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CIA torture report delayed again

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

The US Justice Department is again delaying the release of an internal CIA report on the agency’s secret detention and interrogation program during the Bush administration.

The report had been expected to be made public two weeks ago but was held back over debates about how much of it should be censored. The government published a version of the report in 2008, but its contents were almost entirely blacked out.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Wednesday that the report, expected to be made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, may not be released this week.

The report was written in 2004 by the CIA’s inspector general.

The review questioned the effectiveness of harsh interrogation methods employed by CIA interrogators, such as waterboarding.

That is according to references to the report contained in Bush-era Justice Department memos that were declassified earlier this year.

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MoD faces Afghan civilian death pay-outs

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

The Ministry of Defence has paid out, or is considering, compensation in relation to at least 104 civilian deaths allegedly caused by the British Army in Afghanistan over the last 18 months, it has been revealed.

And compensation claims have been rejected in a further 113 cases in Helmand province, where UK forces are leading the fight against the Taliban.

The figures covering December 2007 to May 2009 are revealed in documents released by the MoD in response to a Freedom of Information request by Channel 4 News.

The documents show that payouts in cases involving fatalities over the period total around 200,000 US dollars (£120,000), and range from 210 dollars for the death of a woman to 39,792 dollars for an incident involving “multiple fatalities, injuries and property” in Lashkar Gah province in October last year.

In Musa Qaleh, in summer 2007, an incident allegedly involving the deaths of five adults and 15 children resulted in a claim for over 100,000 dollars, which was rejected. The following year, the deaths of two children in the same town resulted in a payout of 10,000.

In a statement, the Ministry of Defence said: “Compensation claims brought against British forces working as part of the International Security Assistance Force are considered on the basis of whether the MoD has a legal liability to pay compensation. Where there is a proven legal liability compensation is paid.

“Despite every effort to target only insurgents, there are times when the ordinary people of Afghanistan are inadvertently harmed.

“We are deeply saddened by any civilian deaths and we particularly regret incidents where civilians are harmed as a result of actions by international forces. Even one death is one too many.”

Defence minister Bill Rammell rejected suggestions that the figures revealed only the tip of a much larger iceberg.

Mr Rammell told Channel 4: “We are engaged in a hearts and minds exercise. Wanting to do everything we can to avoid civilian casualties is not only a moral view, but a practical and political view. If we want to take people with us, we need to ensure we are doing that.”

He added: “We go out of our way to advertise the opportunities for compensation.

“I hugely regret any civilian casualties, but we are engaged in an increasingly difficult battle with the Taliban. We are there under a United Nations mandate as part of a coalition of 41 countries.

“We are actually there with the support of the Afghan Government and its people. The last independent opinion poll I saw still showed a large majority of ordinary Afghanis saying that they wanted the international presence there, because they are terrified out of their wits about what the Taliban would do to them.”

Andrew Woodcock, Press Association

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The UK DNA database needs proper scrutiny

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Last December the European Court of Human Rights decided in S and Marper v The United Kingdom that the retention by the State of DNA profiles is a breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. That is because information about people arrested for, or charged with, an offence but not subsequently convicted, is kept on the national DNA database for an unlimited period of time. The Government has accepted the judgment of the European court and announced that it will change the law to ensure compliance. But its proposed method of doing so is unsatisfactory and needs reconsideration.

The Government published a consultation paper on May 7 suggesting that the DNA profiles of people charged but not convicted should in future be kept for six or twelve years, depending on the seriousness of the alleged offence. The consultation period runs until August 7. The Government has rightly emphasised that this is a context, like so many others under the convention, where it is necessary to strike a balance between the rights of the individual and the protection of the public. The right to privacy may make it more difficult to detect dangerous criminals. There will inevitably be disagreements about where the balance lies, having regard to the point made by the House of Lords Constitution Committee that DNA profiles provide the State with large amounts of personal information about citizens that could, in the future, be used for malign purposes.

The immediate problem is that Clause 96 of the Policing and Crime Bill contains a provision that would confer power on the secretary of state to make regulations governing the retention, use and destruction of DNA and other material, such as fingerprints. If ministers are given a power to regulate these matters by secondary legislation, there would be a much reduced opportunity for parliamentary debate and scrutiny. There would be a short debate, after which the regulations could either be approved or rejected. It would not be possible for members of Parliament to table amendments for discussion and for such amendments to be put to a vote.

The committee stage of the Policing and Crime Bill began in the House of Lords last week. When peers debate whether the DNA database is a matter that ministers should be able to regulate by secondary legislation, they will wish to bear in mind that there are three particular aspects of the Government’s substantive proposals as set out in the consultation paper that will need the most careful debate.

The first is that the Government now suggests that the State should retain for up to six years the DNA profiles of adults who were arrested for, but not convicted of, an offence that was not serious or violent or terrorist-related. In Scotland there is no power to retain DNA material when a person is arrested but not convicted unless the offence is a serious one. The consultation paper does not refer to any evidence that this has caused any detriment to the fight against serious crime in Scotland.

