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US cybersecurity plan poses new war threats

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

By Tom Eley |

President Barack Obama announced on Friday the creation of a new “cyber czar” position. The Cybersecurity Coordinator, who is yet to be named, would oversee billions of dollars in funding for developing and coordinating defense of the computer networks that operate the global financial system and domestic transportation and commerce, according to the administration. The position, which Obama said would report directly to him, results from a 60-day “cyberspace policy review” Obama ordered.

Obama’s announcement was overshadowed by the US military’s imminent creation of a new military “Cyber Command,” detailed in a New York Times article published Friday. Obama has not even been presented with the military’s plan, nor did he mention it directly in his press conference. However, administration sources have said he will sign a classified order or set of directives later this month authorizing the creation of the Cyber Command.

Media accounts indicate that the formation of the parallel domestic and military cyber security agencies was the source of a bitter “turf battle” between and within competing national security and federal domestic agencies.

As a compromise, Obama’s domestic Cybersecurity Coordinator would report to both the National Economic Council (NEC), a White House economic advisory group, and the National Security Council, the top-level presidential advisory group that coordinates foreign and military policy, thus ensuring “a balance between homeland security and economic concerns,” the Washington Post reports. Obama’s top economic advisor, Lawrence H. Summers, fought for a dominant role for the NEC so that “efforts to protect private networks do not unduly threaten economic growth.”

In his Friday press conference, Obama sought to present the Cybersecurity Coordinator position in the most innocuous terms, referring to the “spyware and malware and spoofing and phishing and botnets.” and “cyber thieves” that anyone with access to the Internet confronts. Obama emphasized that the measure would not include “monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans,” he said. “Indeed, I remain firmly committed to net neutrality so we can keep the Internet as it should be—open and free.”

But the creation of high-level police agency tasked with overseeing the Internet raises troubling questions. As the New York Times notes, it “appears to be part of a significant expansion of the role of the national security apparatus” in the White House.

Meanwhile, legislation working its way through Congress, the so-called Cybersecurity Act of 2009, would grant the US government unprecedented control over the Internet. The bill gives the president unrestricted power to halt Internet traffic, ordering the shutdown of both government and privately owned and operated networks deemed related to “critical infrastructure information systems,” merely by declaring a “cybersecurity emergency.”

In his remarks, Obama pointed to the threat of cyber terrorism, noting that US “defense and military networks are under constant attack. Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have spoken of their desire to unleash a cyber attack on our country.” He invoked the recent terror attacks on Mumbai, India, where “terrorists…relied not only on guns and grenades but also on GPS and phones using voice-over-the-Internet.” Obama also alluded to the possibility of cyberwarfare with a major foe, mentioning Russia by name. “Last year we had a glimpse of the future face of war,” Obama said. “As Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, cyber attacks crippled Georgian government websites.”

However, these sorts of threats would most likely not fall under the purview of the Cybersecurity Coordinator, at least based on Obama’s explanation of the position. The implication is that these “threats” would be handled by the military-intelligence Cyber Command.

Reports indicate that there is an acrimonious struggle within the national security apparatus over who should oversee the new command. Currently, the National Security Agency (NSA) controls most of the functions that would be associated with cyberwarfare. Created by Democratic President Harry S. Truman in 1952 at the height of the Cold War, the NSA is a spy agency tasked with breaking the codes and signals of foreign entities and encrypting sensitive US government communications. It is overseen by a military figure—either a lieutenant general or vice admiral—and the NSA reports to the Department of Defense.

In March, Rod Beckstrom, the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber-security head (Director, National Cybersecurity Center) resigned in protest over the NSA appearing to win out in the struggle over who should “defend” domestic computer networks. In his resignation letter, which was leaked to the press, Beckstrom implied that the Office of Management and Budget had conspired with the NSA to starve his own agency of funding, and raised the threat posed by the NSA overseeing domestic computer-spying operations. “The threat to our democratic processes are significant if all top government network security and monitoring are handled by any one organization (either directly or indirectly),” Beckstrom wrote. “During my term as director we have been unwilling to subjugate the NSCS underneath the NSA.”

A Wall Street Journal report at the end of April indicated that the head of the Cyber Command would be current NSA chief, General Keith Alexander. Other accounts indicate that the Cyber Command would more likely report at first to the military’s Strategic Command, which oversees the nation’s nuclear arsenal, according to sources cited in the New York Times. And still other sources have said NSA personnel could be moved into a new military command structure under the control of the Pentagon.

In any case, the formation of the Cyber Command raises the threat of the military or the NSA launching operations within the US. Both are currently constitutionally-prohibited from carrying on either military or spy actions within American borders. One anonymous “senior intelligence official,” cited in the Times, called this “the domestic spying problem writ large.”

“These attacks start in other countries, but they know no borders,” he said. “So how do you fight them if you can’t act both inside and outside the United States?” The answer, implied by the very formation of the Cyber Command, is that the military and spy agencies should disregard the traditional separation of foreign war and espionage, on the one hand, and domestic policing and investigation, on the other.

According to the Defense Department, in 2008 360 million attempts were made to breach its computer networks. It also reported that the Pentagon spent $100 million in the past six months to repair damage done by hackers, most of whom work from Russia and China, it is claimed. In early April the Wall Street Journal reported that hackers had penetrated the national electricity grid and even the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighters program.

Yet despite the rhetoric about national defense, comments from administration sources and military figures make clear that motivating the creations of the military cyber defense is its offensive capabilities. “We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain,” said Bryan Whitman, an Obama Pentagon spokesman. “We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment.”

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Obama Nominates Polluter Lawyer To Run Environment Division

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

President Barack Obama has nominated a lawyer for the nation’s largest toxic polluters to run the enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws. On Tuesday, Obama “announced his intent to nominate” Ignacia S. Moreno to be Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division in the Department of Justice. Moreno, general counsel for that department during the Clinton administration, is now the corporate environmental counsel for General Electric, “America’s #1 Superfund Polluter“:

Number five in the Fortune 500 with revenues of $89.3 billion and earnings of $8.2 billion in 1997, General Electric has been a leader in the effort to roll back the Superfund law and stave off any requirements for full cleanup and restoration of sites they helped create.

This February, General Electric lost an eight-year battle to “prove that parts of the Superfund law are unconstitutional.” One of the 600-person DOJ environmental division’s “primary responsibilities is to enforce federal civil and criminal environmental laws such as” the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Superfund.

Before General Electric, Moreno worked as a corporate attorney at Spriggs and Hollingsworth. Moreno’s name is found in the Westlaw database as an attorney defending General Motors in another Superfund case, the GM Powertrain facility in Bedford, Indiana:

Historical uses and management of PCB containing hydraulic oils and PCB impacted materials has contaminated on-site areas as well as the sediment and floodplain soil within Bailey’s Branch and the Pleasant Run Creek watershed.

Although General Motors entered into an agreement in 2001 with the EPA to clean up the site, a number of local residents whose land has been contaminated by polychorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have sued for damages in Allgood v. GM (now Barlow v. GM), in a contentious and caustic dispute over cleanup, monitoring, and lost property values.

During the Clinton administration, Moreno was involved in another controversial case, unsuccessfully defending the Secretary of Commerce’s decision to weaken the dolphin-safe tuna standard. In Brower v. Daley, Earth Island Institute, The Humane Society of the United States, and other individuals and organizations brought suit against the United States government for actions that were “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law,” winning their case in 2000.

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High court rejects claims against Ashcroft

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

By Joan Biskupic |

WASHINGTON — A closely divided Supreme Court on Monday threw out a Pakistani man’s civil rights claim against former attorney general John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller for abusive treatment he says he received when arrested with other Muslims in New York after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The court voted 5-4 — with the more conservative justices in the majority — that the man failed to present enough facts early in the case that his treatment in detention arose from policies Ashcroft and Mueller created and directed that discriminated based on race or religion. The more liberal justices dissented, saying the former detainee had made concrete allegations and the majority’s standard could make it harder for victims of government wrongdoing to bring claims of constitutional violations.

Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani Muslim working as a cable television installer on Long Island, was arrested by federal agents at his home in late 2001 and held for several months at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Iqbal was among hundreds picked up and questioned in the New York area as possibly connected to the attacks.

Iqbal, charged with fraud related to his identification papers, says he was designated a person of “high interest” and transferred to a special detention unit solely because of his race and religion. He says he was subjected to harsher conditions, including abusive strip searches and beatings.

A 2003 Department of Justice inspector general report found widespread abuse of detainees at the Brooklyn center, and numerous individual lawsuits related to treatment there are pending.

Iqbal, who was deported to Pakistan, sued 34 current and former federal officials and 19 prison officers. Monday’s case involved only the claim against Ashcroft and Mueller. Iqbal says that they were the architects of policies that labeled Muslims persons “of high interest” and that they knew of abusive conditions such men faced.

The case centered on how much information Iqbal had to produce to have his case against Ashcroft and Mueller heard. Lower federal courts had ruled that his claim could go forward.

The high court disagreed, saying Iqbal failed to bring forth enough facts for a claim of purposeful and unlawful discrimination. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority that Iqbal must show the officials targeted people solely for reasons of race and religion, rather than for neutral, investigative reasons.

Kennedy noted that the Sept. 11 attacks were committed by 19 Arab Muslim hijackers and said, “It should come as no surprise that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks would produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims.”

The justices said a lower court could decide to allow Iqbal to try to amend his claim by producing more information that showed Muslims were unfairly targeted. Iqbal’s lawyer, Alexander Reinert, said Monday he believed he could bring a stronger case, as required by the high court.

Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Justice David Souter wrote for the dissenters.

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KBR, Halliburton Accused in Investor Suit of ‘Reign of Terror’

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

By Cary O’Reilly |

KBR Inc. and Halliburton Co., two of the largest contractors to the U.S. military, were accused by a pension-fund shareholder of paying bribes, making false claims and operating as criminal enterprises.

