John Yoo. Rice, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet reassured the CIA in spring 2003 that the abusive methods were legal.

Obama told AP’s Jennifer Loven in the Oval Office: “With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don’t want to prejudge that.” If Holder continues to carry out Obama’s political agenda by resisting investigations and prosecution, Congress can, and should, authorize the appointment of a special independent prosecutor to do what the law requires.

The President must fulfill his constitutional duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed. Obama said that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” He is wrong. There is more to gain from upholding the rule of law. It will make future leaders think twice before they authorize the cruel, illegal treatment of other human beings.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of Cowboy Republic. and co-author of the new book, Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com.

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Street View nod prompts call for privacy watchdog reform

Friday, April 24th, 2009

By Chris Williams |

Frustrated by years of alleged intransigence in dealing with complaints about privacy-infringing new technologies, activists have called for politicians to investigate and reform the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

London-based pressure group Privacy International (PI) said the ICO’s response this week to complaints about Google Street View was the final straw.

Giving Street View the all-clear under the Data Protection Act, the regulator said yesterday: “In a world where many people tweet, Facebook and blog it is important to take a common sense approach towards Street View and the relatively limited privacy intrusion it may cause.”

PI sharply criticised the decision, claiming it showed it had become “official policy” at the ICO not to stand in the way of business interests. The group wanted Street View to be suspended while the questions over its legal status and the effectiveness of its face-blurring technology were answered.

“The gloves are now off,” said PI director Simon Davies. “After ten years of failed complaints and undermining by that office of the core data protection principles, we have decided that there is no further point in trying to educate the officials there.”

Over the years the group has written to the ICO about the National DNA Database, fingerprinting in schools and automated number plate recognition. All its complaints have been overruled or shelved.

“We fear that the Commissioner is content to uphold fringe cases of occasional security abuses while allowing new technologies and technologies to cut a vast swathe through privacy,” PI said.

PI is not alone in believing the ICO has failed in its duties. The regulator’s decision last year not to take any action over BT and Phorm’s secret trials of internet interception and profiling systems this month prompted the European Commission to initiate legal proceedings against the UK government. Brussels said the trials were a breach of the ePrivacy Directive, which the ICO is responsible for enforcing.

PI said the regulator lacks the technological expertise to understand the impact of new technologies. It called for an independent advisory board to be urgently established.

Davies said: “The Information Commissioner has clearly decided that pragmatism and commercial interest should triumph over principle. This is a dangerous trend and one that is clearly responsible for Britain’s appalling surveillance culture.”

The group is now taking advice from MPs and peers on what Parliamentary process could be used to reform the ICO. ®

Update

The ICO sent this response:

The ICO is independent of government, pressure groups and the public and private sectors. We are a balanced and robust organisation that takes a risk based approach to regulation in line with best regulatory practice.The ICO has led the debate on the surveillance society, cautioned consumers about the value of personal information and is a strong consistent voice on issues such as data security and the growth in government databases.

The ICO has successfully intervened to prevent proposed fingerprinting at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and issued clear advice on the use of surveillance technology in schools.

We are responsible for enforcing the DPA and FOIA and it is important to recognise that sometimes wider civil liberties and privacy issues are not covered by Data Protection law. We understand that putting images on Google Streetview causes Privacy International concern, but our job is to enforce the law and we are very clear that Google is not breaching the Data Protection Act.

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Rights group: Pentagon to release new prisoner abuse photos

Friday, April 24th, 2009

WASHINGTON, April 24 (Xinhua) — The Pentagon will release “a substantial number” of new photos that show abuse of prisoners at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, a civil rights group said Friday.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a statement that the release, expected on May 28, will be in response to an open-records lawsuit filed by the group.

The photos to be released were taken at facilities other than the infamous Abu Ghraib prison of Iraq.

”These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib,” said Amrit Singh, an ACLU attorney. The photos are to be released by May 28, the ACLU said.

The Pentagon has confirmed that it would release the photos.

The lawsuit was filed in 2004 after the former Bush administration denied a 2003 open-records request by the ACLU.

The 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled last year that the photos should be released.

The Pentagon said it will not appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court and will release the photos.

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Paying billions for our database state

Friday, April 24th, 2009

It is cost rather than privacy concerns that will save us from Labour’s megalomaniac surveillance schemes – a point underlined this morning when David Cameron was interviewed on the Today programme. With the vast choice of public expenditure open to him, he would single out only the identity card scheme and the children’s database ContactPoint as definite targets for immediate cuts.

There are many more savings to be made. Earlier this year, I and a couple of researchers started to calculate the costs of the database state and came up with a total of about £35bn from published figures. The Rowntree Trust followed with a report that claimed that £16bn was spent each year on IT schemes and that spending plans over the next five years amounted to £100bn.

So we are talking very big figures indeed, although no one really knows how much the surveillance state will cost. When you confront civil servants like Sir David Varney who is in charge of the transformational government project, which will make all information about individuals available to all departments and agencies, they say that the savings will pay for the scheme.

But recent investigations by the Times and Computer Weekly showed that the overrun on large-scale IT projects totals £18.6bn. For instance, the cost of the NHS Spine – a controversial plan to computerise all patients’ records – has risen from £2.3bn in three years to £12.7bn, and the system still is not working.

Here are some figures:

ContactPoint

The projected cost of the database, which will contain the personal details of every child of school age in the UK, is £224m with operating costs of £41m per annum over 10 years. The total cost of ContactPoint is £634m.

ID Cards and national identity register

A report in June 2005 from the London School of Economics predicted that the ID card scheme would cost in total between £10.6bn and £19.2bn over 10 years. The original Home Office estimate was £3.1bn. The official figure was revised up and down to £5.4bn and £4.5bn. The difficulty with the ID card scheme is working what the Home Office has passed on to other ministries and what costs it is hiding. Most estimates outside the government believe the final bill to be somewhere between £10bn and £11bn.

e-Borders

The e-Borders scheme will monitor everyone crossing UK borders. Those leaving the country will be expected to supply up to 53 pieces of information to the government. The estimated cost over the next decade is £1.2bn. Costs to the UK travel industry for the same period, which are expected to be passed onto the travelling public, are £360m. Therefore costs to the taxpayer and indirectly to the public equal about £1.5bn. Again this is unlikely to be the final story, especially when you consider that £650m alone was earmarked for the Raytheon Systems over the next 10 years. As yet there is no publicised estimate for the spy centre at Wythenshawe, which will track all our movements. Known costs are about £1.5bn.

Interception modernisation programme

Proposed in the communications data bill, the IMP will store data from every text, phone call, email and internet connection. The costs of the data silo are estimated at £12bn, although the Home Office has suggested it might be run in the private sector. Experience suggests this is unlikely to cut costs and that the security of the system would be compromised. Estimated cost: £12bn.

Automatic number recognition camera network

This system tracks, records and stores the details of all journeys undertaken on major roads and through city centres. The information is stored for five years. In 2007 this was said to have costs £32.5bn in funding with a further £10m since then; a total of £2m per annum is spent. The final bill over five years is £52m.

NHS spine

This is a computerised system linking health records. Estimated cost: £12.2bn.

Some important points: first, a lot of this money is being spent with foreign systems companies; second, the government has never produced a global figure for the surveillance state; third, there are no estimates of the vast amounts of money being wasted locally, for instance on CCTV schemes, which are held by police officers and the House of Lords to have little effect on crime reduction.

If people with knowledge of the economics of surveillance are reading this, they may like to help to refine the bill.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/apr/24/database-state-surveillance

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