The myth of World War II as the Good War took another hint, as the British Guardian newspaper revealed that the UK maintained a secret torture center in London, in which several thousand German prisoners were systematically tortured.
Some are also alleged to have been starved and subjected to extremes of temperature in specially built showers, while others later complained that they had been threatened with electric shock torture or menaced by interrogators brandishing red-hot pokers.
On at least one occasion, an MI5 officer noted in a newly declassified report, a German prisoner was convicted of war crimes and hanged on the basis of a confession which he had signed after he was, at the very least, “worked on psychologically”. A number of people who appeared as prosecution witnesses at war crimes trials are also alleged to have been tortured.
Lest one claim the existence of this camp as a military necessity, the camp was maintained for at least three years after the war ended, “during which time a number of German civilians were also tortured.”
After the firebombing of Dresden, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the brutal colonial fighting for territory, and concentration camps for Japanese Americans, it is hard to see any side as “good”. One may differ as to whether the war was still worth fighting, but no reasonable person can seriously maintain it as a fight of good against evil. Rather, we see yet again that war inevitable unleashes evil on all sides. All talk of good wars is just a fantasy protecting people from awareness of the evil done by them or in their name.
November 14th, 2005
The Washington Post reveals today that the FBI has vastly increased its surveillance of ordinary Americans, thanks to the (Un)Patriot Act:
The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters — one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people — are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks — and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined….
Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau’s new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect — a single telephone call, for example — may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.
A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.
In the process of renewing this abomidable act, Congress is about to make it more draconian:
The House and Senate have voted to make noncompliance with a national security letter a criminal offense. The House would also impose a prison term for breach of secrecy.
There is absolutely no oversight, no control over whose information the FBI can or cannot seize. There is no need to show any reasonable cause. Ask and ye shall receive:
“The beef with the NSLs is that they don’t have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny,” said former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (Ga.), who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. “There’s no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat’s decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it….”
To establish the “relevance” of the information they seek, agents face a test so basic it is hard to come up with a plausible way to fail. A model request for a supervisor’s signature, according to internal FBI guidelines, offers this one-sentence suggestion: “This subscriber information is being requested to determine the individuals or entities that the subject has been in contact with during the past six months.”
This dramatic loss of freedom may not have had any value in investigating terrorism:
As the Justice Department prepared congressional testimony this year, FBI headquarters searched for examples that would show how expanded surveillance powers made a difference. Michael Mason, who runs the Washington field office and has the rank of assistant FBI director, found no ready answer.
“I’d love to have a made-for-Hollywood story, but I don’t have one,” Mason said. “I am not even sure such an example exists.”
Remember, once the information is in a government database, it’s there forever, to be scrutinized again and again, and again, with no limits of any kind:
The same order directed the FBI to develop “data mining” technology to probe for hidden links among the people in its growing cache of electronic files. According to an FBI status report, the bureau’s office of intelligence began operating in January 2004 a new Investigative Data Warehouse, based on the same Oracle technology used by the CIA. The CIA is generally forbidden to keep such files on Americans.
Data mining intensifies the impact of national security letters, because anyone’s personal files can be scrutinized again and again without a fresh need to establish relevance.
The information is then merged with other information in comercial databanks to keep track of what you but, where you eat, and where you drink your coffee.
As an example of the dangers of this growing database, in one of innumerable operations, the government obtained information about every visitor to Las Vegas over two weeks, about 1 million people!
What happened in Vegas stayed in federal data banks [forever]. Under Ashcroft’s revised policy, none of the information has been purged. For every visitor, Breinholt said, “the record of the Las Vegas hotel room would still exist.”
Grigg’s operation found no suspect, and the orange alert ended on Jan. 10, 2004.
The FBI even uses Patriot Act National Security Letters to demand information they have no legal right to. It’s up to the recipient, of whom absolute secrecy is demanded, to fight this illegal request. When a university did fight such a request, the FBI threatened the school administrator and got the inormation illegallly. Of course, under Patriot Act secrecy, that person can’t reveal what the thugs did.
This article is another illustration that traditional American rights and freddoms simply no longer exist. The President can order any American locked up forever, with no limits whatsoever, and the FBI can demand and get immense amounts of information on every one of us and milk it forever. Of course they will soon use it to blackmail critics, as the FBI has historically done.