Executives of both companies engaged in a “reign of terror” that involved paying bribes in Nigeria, overcharging the U.S. government for services, accepting kickbacks, engaging in human trafficking and concealing a rape of an employee, according to the complaint filed yesterday by a pension fund.

“Under defendants’ watch, and supposedly under their control and supervision, the companies were permitted to engage in conduct so notorious that the name ‘Halliburton’ has become virtually synonymous with ‘corruption,” the Policemen and Firemen Retirement System of the City of Detroit pension fund said in its complaint in state court in Houston.

The defendants include KBR Chief Executive Officer William Utt and six board members. Also named as defendants are Halliburton CEO David Lesar and 14 of that company’s current and former executives and board members, including former Chevron Corp. CEO Kenneth Derr and Robert Crandall, past chairman of American Airlines.

Heather Browne, a spokeswoman for KBR, said the company hadn’t been served with the complaint and couldn’t comment on specific accusations.

‘Unfounded Allegations’

“It appears however that the lawsuit is based on unfounded allegations,” she said.

Cathy Mann, a Halliburton spokeswoman, declined to comment on the accusations.

“The lawsuit has just been filed,” Mann said in an e- mail. “Halliburton has not yet been served and has not evaluated the contents, so it’s inappropriate to comment at this time.”

KBR, based in Houston, and former parent Halliburton agreed in February to pay $579 million to resolve U.S. criminal and regulatory charges related to accusations it bribed Nigerian officials to win more than $6 billion in contracts to build a liquefied natural-gas project.

In total, KBR, through a joint venture with four other contractors, paid more than $182 million to its agents for the purpose of bribing Nigerian officials, according to the suit.

Internal Controls

“The size of the multimillion dollar bribes and the magnitude of the cover-up evidence a total lack of internal controls at Halliburton and KBR to detect fraud and wrongdoing,” according to the complaint.

Albert “Jack” Stanley, KBR’s former chairman, pleaded guilty in September 2008 to participating in the bribery scheme. He hired consultants to bribe Nigerian officials and admitted receiving more than $10 million in kickbacks.

Halliburton fell 11 cents to $21.79 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading yesterday. The shares have risen 20 percent this year. KBR rose 60 cents, or 3.6 percent, to $17.39.

The Detroit pension fund has held Halliburton stock since 1998 and KBR since December 2006.

The case is Policemen and Firemen Retirement System of the City of Detroit v. Cornelison, 09-2998, District Court of Harris County, Texas (Houston).

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The Politics of Excusing Torture In The Name of National Security

Friday, May 15th, 2009

Allow me to share some analysis about the way things work in Washington. President Obama’s flip-flop on his agreement to turn over photographs of detainees being tortured by American soldiers is a message with broad and clear implications. Those who believe that the Obama Administration should expose and prosecute persons who committed war crimes should understand that it is not going to happen the way they would like, or as quickly, because Obama is having internal battles as well. His pullback is not occurring because he fears that Republicans will attack him (he knows they will); rather it is occurring because he needs the national security community behind him, and they fear they will be further embarrassed and humiliated if more information is revealed.

According to The Washington Post, President Obama told White House lawyers he does not “feel comfortable” releasing the photos because of the reaction they could cause against U.S. troops, and because “he believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court,” in responding to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. [Emphasis added.]

Even before looking closely at Obama’s change of mind, I understood immediately what had taken place, as soon as I heard the report on the radio. President Obama was, in fact, speaking for the national security bureaucracy in announcing his change of mind. I knew it would happen at some point. Although his first instinct had been to release the pictures, as he had released the new Justice Department torture memos, it was clear he had been turned around, and I was certain it was the work of the national security bureaucracy.

My hunch was confirmed by the AP report, which explained, “American commanders in the war zones expressed deep concern about fresh damage the photos might do, especially as the U.S. tries to wind down the Iraq war and step up operations against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan.” How do the commanders know this to be the case? How do they know that it is the not the case that, to the contrary, more people around the world might admire us for openly correcting past mistakes? In fact, you can be certain “the commanders” do not truly know that the photos will harm America’s image, but they do know how to protect the national security bureaucracy, after having risen to its top ranks. This is exactly what is going on here, and the explanation was pure bureaucratic excuse-making.

The National Security Bureaucracy

On average, it takes about 100 days for the great Executive Branch bureaucracy to begin to work its way and will on the new officials, and that threshold has now been crossed. If anyone believes a rookie president and his new team can take over the executive branch, and actually run it without the cooperation of the permanent people, those who remain in place as presidents and their appointees come and go, he or she does not understand how Washington really works. Political appointees come and go, but the folks who actually run the government have an ongoing agenda of trying not to let these part-time political people screw it up too badly. Nowhere are there more of these permanent career professionals than in the departments and agencies that constitute the national security community.

Few presidents have true national security experience before arriving at the White House. For example, of the last twelve presidents – Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama – only Eisenhower, Nixon, and Poppy Bush truly understood national security operations when they arrived in the Oval Office. President Obama, like all the others, is getting on-the-job training. Who is doing that training? While his appointees with national security experience are playing a role, they themselves were all trained by the national security bureaucracy, and since the Democrats have been out of power for eight years, Obama’s national security team is still relying heavily on the career people. It takes about 18 to 24 months for a new presidential team to get control of the national security behemoth.

I have never tried to catalogue the parts of this dominant segment of our national government, but any off-the-top-of-one’s-head list would have to include the Cabinet departments with the largest budgets, like the Department of Defense (with the Army, Navy, and Air Force), Department of State (with its Foreign Service and Embassies throughout the world), Department of Homeland Security (which united some 22 agencies including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Secret Service, and the Transportation Security Administration.) In addition, virtually every Cabinet department has national security responsibilities — from the Department of Commerce to the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Justice, with its Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). And, of course, there are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) – all are involved in national security.

In fact, since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, the president has had a National Security Council, which fills much of the Executive Office Building beside the White House, and sits atop this huge apparatus with its reach throughout the federal structure, and the entire world. Suffice it to say that the national security bureaucracy is massive. David Halberstam, in his classic chronicle of the Kennedy era’s national security establishment, The Best and the Brightest, viewed it as a great and powerful elephant, which meant that it is not easily troubled by others in the government jungle. Were David with us today, he might describe this Goliath as being very angry, which is a problem for President Obama. But he would also explain that the influence of the bureaucrats ebbs and flows.

Anger in the National Security Ranks, Stemming from the Bush Years

From generals and admirals at the Pentagon to Foreign Service officers in Foggy Bottom, along with untold thousands of the nameless and unknown career civil servants who soldier on to protect our national security, there is anger and resentment. Most of these people are not political in the partisan sense; rather, they work in and for our government to keep the nation safe, and take pride in their work.

For the past eight years, the Bush Administration has marginalized them, manipulated them, and beaten them down. Dick Cheney, in particular, worked to keep the national security professionals submissive, and to ignore their good advice. In a move that was unheard of for a Vice President, Cheney created his own National Security Council, which initially was better staffed and more knowledgeable than the statutory NSC. Cheney placed personal emissaries throughout the national security structure, not only to control it but to be certain that he was always aware of what it was doing, so he could operate accordingly. Dick Cheney had his own agenda, and it proved a disaster. Cheney cost the nation blood and treasure with his preemptive Iraq war. He embarrassed the United States the world over by demanding (and continuing to demand) that we use torture.

Our national security professionals have been humiliated. President Obama is a president who listens, and he has been told that airing the dirty linen that the Bush folks left behind will cause more harm than good. No doubt his top national security advisers – all products of the national security bureaucracy – started giving him serious heads-up talks when it appeared he was going to win the election, for that is when he began saying that he was more interested in looking forward than looking back, and that to investigate torture would only be looking back.

When President Obama hinted that he might prosecute those engaged in torture, he was forced to run out to the CIA for a stroking session to placate these national security professionals, assuring them that he was not going to prosecute any of them for following orders of the Bush/Cheney White House. The national security bureaucracy is testing its influence with the new president – and like all presidents, he will take some of its advice and reject other advice it gives. Right now, he is trying to figure out what to do.

Obama’s Being Tested From the Inside And Outside

It is not likely that Barack Obama had widespread political support in the national security community, which would have had a natural affinity for one of their own like John McCain. But Obama needs to win their hearts and minds. He cannot effectively lead and protect the country without their support, and since so many are recovering from battered-by-the-White-House syndrome stemming from the Bush/Cheney years, he is dealing with their very bad mood. Rather than risk alienation, Obama has given in to them, at the expense of his natural constituency, the political progressives who find it appalling that the Bush/Cheney torture is not being fully exposed (and prosecuted) to prevent it from happening again — and sooner, rather than later.

I would encourage those who are demanding exposure and prosecution to keep pounding their drums. Clearly, they are on the right side of this issue, and Obama knows it. While he is going to placate the national security bureaucrats from time to time in order to lead them effectively, hopefully the pressure for him to deal with the atrocious behavior of Bush and Cheney is only just getting started.

By JOHN W. DEAN

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CIA Refuses to Turn Over Torture Tape Documents

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

The CIA claims the integrity of a special prosecutor’s criminal investigation into the destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes will be compromised if the agency is forced to turn over detailed documents to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describing the contents of the tapes, according to newly released court documents.

In a May 5 letter to US District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein, Lev Dassin, the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the Justice Department recently had discussions with prosecutors working on the criminal investigation into the destruction of the interrogation tapes and was informed that “the production of documents … would conflict and substantially interfere with the [criminal] investigation” into the destruction of the interrogation tapes.

