Psyche, Science, and Society

Australia cancels passport of Wikileaks founder

UPDATE: I have received word that Assange’s passport has been returned to him. Score one for human rights and common decency.

Glenn Greenwald reports that Australia has now confiscated and announced its intention to cancel the passport of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Here is Greenwald’s account:

This is a reminder that one can’t run around exposing the secrets of the most powerful governments, militaries and corporations in the world without consequences (h/t):

The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week.

Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, told the Australian current affairs program Dateline that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.

However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy’s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

Last year Wikileaks published a confidential list of websites that the Australian government is preparing to ban under a proposed internet filter — which in turn caused the whistleblower site to be placed on that list.

The Australian document was so damaging because the Australian government claimed that the to-be-banned websites were all associated with child pornography, but the list of the targeted sites including many which had nothing to do with pornography.  That WikiLeaks was then added to the list underscores the intended abuse.

Forcing Assange to remain in Australia would likely be crippling to WikiLeaks.  One of the ways which WikiLeaks protects the confidentiality of its leakers and evades detection is by having Assange constantly move around, managing WikiLeaks from his laptop, backpack, and numerous countries around the world.  Preventing him from leaving Australia would ensure that authorities around the world know where he is and would impede his ability to maintain the secrecy on which WikiLeaks relies.

Secrecy is the crux of institutional power — the principal weapon for maintaining it — and there are very few entities left which can truly threaten that secrecy.  As the worldwide controversy over the Iraqi Apache helicopter attack compellingly demonstrated, WikiLeaks is one of the very few entitles capable of doing so and fearlessly devoted to that mission.  It’s hardly surprising that those responsible would be harassed and intimidated by governmental agencies — it’d be far more surprising if they weren’t — but it’s a testament to how truly threatening they perceive outlets like WikiLeaks to be.  I hope to speak with Assange later today and will provide more details as I know them.

May 19th, 2010

Larry James protected by Louisiana board’s Alice-in-Wonderland logic

I have covered here the dogged, albeit so far unsuccessful, efforts of Trudy Bond and a cadre of attorneys to bring some measure of accountability to psychologist Col. Larry James for his possible involvement in abuses at Guantanamo in 2003. Bond has filed ethics complaints against James with the American Psychological Association and the Louisiana psychology board. Both have refused to even open an investigation.

Bond, with the help of pro bono attorneys has been suing the Louisiana board  to get them to conduct an investigation before dismissing the case. In cash-strapped Louisiana, the state has spent untold amounts hiring private attorneys to fight this attempt at accountability for Dr. James, and for the board itself.

Columnist James Gill, tin the New Orleans Times-Picayune describes the tortured logic of the torturer protectors.

Tortured logic

By James Gill

It is the greatest catch since Joseph Heller.Say you lodge a complaint with a professional oversight board, which illegally refuses to consider it. Naturally, you decide to appeal to the courts.

But you get the bum’s rush there too. Why? Because the board did not reach a decision on the substance of your complaint, a district judge rules there is nothing to appeal.
We are waiting to see if the court of appeal in Baton Rouge, which heard arguments last week, can find a flaw in the elegant circularity of such reasoning.

Fortunately, the protagonists here are no strangers to insane thought processes. The complainant, Trudy Bond, is a shrink in Ohio, where the object of her ire, Larry James, chairs the psychology department at Wright University.

Bond wants James held to account for alleged misdeeds at Guantanamo Bay and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. That their dispute should play out in Louisiana is not as crazy as it sounds, for James, a native of New Orleans, is licensed to practice here.

Bond filed a complaint against James in Ohio and also asked the Louisiana Board of Examiners of Psychologists to investigate claims that he was complicit in torture.

James’s alleged offenses included tipping off interrogators about prisoners’ phobias.
James, who was the army’s top psychologist at the prisons, denies any wrongdoing. Indeed he depicts himself in a memoir, entitled “Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib,” as a hero who put a stop to prisoner abuse.

He has, however, legion detractors within his own profession and at the Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program and the Center for Constitutional Rights, for example. Various non-profits filed an amicus brief in support of Bond after the state board summarily rejected her complaint in 2008.

The board ruled that Bond had waited too long to file her complaint, much to the bafflement of her attorneys, who pointed out it had been received comfortably within the statutory five-year deadline. They didn’t fare any better in state court, where district judge Michael Caldwell in 2009 agreed with the board that Bond had no right to appeal because the case had not been adjudicated. “A decision not to conduct a hearing into any disciplinary proceeding, whether based on an issue of law, or an issue of fact, is not an appealable decision,” Caldwell found.

At last week’s appeal court hearing, the board’s attorney, Amy Groves Lowe, continued to maintain that Bond had waited too long to file her complaint but said there was no need to address the issue because the law forbade an appeal regardless. In any case, a Louisiana court was not an appropriate forum for a Rhode Island attorney, representing an Ohio psychologist, to seek retribution for the alleged sins of the U.S. military in foreign parts.

Bond’s attorney, Linn Freedman, does indeed work in Rhode Island, but a couple of the judges said they wouldn’t hold that against her. In any case, she used to live in New Orleans and is a member of the Louisiana bar. But it should surely be regarded as outlandish, anywhere in the union, to conclude that an administrative tribunal is entitled to avoid judicial review by simply refusing to hold a hearing on any pretext, rational or otherwise. There isn’t much point in having laws to protect the public from professional incompetence or misconduct if state boards can arbitrarily decline to invoke them. If practitioners have an ethical obligation to report their peers’ misdeeds, moreover, licensing boards must be prepared to administer discipline.