The second matter of concern is that the Government proposes a 12-year period for retention of the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted in relation to serious, violent, or terrorist offences. That is much longer than the three-year period (and a possible two-year extension if a sheriff consents) that is authorised in Scotland. The evidence presented in the consultation paper to justify a period as long as 12 years is weak. Again, Parliament will need to debate this.

The third point is that the consultation paper proposes that in exceptional circumstances the DNA profile could be destroyed before the expiry of the six or twelve years period, on application to a chief constable, for example in cases of mistaken identity. Parliament should have the opportunity to debate whether there should be a right of appeal to an independent judicial body for deletion of the DNA profile.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights understandably concluded in a report published in April that it was “alarmed” that the substance of the Government’s proposals would not be contained in primary legislation and so subject to full parliamentary scrutiny. The joint committee “strongly urged” the Government to reconsider. The House of Lords Constitution Committee has also reached the similar conclusion that Clause 96 is unacceptable because unamendable delegated legislation will not provide a sufficient opportunity for parliamentary oversight and control. The Government should think again.

The author is a practising barrister at Blackstone Chambers in the Temple, a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a crossbench peer in the House of Lords

David Pannick, QC

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Israel’s war crimes not “collateral damage”

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Israel sought to defend itself Thursday against the latest accusations by a major international organization that it committed war crimes against people in Gaza, claiming that the Islamist group Hamas manipulated the group responsible for the most recent report.

Amnesty’s report

The London-based Amnesty International accused Israel forces of war crimes, including using children as human shield and launching wanton attacks against civilians during its 22- day offensive in Gaza

The 117-page report on Operation Cast Lead came on the heels of reports by the International Committee for the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch that similarly found evidence Israel committed war crimes in Gaza.

“The death of so many children and other civilians cannot be dismissed simply as ’collateral damage’ as argued by Israel,” said Donatella Rovera, head of a field research mission in Gaza and Southern Israel during and after the attacks.

The Israel Defense Force (IDF) refuted the accusations and claimed Amnesty had succumbed to the “manipulations of the Hamas terror organization.”

The IDF said Amnesty’s report was “unbalanced,” because it “focuses so intently on any and all IDF infractions, and ignores the blatant violations of international law perpetrated by Hamas.”

“The Amnesty report ignores a critical aspect of Operation Cast Lead - Hamas consistently, deliberately and routinely violated International Law, specifically the prohibition against the use of human shields,” the Israeli statement insisted.

Israel said its forces “operated throughout the fighting in accordance with international law, maintaining high ethical and professional standards” except in certain cases that said were “unavoidable during combat.”

Though the human rights group stated it could not find evidence of Hamas using civilians as human shields, it held Hamas and other Palestinian armed organizations responsible for war crimes as well and urged them to stop all rocket attacks on Israel civilian centers.

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Big brother is watching

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

The furore around the Chinese government’s Green Dam software has raised the issue of the way modern technology is used to monitor our daily lives. Here, we list seven of the technologies that can be used to keep track of your movements.

CCTV

Closed-circuit television cameras were first used in Germany in 1942 to remotely monitor the launch of V2 rockets. Since then, CCTVs have become one of the most contentious pieces of technology in public use. The government and law enforcement agencies claim the use of video monitoring technology can help reduce crime and improve public safety; critics argue that the cameras serve only to displace crime to unmonitored areas, and do not act as a deterrent. With more than four million CCTV units in the UK, the network of cameras captures the average person around 25 times a day.

RFID tags

Radio frequency identification chips are already widely used in supermarkets and shops for the purpose of stock control, but some people fear their use could be widened to monitor the habits and behaviour of ordinary citizens. At the moment, these tags, which are little bigger than a grain of sand, are embedded into pints of milk and library books. When paired with an RFID reader, the tags can help to provide detailed information about items, such as their location, or how many there are. Although most people are happy for RFID tags to be used in stores to monitor stock levels, they’re less happy about the idea of the chips still sending out a signal once they leave the shop. On a benign level, such tracking capabilities would mean a store would know that people in Hertfordshire prefer blue cashmere jumpers, while those in Aberdeen favour the brown versions. But on a more sinister level, it could also enable them to glean an unprecedented insight into our personal lives, and target their brands to us accordingly. To those people who fear a “surveillance culture”, the ability to tag and track everything from our food to our clothes would be the next step on an already slippery slope.