“As the court is aware, the scope of the tapes investigation includes the review of whether any person obstructed justice, knowingly made materially false statements, or acted in contempt of court or Congress in connection with the destruction of videotapes,” Dassin’s letter says. “The Government thus respectfully requests that [a previous court order demanding the CIA turn over detailed descriptions of the contents of the destroyed tapes] be withdrawn or otherwise stayed until the tapes investigation has been completed.”

Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney, said the move is “a classic CIA delay tactic.”

In court papers, she said the government is using the criminal investigation “as a pretext for indefinitely postponing” its obligation to produce documents related to the destruction of the videotapes.

“The Government makes no mention of an expected timeline for completion of [Special Prosecutor John] Durham['s] investigation,” the ACLU said in court papers. “Nor has Mr. Durham provided a declaration in support of the Government’s position.”

Hellerstein seemed to agree. He pointed out in a two-page order that Durham had not stepped forward to state that his probe would be hindered if documents related to the destruction of the tapes were turned over to the ACLU.

In fact, in a March court filing, Dassin noted that a stay of the contempt motion filed by the ACLU seeking release of the tapes was allowed to expire on February 28 without a request for a continuation - signaling that Durham’s investigation was complete. In January, Durham had indicated in a court filing that he expected to wrap up his probe by the end of February.

Last month, however, Durham questioned the CIA’s former number three official, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, about the destruction of the tapes. Foggo, who was sentenced to three years in prison for fraud for steering lucrative contracts to a friend, was due to report to federal prison, but Durham asked for a delay so he could question him about the tape destruction.

In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for its destruction of the tapes in violation of a court order requiring the agency to produce or identify all records requested by the ACLU related to the CIA’s interrogation of “war on terror” detainees.

Hellerstein ordered the Justice Department, on behalf of the CIA, to file legal briefs by May 27 justifying the reasons for withholding the documents. He added that those papers should include affidavits, including a declaration from the special prosecutor investigating the tape destruction

Those documents “may include also any reasons why the identity of persons involved in the destruction should not be disclosed,” Hellerstein wrote in a two-page order.

Several weeks ago, Dassin revealed in another court filing that the CIA has about 3,000 documents related to the 92 destroyed videotapes, suggesting an extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and officials of the Bush administration. The Justice Department said the documents include “cables, memoranda, notes and e-mails” related to the destroyed CIA videotapes.

In last week’s court filing, Dassin said, “those 3,000 records included ‘contemporaneous records,’ which were created at the time of the interrogation or at the time the videotapes were viewed, ‘intelligence record,’ which do not describe the interrogations but contain raw intelligence collected from the interrogations, ‘derivative records,’ which summarize information contained within the contemporaneous records, and documents related to the location of the interrogations, that upon further review by the CIA, were determined not to relate to the interrogations or to the destroyed videotapes.”

The ACLU and the government have jointly proposed that the government describe the contents of the “contemporaneous” and “derivative” records, but not the intelligence records or the “other records that ultimately proved to be unrelated to the interrogations or the videotapes.”

Dassin said the Justice Department intends to turn over additional indexes next month, and on May 18 will produce a list of “all contemporaneous records and all derivative records” related to the destruction of the interrogation tapes, but he added that quite a bit of information will be withheld.

In previous court filings, Dassin acknowledged that 12 videotapes, showed Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, being subjected to waterboarding and other harsh methods. The 80 other videotapes purportedly show Zubaydah and al-Nashiri in their prison cells. Some of the videotapes predated the Justice Department’s August 1, 2002, legal memo authorizing CIA interrogators to use ten torturous methods against “high-value” detainees.

But it’s unknown whether the interrogation tapes that predate the August 1, 2002, “torture” depict “enhanced interrogation” techniques not yet approved by the Justice Department.

Last week, the CIA turned over to the ACLU documents that showed CIA interrogators at a secret “black site” prison provided top agency officials in Langley with daily “torture” updates of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-level” terrorist detainee, who was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

The documents included two sets of indexes (Part I) (Part II), totaling 52 pages that contained general descriptions of cables sent back to CIA headquarters describing the August 2002, videotaped interrogation sessions of Zubaydah. Those cable transmissions included a description of the techniques interrogators had used and the intelligence, if any, culled from those sessions.

The CIA and the Justice Department declined to turn over a more detailed description of the cables its field agents sent back to headquarters, citing several exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act.

In a two-page letter accompanying the indexes, CIA Associate General Counsel John McPherson wrote that a “senior government official” would submit a declaration on May 22 “that more fully explains the justifications for withholding a more detailed description of the cables.”

 

*************Jason Leopold is editor in chief of The Public Record, www.pubrecord.org

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How U.S. Officials Circumvented the Bill of Rights

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

By Jacob G. Hornberger |

In another embrace of President Bush’s war-on-terrorism policies, President Obama has announced that he might retain the Pentagon’s military-commission system to try people accused of terrorism. Apparently, the president, like the U.S. military, lacks confidence in the federal judicial system established by the Framers to handle criminal cases involving terrorism.

For those who still doubt whether terrorism is a crime, their doubts have been laid to rest by several U.S. federal judges, most recently in the José Padilla case. Padilla, who is an American citizen, started his long journey as a criminal defendant in U.S. federal court. On the eve of trial, the government transferred him to the control of the Pentagon, converting his status to that of “enemy combatant” in the war on terrorism. For five years, he was tortured and denied a trial, before U.S. officials suddenly transferred him back to the status of a criminal defendant, securing a federal grand-jury indictment against him for violating federal criminal statutes relating to terrorism.

Padilla recently pled guilty to terrorism in U.S. district court. A federal judge accepted his plea of guilty to that criminal offense. Would a federal judge accept a plea of guilty to a federal crime that wasn’t really a crime? Not likely, especially when the crime is written in the federal statute books, having been duly enacted into law by the U.S. Congress.

The federal judge in the Padilla case isn’t the only one who has acknowledged that terrorism is a crime. In the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, a foreigner who was charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism, the federal judge accepted Moussaoui’s plea of guilty to a federal crime, to wit, terrorism.

Moreover, there are federal judges around the United States who have sentenced people to terms in the federal penitentiary after they have been found guilty of the federal crime of terrorism. These include Ramzi Yousef, one of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993.

In fact, to belabor the obvious, the U.S. Justice Department itself has implicitly acknowledged that terrorism is a crime, for it is the Justice Department that has secured grand-jury indictments and prosecuted many defendants for the criminal offense of terrorism.

I repeat: terrorism is a crime. No one can deny that, especially given the federal proceedings involving Padilla, Moussaoui, and many others who have been tried for terrorism.

So why is there a class of people who are accused of terrorism who are being treated differently than Padilla, Moussaoui, and others who have been prosecuted for terrorism in U.S. district courts? That is, under what justification are some accused terrorists provided one route – i.e., the federal court route – for determining their guilt and their punishment while others are subjected to another route – i.e., the military-commission route?

The answer to that question involves an examination of one of the cleverest and most devious processes ever devised by the lovers of power, one that has enabled U.S. officials to circumvent the procedural protections outlined in the Bill of Rights, the very thing that the Framers and our American ancestors tried to prevent.

Let’s first refresh our recollections as to the purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Constitution called into existence the federal government. But our American ancestors understood that that federal government might well prove to be the greatest danger to their freedom and well-being. That’s in fact why so many of our American ancestors opposed even establishing a federal government.

Thus, the Framers used the Constitution to ensure that the federal government they were establishing would always remain weak and divided. That was the idea behind setting forth enumerated powers and division of powers.

That wasn’t good enough for the American people, however. They still didn’t like the idea of establishing a federal government, but they went along with the deal on one condition: that immediately after ratification, the Constitution would be amended with a Bill of Rights, which is what happened.

The Bill of Rights contains restrictions on federal power relating to the arrest, prosecution, and punishment of people accused of violating federal criminal laws. These include provisions relating to search and seizure, indictment, a person’s right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, the right to trial by jury, the right to confront witnesses, and the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishments.

Why did our American ancestors insist on the inclusion of those express guarantees in criminal cases? Because they believed that without them, the federal government would simply arrest people, especially people they didn’t like, and inflict harm on them. To ensure that that would not happen, our American ancestors declared, “We’re reluctantly going to permit a federal government to come into existence despite our misgivings. But here are the rules under which you people must operate. If you decide that you want to incarcerate and punish someone, you are required to follow these procedural principles.”

Ever since the inception of the United States, by and large the quest of people who have been attracted to federal power has been to break free of constitutional constraints, oftentimes with the best of intentions and the greatest zeal. What has prevented them from doing so has been a citizenry that has treasured its freedom and has been knowledgeable about the history and nature of the Constitution as well as a federal judiciary determined to enforce the Bill of Rights.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11, however, provided the opportunity that the lovers of power had long been waiting for – the opportunity to arrest and punish people, including Americans, without the constraints of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

How did they accomplish that monumental feat without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment? By simply announcing that a criminal offense – namely, terrorism – would henceforth be treated as an act of war. Since this was war, the argument went, federal officials would no longer be required to comply with procedural requirements outlined in the Bill of Rights when arresting and punishing people, including Americans.

How clever and devious is that? It will undoubtedly go down in U.S. history as the most brilliant – and perhaps the most evil – end-around of the Constitution ever. While there have been, of course, innumerable violations of constitutional provisions in U.S. history, what was revolutionary about the post–9/11 power was that it was intended to a become permanent feature of American life, given the perpetual nature of the war on terrorism.

And, again, what is amazing is how this power grab was accomplished: through the simple act of declaring that a certain federal criminal offense – terrorism – was now being considered by federal officials as an act of war.

Yet, it’s not as though they converted terrorism from a crime into an act of war. As previously noted, terrorism is a federal criminal offense. It was before 9/11 and it continued to be after 9/11. Again, that’s why both Americans and foreigners (e.g., Padilla and Moussaoui) have been prosecuted for terrorism in U.S. district court.