November 6th, 2005
A new poll conducted by Zogby International for AfterDowningStreet.org claims that
New Poll: Majority of Americans Support Impeachment. While the fact that 53% of those surveyed agree with the statement “If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment” is very interesting. It does suggest a deep level of disillusionment with the administration and a sense that they may be lying to us. At the same time, it is, unfortunately misreported by AfterDowningStreet.org as saying that a majority support impeachment.
First, there is that huge “if” clause: “If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq.” I wish they had asked if people thought Bush lied about his reasons for going to war. Without the latter question, these results are hard to interpret correctly, as have been those in two prior polls on this topic. If only a relatively few people believe President Bush did not tell the truth, then what do these results mean? Certainly NOT that people support impeachment.
Secondly, the question never asks about support for impeachment, it asks only whether “Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment.” Considering and doing are far from the same thing. People may well think that Congress should consider it, but not actually do it.
Also in this article is a chart extrapolating the three polls that have asked this question into the far future. They claim “If impeachment support continues to grow by 3% each month, it will reach 60% in January, 65% in March, and 70% in April” which is correct, but they give no reason whatsoever to believe that it will continue to grow in this fashion. Extrapolation into the future is a notoriously risky business even when you have far more data than three polls, as any honest stock market analyst can tell you. To see this, just continue the line in the chart passed the arbitrary stopping point of January, 2007 to its natural end point of January, 2009. In that case “If impeachment support continues to grow by 3% each month,” a rough extrapolation suggests that roughly 150% of the American public will support impeachment!
Unclear here is why AfterDowningStreet.org didn’t commission Zogby to ask the question they seem interested in, which is, do people support impeachment. While I think that AfterDowningStreet.org has called admirable attention to administration lies, I find it sad that they are putting forward such a misleading message. Aping the worst characteristics of out opponents by spinning distorted information to make a point it doesn’t support, is hardly a good way to advance the antiwar movement. It leaves us open to justified attacks on our credibility. It also fails to teach people to think carefully and critically. After all, the goal is not just to defeat Bush, but to create a more informed critical populace less likely to fall for the next manipulative demagogue to come along.
November 4th, 2005
To great fanfare, Bush announced his plan to tackle the avian flu pandemic. Key provisions include building a small (20 million treatment courses) stockpile of Tamiflu, largely to be paid for by states, not the federal government, and a years long effort to ramp up the production of vaccines.
Of course there was little or nothing in it to help stop the spread of the pandemic in the majority of the world that cannot afford large stockpiles of Tamiflu or even to create their own vaccines. Let the poor die, seems to be US policy, ignoring that we’re all in this together. An uncontained pandemic in Africa or Southeast will spread within weeks to the US. Not curtailing it elsewhere will be suicidal for Americans too, in addition to being simply disgusting and immoral.
The plan keeps the “private sector” in charge. Those who view government as simply a source of unending goodies to rob from the rest of us will continue to receive their loot, while controlling the provision of medicines and vaccines to the rest of us.
Further, the plan does little to address the terrible shape of our healthcare and public health systems. The chronic shortage of emergency rooms guarantees that a pandemic will create an immediate crisis, with millions receiving little or no treatment. And how is an over strapped public health system going to cope with mass dispensing of vaccines and medications while triaging millions? Well, leave it up to states and localities to figure out.
The plan is so rotten that even Congress is critical: [Bush Bird Flu Plan, Barely Out of Nest, Winged on Capitol Hill] If this is the best we have when a pandemic hits, heaven help us, because no one else will.
November 4th, 2005
The Boston Globe published as article [Giving birth to a better brain: Do babies sharpen parents' minds?] describing a new line of research suggesting that child-rearing is good for one’s competence and, indeed, one’s brain. At least among the animals studied, those engaged in parenting exhibited expanded cognitive abilities:
The transforming experiences of pregnancy, labor, and caring for small children ”enables the brain to process information much differently than it did before,” he said.
Kinsley and other researchers have found that beginning a few weeks after giving birth, a female rat’s cognitive abilities — particularly smell and visual perception — start to expand. Rats nursing a litter of pups discover and catch prey three times as quickly as virgin rats, he said.
And we fathers may benefit as well:
Kinsley and Lambert found that father mice and marmosets performed better than non-parents at tests of foraging and remembering the location of hidden Froot Loops. And like mother rats, father rats experience growth in brain cells after fathering pups, albeit much smaller growth.
Of course, it’s important to remember that it’s a large leap from rats to humans. But these results are certainly intriguing.
November 1st, 2005