Telecoms technology

The recent election protests in Iran have raised some interesting questions about the technology used by the country’s government to not only censor and control the spread of information, but monitor the ways in which citizens have been communicating and mobilising. It now appears that some of the technology the Iranian authorities have been using to listen in on phone calls made on fixed-line phones and mobile handsets was sold to the government by Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between the Finnish phone maker and the German technology giant. Nokia Siemens said it believed the product was being used by the government to monitor calls, but some experts have speculated that it could also be used for a practice known as “deep packet inspection” – a process that enables agencies to block communications, as well as monitor the nature of conversations and even covertly alter this for the purpose of propaganda and disinformation. Nokia Siemens, rocked by this association with a repressive regime, have pointed out that Iran is not the only country using its monitoring technology – many Western governments, including the UK and US, apparently use it for “lawful intercepts”…

Email monitoring software

Who is reading your emails? Chances are, if you work for a big company, your boss could be keeping an eye on how many messages you send in the course of a day. According to recent research by Forrester, 44 per cent of companies read outgoing mail, using a combination of digital scanning software and real people. The primary concern for businesses appears to be the dissemination of inappropriate or commercially sensitive information rather than time-wasting, but with more and more distractions available at our office computers, from Facebook and Twitter to online shopping, many more businesses may decide to start monitoring just how their employees spend their work time.

Information-gathering technology

Gunwharf Quays shopping centre in Portsmouth shot to fame last year when it was revealed that surveillance software was monitoring the signals given off by shoppers’ mobile phones to track their movements. The technology allowed researchers to tell when someone entered the shopping centre, what stores they visited, how long they spent in each one, and what time they left. It could even tell what route they took, and the country they were visiting from. Although all monitoring is anonymous – it does not identify the owner of the phone, rather than handset’s unique IMEI network number – it raised some concerns from privacy campaigners. While, at its most innocuous, this sort of information could help business and shopping centres pinpoint areas of high footfall or congestion, and redesign the space accordingly, or spot a surge in late shoppers that could prompt them to extend store opening hours, it also implies that this technology could be extended to minutely measure purchasing habits and retail behaviour. Perhaps that scene from Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise is bombarded by tailored, personalised advertising as he passes every hording, is not too far away.

Targeted advertising

One of the most contentious issues facing businesses and consumers at the moment is targeted advertising. With companies struggling to find a profitable business model in the digital age, a greater premium is being placed on targeting products, services and content directly to people on the basis of their specific likes, dislikes and needs. Phorm’s Webwise technology is a good example of this new way of thinking – it works by scanning users’ browsing history, and matching keywords found in these websites to targeted adverts, provided by other companies, which match the interests of web users. Phorm has stressed that the entire process is anonymised, so that interests cannot be directly traced to a named individual, but that has still lead some web users, as well as technology luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, to be suspicious of the concept. Sir Tim likened commercial traffic monitoring by internet service providers as akin to “allowing them to put a television camera in your living room”.

GPS-enabled phones

Most modern mobile phones have a small GPS chip inside them, which means your location can be pinpointed to within a few hundred metres by the network of satellites floating in orbit. Of course, most people will use this technology in combination with the mapping software loaded on to their phone to make it easier to find their way around; some phones are now so sophisticated that they can provide real-time turn-by-turn directions, just like a satnav. The inclusion of GPS chips in handsets has also opened up a new world of location-based services – now that your phone “knows” where you are, it can feed that information in to, say, your phone’s search engine to provide data, links and recommendations for local amenities for whichever area you find yourself in. The flip side of that, of course, is that with the right kind of software installed on your phone, it’s possible to remotely monitor your location for less innocuous reasons. Services such as Google Latitude and Sniff are opt-in, consensual examples of this sort of technology, although some worry that in time, these kinds of monitoring software will be commonplace and non-negotiable, rather than a matter of personal choice.

Claudine Beaumont

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Mandelson says No U-turn on ID cards

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Home secretary Alan Johnson’s pledge that the government will not make ID cards compulsory is not a U-turn on policy, according to first secretary Lord Mandelson.

The business minister said the government had “always made clear we want to move to a full take-up of ID cards and what Alan Johnson has said is fully consistent with that.”

Mandelson was commenting on the announcement that the trials planned for airside Manchester and London City airport staff will no longer be compulsory.

Johnson also backed down on previously stated aims to make ID cards compulsory for all citizens at some point in the future.

But Mandelson insisted it had always been the government case that ID cards need not apply to every citizen of the country .

Mandelsons comments follow widespread speculation about the future of the scheme, and rumours that Johnson was less enthusiastic about ID cards than his predecessors.

The Tories claimed last week that key statutory instruments required before the scheme can proceed have still to be laid before Parliament, with just three weeks before MPs leave Westminster for their summer holidays.

Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have said they would scrap the scheme if they came into power.

And a major IT contract for producing the cards themselves has been delayed until at least autumn 2010, after the next General Election.

Tory shadow home secretary Chris Grayling claimed Johnson had decided to beat “a partial retreat” and that this was “symbolic of a government in chaos”.

“They have spent millions on the scheme so far. The home secretary thinks it has been a waste and wants to scrap it, but the prime minister won’t let him. We end up with an absurd fudge instead,” he said.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 2:22 pm and is filed under War & Terrorism News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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