Therefore, after 9/11 U.S. officials did not cancel terrorism as a federal crime. Instead, they simply declared that it could also be considered as an act of war, at their option. Of course, the power associated with that option gave them almost complete control over the American people, an omnipotence that the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent.

If U.S. officials opted to treat a person as a criminal defendant, they would have to accord him the protections of the Bill of Rights. But if they opted to treat a person as a combatant, they could simply ignore the Bill of Rights. Their omnipotence lies in the power to exercise the option.

Let’s keep in mind the reason that the Pentagon established its detention facility in Cuba rather than the United States. It was not to protect the American people from possible prison escapes. After all, convicted terrorists are held in maximum-security prisons around the country and no one loses any sleep over their possible escape. Moreover, in World War II German prisoners of war were imprisoned here in the United States.

The reason that the Pentagon went to Cuba to establish its prison facility was precisely to avoid the application of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and any federal-court interference with its operations. At Gitmo, the Pentagon was going to show America and the world what could be accomplished for law and order in a society without a Constitution and a Bill of Rights – a society in which military power is sovereign and supreme.

One of the fascinating aspects of Gitmo is that the Pentagon was determined to set up not only what it considered an ideal prison facility – one that didn’t coddle criminals – but also a model judicial system, one that would prove superior to the federal court system that is required to accord people constitutional rights.

In fact, one big difference between the Guantanamo prison and World War II prisons immediately became evident: The prisoners at Gitmo were not treated as prisoners of war but rather as criminal defendants – yes, criminal defendants, charged with the crime of terrorism! The only difference – but a big difference – was that these criminal defendants would be tried under the Pentagon’s new judicial system rather than under the judicial system the Pentagon scorned – the one established by the Framers.

So, the fact of the matter is that when it comes to terrorism cases, the United States is now operating under two competing, dual-track federal judicial systems. One system for prosecuting suspected terrorists is being run by the Pentagon at Gitmo. The other system is being run by the federal courts here in the United States under the principles of the Constitution. The government, not the defendant, gets to decide which system the defendant will be tried under.

What are the attributes of the Pentagon’s system? In the Pentagon’s system, the accused is presumed guilty (unlike the constitutional system, where the person is presumed innocent), the accused can be tortured into incriminating himself, the accused can be punished before determination of guilt, evidence acquired by torture can be used to convict the defendant, hearsay evidence can also be used, the defendant is denied the right to confront witnesses against him, there is no right of trial by jury, and kangaroo military tribunals are employed.

At Gitmo the Pentagon has established a judicial system that is the dream of those who believe that the procedural protections in the Bill of Rights are nothing more than constitutional “technicalities” that let guilty people go free. No more reading people their rights. No more Miranda warnings. No more coddling of criminals. No more exclusionary rule. Defense attorneys under tight control. Secret proceedings.

In other words, the system that law-and-order types have been dreaming of for decades – one freed of the due-process guarantees outlined in the Bill of Rights – has arrived, and it is at Gitmo.

The English jurist William Blackstone (1723–1780) enunciated the underlying principle of English and American criminal jurisprudence: “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

The Pentagon’s system is different. It is oriented toward one goal: the punishment of people it has determined are terrorists. The Pentagon’s system operates under the dictum “Better that ten innocent persons suffer than that one guilty person escape.”

Every American should realize what 9/11 enabled federal officials to accomplish – it gave them the ability to do things to both Americans and foreigners that our ancestors feared they would in the absence of a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, the ability to take people into custody and punish them, without having to concern themselves with procedural due process. By wielding the option to treat people accused of terrorism as either criminal defendants or as combatants – an option which, by the way, violates the principles of equal treatment under law and the rule of law – the federal government and its military have upended their relationship with the citizenry, enabling the former to gain supremacy and control over the latter.

Have Your Say: How U.S. Officials Circumvented the Bill of Rights
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Suspected war criminal to lead U.S. forces in Afghanistan

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

On July 22 2006, Human Rights Watch issued a report titled “No blood, no foul” about American torture practices at three facilities in Iraq. One of them was Camp Nama, which was operated by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), under the direction of then Major General Stanley McChrystal.

McChrystal was officially based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but he was a frequent visitor to Camp Nama and other Special Forces bases in Iraq and Afghanistan where forces under his command were based.

An interrogator at Camp Nama described locking prisoners in shipping containers for 24 hours at a time in extreme heat; exposing them to extreme cold with periodic soaking in cold water; bombardment with bright lights and loud music; sleep deprivation; and severe beatings. When he and other interrogators went to the colonel in charge and expressed concern that this kind of treatment was not legal, and that they might be investigated by the military’s Criminal Investigation Division or the International Committee of the Red Cross, the colonel told them he had “this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is the international body charged under international law with monitoring compliance with the Geneva Conventions, and it, therefore, has the right to inspect all facilities where people are detained in a country that is at war or under military occupation. To hide prisoners or facilities from the ICRC or to deny access to them is a serious war crime. But many U.S. prisons in Iraq have held “ghost” prisoners whose imprisonment has not been reported to the ICRC, and these “ghosts” have usually been precisely the ones subjected to the worst torture. Camp Nama, run by McChrystal’s JSOC, was an entire “ghost” facility.

When the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq challenged U.S. authorities over military operations that were killing civilians in 2007, U.S. State Department officials informed them that “the U.S. government continues to regard the conflict in Iraq as an international armed conflict, with procedures currently in force consistent with provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” The U.S. government can’t have it both ways. If the U.S. is at war in Iraq, the Geneva Conventions apply. If the war is over and Iraq is a sovereign, independent country, then Iraqis have even greater legal protections under human rights laws like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Iraq and the U.S. have both signed and ratified.

In fact, the Geneva Conventions are the minimum standards to which U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan must conform, and violations of the Geneva Conventions are war crimes punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the War Crimes Act in U.S. Federal Law. The War Crimes Act even provides for the death penalty if somebody dies as a result of a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Human Rights First’s Command’s Responsibility report documented 98 such deaths in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the most serious punishment meted out for any of these crimes was a five-month prison sentence, and no officer above the rank of major was charged in relation to any of them in spite of the documented role of more senior officers and civilian officials in authorizing and then covering up these crimes.

Unfortunately, the potential charges against Lieutenant General McChrystal do not begin and end with torture. Under his command, the Joint Special Operations Command has been at the leading edge of the Pentagon’s increasing reliance on Special Forces, which operate opportunistically somewhere between regular military operations and the “covert” operations that the CIA’s Clandestine Service has conducted since 1945. Many of JSOC’s operations, like those of the CIA, involve criminal acts, including murder.

Regular military forces are clearly governed and protected by the laws of war, while clandestine CIA officers understand that their actions violate the laws of the countries where they operate and that they will be treated as criminals if they are exposed and arrested unless American diplomats can come to their rescue. But now the United States has about 40,000 Special Forces, many of whom are being trained to conduct otherwise criminal operations against civilian targets, including assassinations, while enjoying the full support, equipment and training of the U.S. military.

An added attraction of “covert” operations to American policy-makers has always been that, by the very nature of these operations, the American press could be silenced with a quiet word to editors to prevent them betraying “national security” secrets. The media could then report only the official cover story, turning them into powerful coconspirators in the propaganda component of these operations. Moving large numbers of nominally military operations into this shadowy world that is not just beyond public scrutiny but is deliberately misrepresented to the public, raises serious and disturbing questions that deserve serious scrutiny.

Military support for these operations does not make it legal to go into other countries and sneak around and kill people who may or may not be a danger to U.S. interests. U.S. military intelligence officers told the ICRC in 2004 that “between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake,” but the secrecy surrounding “special operations” means that there is no similar estimate available on the proportion of innocent people killed in JSOC operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. This entire development in American strategy has no legal basis, and killing people under these conditions is simply murder under the laws of most countries. As with other war crimes, the heaviest criminal responsibility lies with those who design and order these operations rather than with their subordinates who carry them out.

Which brings us back to Lieutenant General McChrystal and Afghanistan, and also back to Iraq. Seymour Hersh described in December 2003 how JSOC’s teams in Iraq were trained in the arts of disguise and assassination by Israeli Mist’aravim assassins, who developed their expertise conducting similar operations in Palestine. President Bush publicly credited JSOC’s assassination teams in Iraq with an instrumental role in the success he claimed for his escalation of the war in 2007 and 2008.

But there were plenty of other unacknowledged reasons for the reduction in violence in Iraq in 2008, most notably that the United States and its Iraqi allies were the perpetrators or instigators of most of the violence to begin with. The land mines or “IED”s that caused so many U.S. casualties are by definition a defensive weapon. After an escalation of air strikes — 640 in three months in the summer of 2007, and 110 per month through the first half of 2008 — U.S. forces finally pulled back to their bases and left the Iraqis at peace in the ruins of their country.

Once they got their time line straight and figured out that the Iraqi resistance couldn’t have been responsible for September 11, many U.S. troops in Iraq quietly switched from “search and destroy” missions to “search and avoid,” parking their Humvees in a safe place and trying to stay out of trouble. As Phil Aliff, who was with the 10th Mountain Division in Anbar province, told Dahr Jamail of Inter Press Service, “We decided the only way we wouldn’t be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time.”

A bit higher in the chain of command, U.S. officers found bribery to be more effective than house raids and air strikes in persuading the Iraqis to leave them alone. And Iraqi politicians finally gained the first glimmer of legitimacy by standing up to their American occupiers over the Petroleum Law and the Status of Forces Agreement. Tragically, now that Obama is back loading troop withdrawals and wobbling on his commitment to end the occupation, the Iraqi resistance is renewing its operations.

The decision to put Lieutenant General McChrystal in charge of the war in Afghanistan must be seen as an endorsement of Special Forces tactics, like those that form part of the “surge” mythology on Iraq. You don’t hire a hitman to oversee a humanitarian relief project. But U.S. Special Forces have been conducting operations in Afghanistan for years, like the Specter gunship attack that killed 90 civilians in Azizabad last August, according to U.N. and local officials, and these operations have only fueled resistance. It isn’t difficult to imagine how the Afghans will respond to an expansion of JSOC raids killing local tribal leaders in Pashtun villages. They will unite as they did against the Russians to throw the invaders out of their country. The Northern Alliance, which the United States rescued from defeat in 2001, can’t run the country and most of them don’t even want to. They’re quite happy selling and taxing opium from their new mansions in Kabul, and their soldiers are no more eager to go and fight in the Hindukush than they are to try to govern it.

Pashtun territory also includes a big slice of modern Pakistan, and American policy has undermined the historically fragile accommodation between the Pashtuns and the Pakistani government and army. The international border through the heart of Pashtunistan is a line drawn on the map by an Englishman, Sir Mortimer Durand, in 1893, and it is worth remembering why he drew that line in the first place. After two failed Afghan Wars, the British understood that the key to the security of that part of British India (now Pakistan) was to leave the Pashtun in peace and to maintain live-and-let-live relations with them.

Those beyond the Durand Line and the Khyber Pass became part of officially independent Afghanistan, while those within the official borders of India, although nominally British, were still effectively independent in the absence of trouble, while tolerating the presence of British troops in garrison towns like Peshawar and Rawalpindi. Both sides had learned to fear and respect each others’ boundaries and understood that escalations of military force were in nobody’s interest and should be kept to a minimum. This was the status quo that the British transferred to Pakistan in 1947, and which the United States has now placed in jeopardy with nothing realistic to replace it.

So, an escalation by JSOC and other “special forces” in Afghanistan will only result in exacerbating this spiral of violence, especially with the political fortunes of Obama and the Democrats wedded to this strategy. The Democrats are habitually terrified of appearing weak, and the Republicans are habitually unscrupulous in exploiting the moral weakness that the Democrats’ fear of such accusations betrays. And the victims of all this weakness and unscrupulousness will be the oppressed women in their burqas; the Afghan children with their surprisingly Western features; these amazing people who have led their unique way of life in their mountain homes for hundreds of years; these people who respond to foreign invaders exactly the way that most Americans like to believe that we would if the roles were reversed.

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of “Blood on our hands - the American invasion and destruction of Iraq” (Nimble Books), to be published later this year.

Have Your Say: Suspected war criminal to lead U.S. forces in Afghanistan
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Senate Hears Testimony On Torture Policy

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

A key Senate subcommittee is set to hear testimony today on the torture policies of the Bush administration. The hearing, to be held by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, will feature testimony from former FBI agent Ali Soufan and former Bush administration State Department official Philip Zelikow, both of whom have voiced serious concerns about Bush administration interrogation policies. It is the first congressional hearing focusing specifically on torture since the American Civil Liberties Union obtained four memos produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) outlining the Bush administration’s legal framework for its torture policies.

“Torture is a crime and we can no longer pretend there is any doubt these crimes were committed,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “The policies of torture originated on Pennsylvania Avenue and were endorsed by the highest ranking government officials. We’ve known that for too long not to have held any high-level officials accountable. Attorney General Holder must appoint an independent prosecutor so our country can move towards restoring the rule of law.”

Zelikow, also the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, wrote a memo in 2005 opposing the legal reasoning behind the OLC torture memos while at the State Department. After the memo was circulated, the White House collected and destroyed most of the copies. The ACLU currently has a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request pending for that memo.

Soufan was an FBI agent who was present during interrogations of detainee Abu Zubaydah from March to June 2002, and was described by a pseudonym in a report last year by the Justice Department’s Inspector General as one of two FBI agents who reported observing interrogation tactics that were “borderline torture” and comparable to U.S. Army Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) tactics that were central to the government’s torture program.

The ACLU has been calling for years for an independent criminal investigation into the interrogation techniques used by the federal government against detainees held by the United States. Based on documents obtained through FOIA litigation brought by the ACLU, several congressional hearings and a report released last month by the Senate Armed Services Committee, it is clear that important decisions on the use of torture and abuse were made in the White House, at the Pentagon, and at the headquarters of the CIA and the Justice Department.

The Department of Defense has also committed to make public by May 28 a “substantial number” of photos depicting the abuse of prisoners by U.S. personnel. The photos, which are being released in response to the ACLU’s FOIA litigation, include images from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan at locations other than Abu Ghraib.

“Congress needs to keep asking tough questions on torture,” said Christopher Anders, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel. “Having the Senate hear from an eyewitness to the start of the government’s torture program and an official who objected to a torture memo is a good step towards accountability. But the only way to make clear that no one is above the law is for Congress to step up its oversight and for attorney general to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate torture crimes.”

Have Your Say: Senate Hears Testimony On Torture Policy
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Populism is Not a Style, It’s a People’s Rebellion Against Corporate Power

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

When I lived in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, I got a call from a friend of mine who worked for the Congressional Research Service–a legislative agency that digs up facts, prepares briefing papers, and otherwise does research on any topic requested by members of Congress.

My friend could barely speak, because he was hooting, howling, and guffawing over a research question he’d just received. It was from the office of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, the aloof and patrician Texas Democrat who was known on Capitol Hill primarily as a faithful emissary for Wall Street interests. At the time, Bentsen was contemplating a run for the presidency, and apparently he was searching for a suitable political identity. “What is a populist?” read the research query. “The senator thinks he might be one.”

Uh…no sir, you are not.

Bentsen was closer to being “The Man in the Moon” than he was to being a populist. Yet, he was hardly alone in trying to cloak himself as “The People’s Champion” while remaining faithful to the plutocratic powers. These days, there’s a whole flock of politicos and pundits doing this–from Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck.

They are abetted by a media establishment that carelessly (and lazily) misapplies the populist label to anyone who claims to be a maverick and tends to bark a lot. Although the targets they’re usually barking at are poor people, teachers, minorities, unions, liberals, protestors, environmentalists, gays, immigrants, or other demonized groups that generally reside far outside the center of the power structure–the barkers are indiscriminately tagged as populist voices.

First of all, populism is not a style, nor is it a synonym for “popular outrage.” It is a historically grounded political doctrine (and movement) that supports ordinary folks in their ongoing democratic fight against the moneyed elites.

The very essence of populism is its unrelenting focus on breaking the iron grip that big corporations have on our country–including on our economy, government, media, and environment. It is unabashedly a class movement. Try to squeeze Lord Limbaugh into that philosophical suit of clothes! He’s just another right-wing, corporate-hugging, silk-tie elitist–an apologist for plutocracy, not a populist.

Fully embracing the egalitarian ideals and rebellious spirit of the American Revolution, populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies. This approach distinguishes the movement from classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate its excesses.

We’re seeing liberalism at work today in Washington’s Wall Street bailout. Both parties tell us that AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, and the rest are “too big to fail,” so taxpayers simply “must” rescue the management, stockholders, and bondholders of the financial giants in order to save the system. Populists, on the other hand, note that it is this very system that has caused the failure-so structural reform is required. Let’s reorganize the clumsy, inept, ungovernable, and corrupt financial system by ousting those who wrecked it, splitting up its component parts (banking, investment, and insurance), and establishing decentralized, manageable-sized financial institutions operating on the locallycontrolled models of credit unions, co-ops, and community banks.

A movement

Not only is American populism a powerful and vibrant idea, but it also has a phenomenal history that has largely been hidden from our people. The Powers That Be are not keen to promote the story of a mass movement that did–and still could–challenge the corporate structure. Thus, the rich history of this grassroots force, which first arose in the late 1870s, tends to be ignored entirely or trivialized as a quirky pitchfork rebellion by rubes and racists who had some arcane quibble involving the free coinage of silver.

The true portrait of populism is rarely on public display. History teachers usually hustle students right past this unique moment in the evolution of our democracy. You never see a movie or a television presentation about the movement’s innovative thinkers, powerful orators, and dramatic events. National museums offer no exhibits of its stunning inventions and accomplishments. And there is no “populist trail of history” winding through the various states in which farmers and workers created the People’s Party (also known as the Populist Party), reshaped the national political debate, forced progressive reforms, delivered a million votes (and four states) to the party’s 1892 presidential candidate, and elected 10 populist governors, six U.S. senators, and three dozen House members.

This was a serious, thoughtful, determined effort by hundreds of thousands of common folks to do something uncommon: organize themselves so–collectively and cooperatively–they could remake both commerce and government to serve the common good rather than the selfish interests of the barons of industry and finance.

While the big media of that day portrayed the movement as an incoherent bunch of conspiracy-minded bumpkins, the populists were in fact guided by a sophisticated network of big thinkers, organizers, and communicators who had a thorough grasp of exactly how the system worked and why. Most significantly, they were problem solvers–their aim was not protest, but to provide real mechanisms that could decentralize and democratize power in our country. The movement was able to rally a huge following of hard-scrabble farmers and put-upon workers because it did not pussyfoot around. Its leaders dared to go right at the core problem of an overreaching corporate state controlled by robber barons. Populist organizers spoke bluntly about the need to restructure the corporate system that was undermining America’s democratic promise.

“Wall Street owns the country,” declared Mary Ellen Lease at an 1890 populist convention in Topeka, Kansas. A powerhouse orator who took to the stump and wowed crowds at a time women were not even allowed to vote, Lease laid out a message her audiences knew to be true, for they were living what she was so colorfully describing. “It’s no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street,” she roared. “Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags….The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us beware.”

These populist voices tapped directly into people’s anger. But, still, how could common farmers and laborers–largely impoverished and powerless folks–possibly take on Wall Street, the railroad cartels, corporate trusts, and lobbyists, as well as the politicians that these powers owned? Well, even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building, and–after all sorts of starts-and-stops–populists found five ways to organize the movement and make their mark.

ECONOMIC. In 1877, before populism even had a name, it had a mission, which was to do something–anything–about the spreading economic plight of farmers all over the country. They faced not only the usual disasters of weather and bugs, but also the unnatural disasters of rampant gouging by bankers, crop-lien merchants, commodity combines, railroad monopolies, and others. Government was worse than unresponsive; it sided with the gougers.

An economic alternative was needed, and it came out of Texas. Known as the Farmers Alliance, it created a network of cooperative enterprises that could both buy supplies for farmers in bulk and pool their crops to sell in bulk, bypassing the monopolists, getting better prices, and giving farmers a modicum of control over their destinies. It was an idea that worked.

The first Texas Alliance quickly spawned 2,000 sub-alliances around the state with a total of 100,000 members. Alliances were soon being formed throughout the South, in all of the Plains states, in the upper Midwest, and all across the West to California, bringing more than a million farmers into a common economy. This was a vast, multi-sectional structure of radical economic reform, creating a new possibility that its leaders called a “cooperative commonwealth.”

CULTURAL. The Alliance gave the movement a solid structure, as well as essential credibility, through its delivery of tangible benefits to members. But it also created something much larger and more important: the means for ordinary people to learn what a democratic culture really is and to implement a vision of an alternative way to live.

These were working-class families of very modest means. They had little formal education, lived in isolated communities, and were treated as nobodies by the influentials who ran things. But–whoa!–now these outcasts were running something, and they mattered, both individually and as a group.

It was transformative for them. Lawrence Goodwyn, author of Democratic Promise, the definitive book on the populist phenomenon, sees this cultural awakening as the key triumph of the Alliance: “[The cooperative experience] imparted a sense of self worth to individual people and provided them with the instruments of self-education about the world they lived in. The movement gave them hope–a shared hope–that they were not impersonal victims of a gigantic industrial engine ruled by others but that they were, instead, people who could perform specific political acts of self-determination.”

It was not all about business, either. Parades of farm wagons and colorful floats, day-long picnics, brass bands, song fests (Mary Ellen Lease was a renowned singer, as well as an orator), dances, poetry, and other social/cultural events enlivened and deepened the Alliance community, creating what Goodwyn calls a “mass folk movement.” In addition, the Alliance ran a massive grassroots education program throughout rural America, providing everything from literature networks to adult-ed classes.

MEDIA. To stay connected and provide a steady flow of energy, the movement relied on a concerted program of education and communication–not only to enlighten and invigorate its widely dispersed members, but also to bring in new recruits. This required the Alliance to create its own media, for the establishment outlets offered only scorn and ridicule for the populist cause.

Books, over a thousand populist magazines, newspapers, and hundreds of popular songs and poems flowed from the movement. The communication lynchpin, however, was the Alliance Lecture Bureau, a stable of trained, articulate speakers–40,000 strong!–who regularly traversed the country from New York to California, bringing information, insight, and inspiration to all corners of Populist Nation. Goodwyn notes that this amazing system of reliable messengers was “the most massive organizing drive by any citizen institution of nineteenth century America.”

COALITIONS. Though it created serious tensions in various Alliance chapters, the movement kept trying to broaden its base by joining hands with other groups that were also confronting corporate power. Early on, its leaders reached out to the emerging labor movement. While there were Alliance leaders who thought of farmers as Jeffersonian, small-scale capitalists, many others (and many more rank-and-file members) viewed farmers essentially as working stiffs battling the same robber barons that labor was confronting. In 1885, the Knights of Labor were on strike against two companies in Texas, and several county alliances in that state voted to boycott the companies. This stand was a defining moment for the Alliance, for it heralded the co-op movement’s shift into a more radical political phase.

By 1892, the Alliance’s political arm, the Populist Party, fully embraced the relationship with industrial workers. Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota electrified the national delegates to the party convention that year with a speech pointing directly to a shared cause with the union movement: “The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized labor beats down their wages; a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down….The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes….From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two great classes-paupers and millionaires.”

An even tougher match-up for the leadership was with black farmers, who had organized their own Colored Farmers National Alliance with about a million members. Aside from the obvious barrier that entrenched racism presented to this possible coalition, there was another degree of separation: white Alliance members tended to be farm owners (albeit heavily-mortgaged owners), and black Alliance members were mostly field hands, renters, or sharecroppers. Yet, there was such a strong feeling of a shared fight that real and successful efforts were made to join together.

In A People’s History of the United States, author Howard Zinn writes, “When the Texas People’s Party was founded in Dallas in the summer of 1891, it was interracial and radical.” A white leader at that meeting demanded that each district in the state include a black delegate, pointing out that, “They are in the ditch just like we are.” Two black Alliance members were then elected to the party’s executive committee. Alliances in Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina also made notable advances in interracial actions, and eminent historian C. Vann Woodward has said flatly that, “Never before or since have the two races in the South come so close together as they did during the Populist struggles.”

The Alliance also included what was, at the time, a remarkable number of women activists. They made up roughly one-quarter of the membership and held many key posts.

POLITICS. By the mid-1880s, the Alliance reached a point where it had to abandon its original stance of non-partisanship and start flexing its political muscle. The big commodity brokers and railroad barons were brutalizing the co-ops with predatory pricing and other monopoly tactics, and bankers were squeezing the Alliance’s marketing co-ops by refusing to provide loans. The major political parties, which were in harness to these moneyed interests, offered no relief from the corporate assault, while also refusing to advance any of the Alliance’s broader reform agenda.

For about six years, Alliance members held countless local meetings, debates, and consultations on how to proceed politically. Finally, Alliance delegates met in Omaha on July 4, 1892, for the founding convention of the People’s Party of America, proudly branding themselves “The Populists.”

Now, they could run their own people for offices up and down the ballot, campaigning on a broad platform to counter the “corporations, national banks, rings, trusts…and the oppression of usurers” in order to advance the common interests of the “plain people.” The Knights of Labor were a part of this founding, and the preamble to the party’s 1892 platform declared that “The interests of rural and civil labor are the same; their enemies are identical.”

Yes, the Populists called for the “free and unlimited coinage of silver” to provide both debt relief and economic stimulus for small enterprise, but the snickering cynics who try to marginalize populism by defining it in terms of this narrow (though important) issue ignore the party’s broader and amazingly progressive agenda, including these provisions:

• The first party to call for women’s suffrage.
• An eight-hour day for labor, plus wage protections.
• The abolition of the standing army of mercenaries, known as the “Pinkerton system,” which violently suppressed union organizers.
• The direct election by the people of U.S. senators (who were chosen by state legislatures at the time).
• A graduated income tax.
• Legislation by popular initiative and referendum.
• Public ownership of railroads, telephones, and telegraphs.
• No subsidy of private corporations for any purpose.
• Prohibition of speculation on and foreign ownership of our public lands and natural resources.
• A free ballot and fair count in all elections.
• Civil-service laws to prevent the politicalization of government employees.
• Pensions for veterans.
• Measures to break the corrupting power of corporate lobbyists.

What happened?

Ultimately, the Populists were undone, not by their boldness, but by leaders who urged them to compromise and to merge their aspirations into the Democratic Party. In the presidential election of 1896, they nominated the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, whose “cross of gold” campaign focused on the monetary issue, avoiding the much more appealing structural radicalism of Populism. Outspent five to one, Bryan lost a close race to William McKinley, the Republican who was financed and owned by Wall Street.

The People’s Party, having surrendered its independence and soul at a time the Alliance was being gutted by the money interests and the press, lost favor with its own faithful–and withered into a parody of itself.

Nonetheless, the Populists had successfully energized, organized, educated, and mobilized one of America’s few genuine mass movements, striking fear in the flinty hearts of such barons as J.P. Morgan, who railed against that “awful democracy.”

The party was killed off, but not the Populist spirit. Persevering in separate political forms, the constituent components of populism–including unionists, suffragists, anti-trusters, socialists, cooperativists, and rural organizers–continued the struggle against America’s economic and political aristocracy. Indeed, populists defined the content of national politics for the first third of the 20th century, forcing the Democratic Party to adopt populist positions, spawning the Progressive Party, elevating two Roosevelts to the presidency, and enacting major chunks of the agenda first drawn up by the People’s Party.

Though the Powers That Be don’t want us connecting with this stunning “Populist Moment” in our democratic history, a majority of folks today hold within them the live spark of populism–which is an innate distrust of corporate tycoons and Wall Street titans and an instinct to rebel against them. The moment can come again. As Goodwyn tells us, “the triumph of Populism…was the belief in possibility it injected into American political consciousness.”

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Congress Resists Guantánamo Releases

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

As lawmakers amped up the outcry against releasing Guantánamo “terrorists in our neighborhoods,” France agreed to accept a “cleared” Guantánamo prisoner and human rights groups continued to press for release of 17 Chinese Uighurs the U.S. government has declared to be no threat to national security.

The Democratic-led House Appropriations Committee last week passed a bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but stripped more than $50 million that President Barack Obama had requested for closing the prison and starting the relocation of its 240 prisoners.

Lawmakers of both parties demanded that the Obama administration present a plan for closing Guantánamo and detailing what would be done with its inmates.

Republican lawmakers said the issue is an example of Obama’s weakness on national security and accused the president of endangering U.S. citizens. They proposed legislation titled the “Keep Terrorists Out of America Act,” which would bar moving Guantánamo prisoners to any U.S. facility unless approved by the receiving state’s governor and legislature.

“Our constituents don’t want these terrorists in their neighborhoods,” said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, a Republican from Ohio.

Several Democrats have also joined Republicans in saying they do not want Guantánamo prisoners in their states or districts.

Administration officials have not said where the detainees would go, but they rejected the idea that U.S. citizens would face any risks from closing the prison by January.

“We are not going to put at risk the safety of the people of this country,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told a congressional hearing.

Some observers said that, in the congressional pushback against Guantánamo detainees, lawmakers appeared be conflating two separate groups of prisoners: those who have been cleared for release because they do not pose a threat to U.S. national security, and others who will be detained in the U.S. to await trials in federal courts, or who cannot be tried but are deemed too dangerous to release.

In the former category are 17 Chinese ethnic Uighurs who the U.S. says pose no security risk, but who have been detained without charge for over seven years at Guantánamo Bay. Their continued detention was found unlawful by a federal district court in January.

The court ordered the Uighurs released into the U.S. because they cannot be returned to China given the threat of torture there, and because no other country has agreed to accept them. But a U.S. Appeals Court reversed that decision when it held that federal courts have no jurisdiction over immigration law and thus are powerless to order the men released into the U.S. even if their continued detention is illegal.

The Uighurs’ lawyers, including the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group, has asked the Supreme Court to hear the case.

In a friend-of-the-court brief filed May 8, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined the CCR’s plea.

Jennifer Chang Newell, a staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said, “The Constitution requires that where a federal court has found a detainee’s imprisonment to be illegal, the court must have the power to order his release – including release into the United States when necessary to end the unlawful detention.”

“Permitting the government to hold these men indefinitely violates the Constitution and threatens to render habeas corpus a dead letter,” she said.

Uighurs are a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia.

In related developments, the government announced that two long-imprisoned Guantánamo detainees would soon be released.

As indicated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy during President Obama’s recent visit to Europe, France will take in one Guantánamo detainee who has been held prisoner by the U. S. at Guantánamo since 2002.

Lakhdar Boumediene, 43, was arrested along with five other Algerians in 2001 in Bosnia, suspected in a bomb attack plot against the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. A U.S. federal judge ruled in November that the evidence against Boumediene was not credible and ordered him set free.

Boumediene is well known in legal circles because it was in his name that civil liberties attorneys argued at the U.S. Supreme Court the most recent case of prisoners’ right to seek their release through habeas corpus petitions. The court ruled in favor of the detainees in the case, Boumediene v. Bush.

The detainee the U.S. government has now agreed to release is Ayman Batarfi, 38, a Yemeni surgeon who reportedly treated al-Qaeda wounded at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. The government’s decision came as part of a case-by-case review ordered by President Barack Obama to empty the prison camps here by January 2010.

Batarfi had told a military review panel in 2005 that he was a humanitarian worker who found himself at the battle of Tora Bora in 2001 while Osama bin Laden was in the area, according to a Pentagon transcript. He said he did not respect the al-Qaeda leader, whom he called “a coward.”

Batarfi is the third detainee whose release has been ordered during the Obama administration. In addition to Boumediene and Batarfi, an Ethiopian-born British resident, Binyam Mohamed, was sent back to Britain a month into the Obama administration.

Along with five other Guantánamo detainees, Mohamed has filed lawsuits both in the U.S. and Britain.

In the U.S., he is suing a subsidiary of the Boeing company, Jeppesen Dataplan, for being complicit with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in facilitating his rendition and torture. While the government invoked the so-called state-secrets privilege to keep the case out of court, a federal appeals court has ruled that the suit should proceed.

His British lawsuit charges that British intelligence services cooperated with U.S. authorities in his rendition and torture. The suit has caused a diplomatic furor in Britain, where the foreign secretary, David Miliband, intimated that evidence of British complicity had to be kept secret under threat from the U.S. to stop sharing intelligence with Britain if details were disclosed in court.

But the British High Court announced last week that it will reopen its judgment that details of the torture of the former Guantánamo Bay detainee must be kept secret. Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve, one of Mohamed’s attorneys, told IPS, “It is long past time that this evidence was made public. How can it be that two governments that purport to uphold the rule of law be working together to cover up crimes committed against Binyam Mohamed?” In the Batarfi case, a major factor in the decision of the Justice Department was a federal judge’s finding that the government improperly withheld important psychiatric records of a government witness who was used in a “significant” number of Guantánamo cases.

The judge said the government had censored parts of the records, showing that the witness, a fellow detainee, was being treated for a serious psychological problem. That witness provided information in the government’s case for detaining Batarfi.

There are nearly 100 Yemenis among the approximately 240 Guantánamo captives. Bush administration officials never succeeded in negotiating a repatriation agreement for those who had been earlier approved for release.

(Inter Press Service)

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Memos shed light on CIA use of sleep deprivation torture

Monday, May 11th, 2009

By Greg Miller |

Reporting from Washington — As President Obama prepared last month to release secret memos on the CIA’s use of severe interrogation methods, the White House fielded a flurry of last-minute appeals.

One came from former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, who expressed disbelief that the administration was prepared to expose methods it might later decide it needed.

“Are you telling me that under all conditions of threat, you will never interfere with the sleep cycle of a detainee?” Hayden asked a top White House official, according to sources familiar with the exchange.

From the beginning, sleep deprivation had been one of the most important elements in the CIA’s interrogation program, used to help break dozens of suspected terrorists, far more than the most violent approaches. And it is among the methods the agency fought hardest to keep.

The technique is now prohibited by President Obama’s ban in January on harsh interrogation methods, although a task force is reviewing its use along with other interrogation methods the agency might employ in the future.

Because of its effectiveness — as well as the perception that it was less objectionable than waterboarding, head-slamming or forced nudity — sleep deprivation may be seen as a tempting technique to restore.

But the Justice Department memos released last month by Obama, as well as information provided by officials familiar with the program, indicate that the method, which involves forcing chained prisoners to stand, sometimes for days on end, was more controversial within the U.S. intelligence community than was widely known.

A CIA inspector general’s report issued in 2004 was more critical of the agency’s use of sleep deprivation than it was of any other method besides waterboarding, according to officials familiar with the document, because of how the technique was applied.

The prisoners had their feet shackled to the floor and their hands cuffed close to their chins, according to the Justice Department memos.

Detainees were clad only in diapers and not allowed to feed themselves. A prisoner who started to drift off to sleep would tilt over and be caught by his chains.

The memos said that more than 25 of the CIA’s prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation. At one point, the agency was allowed to keep prisoners awake for as long as 11 days; the limit was later reduced to just over a week.

According to the memos, medical personnel were to make sure prisoners weren’t injured. But a 2007 Red Cross report on the CIA program said that detainees’ wrists and ankles bore scars from their shackles.

When detainees could no longer stand, they could be laid on the prison floor with their limbs “anchored to a far point on the floor in such a manner that the arms cannot be bent or used for balance or comfort,” a May 10, 2005, memo said.

“The position is sufficiently uncomfortable to detainees to deprive them of unbroken sleep, while allowing their lower limbs to recover from the effects of standing,” it said.

In the Red Cross report, prisoners said they were also subjected to loud music and repetitive noise.

“I was kept sitting on a chair, shackled by hands and feet for two to three weeks,” said suspected Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner captured by the CIA, according to the Red Cross report. “If I started to fall asleep, a guard would come and spray water in my face.”

In the Justice Department memos, sleep deprivation was described as part of a “baseline” phase of interrogation, categorized as less severe than other “corrective” or “coercive” methods.

Within the CIA, sleep deprivation was seen as a method with the unique advantage of eroding prisoners’ will to resist without causing lasting harm.

“Waterboarding was obviously the most controversial,” said a former senior U.S. government official who was briefed extensively on CIA interrogation operations. But “sleep deprivation is probably the most effective thing they had going.”

Facing congressional efforts in 2005 and 2006 to block the use of certain techniques, CIA lawyers and Bush administration officials lobbied to keep a core set of methods, including sleep deprivation.

In 2007, after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling compelled the White House to bring the CIA program into compliance with the Geneva Convention, President Bush signed an executive order that outlined detainees’ rights to the “basic necessities of life.” The order listed “adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing” and protection from extreme heat and cold. But it made no mention of sleep as a basic necessity.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said sleep deprivation multiplied the coercive power of other techniques that included face-slapping and confinement in small boxes.

“It was viewed as a tool that enabled all the others,” said a former CIA official directly involved in the program. The former official, like others, described internal thinking on condition of anonymity.

The Justice Department memos also cited research that suggested sleep deprivation was not harmful.

“Experience with sleep deprivation shows that ’surprisingly, little seemed to go wrong with the subjects physically,’ ” said the May 10, 2005, Justice Department memo — one of many instances in which government lawyers cited scientific papers in asserting that the program was safe.

But some authors of those studies have since said that the conclusions of their research were grossly misapplied.

James Horne, director of the Sleep Research Center at Loughborough University in Britain, said he was never consulted by U.S. officials and didn’t know how his work was being used until the memos were released.

“My response was shocked concern,” Horne said in an e-mail interview. Just because the pain of sleep deprivation “can’t be measured in terms of physical injury or appearance . . . does not mean that the mental anguish is not as bad.”

Horne said that it was dangerous for the CIA to extrapolate from independent research in which subjects had gone for as long as a week without sleep, voluntarily, and were free to eat, rest, watch television or leave the research facility at any time. By contrast, CIA prisoners were subjected to major additional stresses that risk physical and mental collapse.

“To claim that 180 hours is safe in these respects is nonsense,” Horne wrote in a separate online posting. Even if sleep deprivation succeeded in getting prisoners to talk, he said, “I would doubt whether the state of mind would be able to produce credible information, unaffected by delusion, fantasy or suggestibility.”

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‘Smart’ cameras doing job of human eyes

Monday, May 11th, 2009

The surveillance cameras at Big Y, a Massachusetts grocery chain, are not just passively recording customers and staff. They’re studying checkout lines for signs of “sweethearting.”

That’s when cashiers use subtle tricks to pass free goods to friends: obscuring the bar code, slipping an item behind the scanner, passing two items at a time but charging for one.

There simply aren’t enough watchful human eyes to keep it from happening. So Big Y is using technology to block it - with implications far beyond dishonest cashiers.

Mathematical algorithms embedded in the stores’ new security system pick out sweethearting on their own. There’s no need for a security guard watching banks of video monitors or reviewing hours of grainy footage. When the system thinks it’s spotted evidence, it alerts management on a computer screen and offers up the footage.

The possibilities that researchers envision for this kind of technology have the ring of science fiction. Think of systems that spot abandoned packages on a train platform or alert an airline crew to a potential terrorist on board. Already, cities like Chicago have invested in “anomaly detection” cameras around town, linked to emergency headquarters. The city plans to announce this week that it is using the technology at Navy Pier, one of Chicago’s best-known attractions.

But just how smart have these cameras really become?

“Some of the claims that are made are just ridiculous,” says Oliver Vellacott, chief executive of IndigoVision, a British company that makes video-analysis technology. “That you’re going to spot suspicious behavior in people about to stab someone on the street.”

Big Y’s security system comes from a Cambridge, Mass., company called StopLift Inc. The technology works by scouring video pixels for various gestures and deciding whether they add up to a normal transaction at the register or not.

In the middle of a six-month trial, Mark Gaudette, Big Y’s head of loss prevention, decided he’d seen enough and began rolling out the system in all of the chain’s 58 locations.

Loss-prevention tool
“We realized that we had a problem with training,” Gaudette said, explaining that in many cases cashiers didn’t realize they were missing the scanner. “Most folks are just distracted.”

He would not say how much the company is spending on the technology, but said he expects to save up to $3 million a year by using it.

As a test case, Big Y’s success may be misleading. Cameras in grocery stores have a limited area to keep an eye on. They look for only a few sets of defined behaviors that may signal a cashier is not charging the customer. And they don’t have to catch every thief to save a store money.

The task grows much more complicated if you’re trying to, say, spot the one hijacker among a plane full of innocent passengers.

Yet that is entirely possible, according to some researchers. Dr. James Ferryman leads a team at Britain’s University of Reading that joined a European consortium last year with just that goal in mind. The European Union put up part of the funding.

Using a mock-up of an Airbus, the researchers tested camera systems that would identify threats inside passenger planes. Some of the cameras on board, Ferryman said, focused on a passenger’s face and upper torso, looking for telltale signs that someone may be up to no good - heavy sweating, for instance.

A central computer would take on the job of compiling data from the cameras - and from audio sensors and the plane itself, among other sources - and deciding whether a credible threat existed before alerting the crew.

Many threat variables
But giving a camera the ability to sniff out unruly behavior or what Ferryman called “the potential beginnings of a terrorist action” requires accounting for a huge number of variables that could affect passengers’ behavior. Is the plane on a short domestic flight or a 12-hour trans-Atlantic haul? Are there mostly business customers on board or families headed for a vacation? “A threat in one particular situation may not be in another,” Ferryman said. “You don’t want a system where the cabin crew is constantly being given false alerts.”

For all of the complexity, Ferryman said the testing done so far leaves him confident that automated threat detectors will emerge - assuming regulations would prod airlines into paying extra for planes outfitted with the systems.

Officials in Chicago are already sold on the idea that cameras can detect a variety of threats. The city announced plans in 2004 to build a more intelligent surveillance system, using cameras to tip off police about possible terrorist threats such as an abandoned package or a truck circling a skyscraper.

IBM Corp. installed the technology last year. It’s now out of the pilot stage and connected to hundreds of cameras around the city.

The system can make sense of data captured by separate cameras. For instance, one camera sees a car coming to a stop and another reads its license plate, and the system tells city officials a BMW belonging to John Doe just illegally parked on Michigan Avenue.

ACLU seeks input
Privacy watchdogs have raised concerns. Is surveillance less invasive when a computer rather than a human is doing the watching? The Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union says the answer is unclear, because the public has little evidence the system really works or that checks are in place to prevent abuse.

“What we’d really like to see is more public input into the whole process - that before there are new systems or cameras put online, there is a way for the public to have real, meaningful input into whether this system is desirable, or effective or nonintrusive,” said Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the Illinois ACLU.

Ray Orozco, Chicago’s head of emergency management, is cagey about offering details. He said he can’t reveal specific threats the system may have detected, for fear of compromising security.

He emphasized that no camera in the city offers any view that couldn’t be seen from a park bench.

“The individuals out there that pay taxes, they want the cameras,” Orozco said. “We haven’t had anyone come and say, ‘Take the camera out of my neighborhood.’ ”

As for its effectiveness, Orozco has few doubts. In fact, Chicago is expanding the technology’s reach. At Navy Pier, the city is training the same capability on the surrounding waterway, with alerts for unauthorized boats in restricted areas.

This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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Pentagon’s Black Budget Grows to More Than $50 Billion

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

By Noah Shachtman |

The Pentagon wants to spend just over $50 billion on classified programs next year, newly-released Defense Department budget documents reveal. “That’s the largest-ever sum,” according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer — a three percent increase over last year’s total.

It makes the Pentagon’s secret operations, including the intelligence budgets nested inside, “roughly equal in magnitude to the entire defense budgets of the UK, France or Japan,” Sweetman adds. All in all, about seven and a half percent of the Defense Department’s total spending is now classified.

Black-world weapons-buying “remains dominated by the single line item,” according to Sweetman. (You can find it under the Air Force’s “other procurement” section, on page F-21 here.) “This year’s number stands just above $16 billion. In inflation-adjusted terms, that’s 240 per cent more than it was ten years ago.”

Many of the secret budgets still remain clandestine, however. In the research budget, the line item for a “Special Program”of the super-secret National Security Agency is a string of zeros. Same goes for an NSA “Cyber Security Initiative” kitty. And don’t even ask about NSA’s “Intelligence Support to Information Operations” account. That’s a blank slate, too.

Some other fun facts, buried in the Pentagon’s just-released budget docs:

Money for “Directed Energy Technology” — real-life ray gun research — jumps from $62.7 million last year to $105.7 million in 2010.
Cash for “Prompt Global Strike Capability Development” — weapons that can hit anywhere on the planet, in just a few hours — jumps from $74.1 million to $166.9 million.
The high-flying Global Hawk drones get an an extra $486.8 million.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense is pushing $75 million in new alt-fuel and alt-power projects — from “Landfill Gas Energy Capture” to a “Tactical, Deployable Micro-Grid.”
The Maui Space Surveillance System gets a major downgrade, from $36.3 million to a mere $5.8 million. Aloha, space-watchers!
UPDATE:CQ’s Tim Starks reports that “the budget would also allocate an unspecified amount to the new ‘Imagery Satellite Way Ahead‘ program, a joint effort between the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense designed to revamp the nation’s constellation of spy satellites.”

The mostly classified plan would include new, redesigned “electro-optical” satellites, which collect data from across the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as the expanded use of commercial satellite imagery. Although the cost is secret, most estimates place it in the multibillion-dollar range.

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Pentagon eyes new anti-missile technology

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon is redirecting its missile defence efforts by winding down multibillion-dollar programmes aimed at destroying enemy missiles very soon after they take off.

The move away from “boost-phase” intercept programmes was announced as part of President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget request sent to Congress on Thursday.

Prospects: The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency said it had turned bullish in recent months on prospects for intercepts during the ascent phase, which it termed “significantly less challenging”. The ascent phase starts after powered flight, but before a ballistic missile deploys decoys or executes manoeuvres to avoid being shot down in the post-boost phase of its flight. “We believe technologies now available – not previously available – make this a more suitable, more affordable enterprise,” said retired Navy Rear Admiral David Altwegg, the agency’s executive director.

“Our studies tell us that this ascent-phase interceptor effort will provide the margin of superiority needed and replace boost-phase as we now know it,” he told reporters. Altwegg said the Missile Defense Agency had several initiatives under way that could lead to deployment of such systems as soon as 2013 or 2014, if funded by Congress. Altwegg declined to name any of the potential contractors. The Obama administration said on Thursday it would cancel the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, a boost-phase program being developed by Northrop Grumman Corp. The cancellation was one of the few surprises in a spending plan that was largely laid out by Defence Secretary Robert Gates last month.

Once valued at as much as $6 billion, the KEI was targeted for cancellation after running into cost and technical hitches, including overheating and repeated first and second stage booster failures, the missile agency said.

Randy Belote, a Northrop Grumman spokesman, said the company was disappointed the administration had chosen not to fund the KEI program. He said it offered “the strategic flexibility we believe is absolutely essential to deal with constantly evolving ballistic missile threats”. Gates had previously announced plans to turn another boost-phase program, a modified Boeing Co 747 equipped with a chemical laser, into a research effort rather than one aimed at potential production models. The Airborne Laser, designed to destroy all classes of ballistic missiles in their boost phases, is scheduled to try to shoot down a dummy target in September.

“I would not yet dismiss ABL,” Altwegg told reporters. The residual research programme could lead to other “speed-of-light” missions, including destroying enemy aircraft and surface-to-air missiles, advocates of the system have said.

Overall, Obama sought $7.8 billion for the Missile Defense Agency, a cut of about $1.2 billion from last year. Also terminated was Lockheed Martin Corp’s Multiple Kill Vehicle programme. The spending reduction was slightly smaller than the $1.4 billion cut announced by Gates on April 6, when he rolled out plans to tie US military spending more closely to conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan. In another development, Altwegg said it had been agreed to let federal research labs compete to carry out a $5 million study of a possible space-based missile defence, a potential baby step toward a system once mocked as “star wars”. The Pentagon has spent more than $100 billion to date to develop anti-missile systems based at land, sea, and in the air. reuters

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