Indeed, if there is a moral obligation to investigate the role of doctors and psychologists in the torture of military prisoners, state boards may provide the only opportunity.

Nobody so far as been held accountable for violating the obligation to do no harm, although it is impossible to believe that professional canons were not sometimes suspended at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib for the sake of preventing further acts of terror.

It will be regarded in some quarters as unpatriotic to inquire too deeply, and there may not be much stomach in Louisiana for establishing what James’ role was. He professes himself nonplussed by all the fuss.

**************

James Gill is a columnist for The Times-Picayune.

May 19th, 2010

CDC deceived public on lead poisoning in DC water

In general, public health officials in this country do an amazing job with limited resources. While not all their decisions are optimal, or are proven correct by later events, most public health officials can be be trusted to generally act in the public interest.

During the Bush years I was afraid that one effect of the overt politicization of so many government agencies would be to reduce further the public trust in government bureaucrats. In public health, especially, control of all sorts of problems, from infectious disease to pollution, depend upon trust.

One agency that was affected by Bush-imposed bad management was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now the Washington Post brings an account of high  CDC officials covering up the extent of lead poisoning caused by water in Washington DC.  The effects of official lying by health officials are extremely corrosive. When a future crisis hits, people will be less willing to trust official statements. Society suffers greatly when this type of trust is eroded.

CDC misled public on health risks of lead in D.C. water, investigation finds

By Carol D. Leonnig

The nation’s premier public health agency knowingly used flawed data to claim that high lead levels in the District’s drinking water did not pose a health risk to the public, a congressional investigation has found. And, investigators determined, the agency has not publicized its later internal research showing the problem did harm children and continues to endanger thousands of city residents.

A House investigative subcommittee concludes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made “scientifically indefensible” claims in 2004 that high lead in the water was not causing any noticeable harm to the health of city residents. The CDC hurriedly published its analysis though officials knew the research relied on incomplete and misleading blood test results that played down the health impact, the investigation found.

The House science and technology subcommittee investigation, scheduled to be released Thursday, was spurred last year by other scientific journals and Washington Post reporting showing that the 2004 CDC analysis was missing many test results for children who had lead poisoning. With its final report, the committee reveals the missing data showed clear harm to children from the water problem — and that CDC authors knew the data were flawed and in several instances ignored clear indications that their analysis improperly played down the lead risk. It finds the CDC ultimately misled the public and failed in its primary duty.

“The leaders of the CDC lead program, keenly aware of all of these problems even before the publication of the [2004 report], failed in their public health duty to protect and inform the public,” the committee’s investigative report states. “CDC’s actions in publishing — and continuing to stand by [the report] made the problem go away for the agency and the politicians, but not for the parents and the children throughout the nation who will suffer life-time consequences from this misguided document.”

The CDC analysis was largely used to calm public fears in early 2004 during the discovery that 1 million D.C. and Northern Virginia residents had been relying on a water supply with unsafe lead concentrations for at least a year. The study, published in the CDC’s “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” has since been repeatedly cited around the nation and in foreign countries as evidence that even astronomically high lead levels in water are not cause for concern.

Lead is a toxic metal long known to cause brain damage and developmental delays in fetuses and children when they or their pregnant mothers ingest significant amounts. The CDC analysis was viewed as counter-intuitive, even by some its co-authors: For several years, established researchers had found that children suffered permanent damage from very low levels of lead in their blood, and that infants drinking formula are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning from tainted water.

CDC officials said they are preparing a statement responding to the House subcommittee’s findings.

The House subcommittee’s investigation also chides CDC for not alerting the public to its more thorough subsequent study that directly contradicted its earlier claims. This 2007 research determined there was a clear link between the city’s water problem and lead poisoning in D.C. children. For example, it showed, city children with high lead in their blood were significantly more likely to live in homes with lead pipes, and after the city fixed its water treatment problem, CDC saw a “dramatic reduction” in lead poisoning in young D.C. children.

The committee also urged release of this research to alert residents to a continuing, lurking threat — in an estimated 9,000 D.C. homes where water utility crews replaced part of the lead service pipe bringing water to the house. The CDC study concluded that the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority’s $93 million effort to reduce lead risks after the 2004 lead crisis had largely backfired: Children living in homes with partial lead pipe replacements were four times more likely to suffer from unsafe levels of lead in their blood than those in homes without lead pipes.

“While still defending its hasty 2004 publication, which was based on faulty and incomplete data, CDC officials are suddenly reluctant to publish the results of the follow-up study because of data quality issues,” the committee investigators said.

The House committee went back to recover thousands of missing blood tests, when the city’s water lead levels were the highest, in 2002 and 2003. It found the number of D.C. children who suffered lead poisoning had spiked — not fallen or remained stagnant as the CDC first said — during the years when lead levels were highest in the city’s water supply.

A group of lead experts and community activist groups joined together to petition CDC to withdraw its 2004 analysis as fatally flawed. Marc Edwards, a civil engineer and lead expert at Virginia Tech who early on raised doubts at the counterintuitive findings, said it’s long past time for the agency to make amends by retracting the paper. He also recommended that Mary Jean Brown, the lead author of the paper and CDC’s director of lead poisoning prevention, step down from her position.

“The CDC paper was a publicity stunt that was used to obfuscate the harm done to D.C.’s children during the lead crisis,” Edwards said. “They should apologize for their historic betrayal . . . and for their dangerous conclusions which endanger child

Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), the House subcommittee chairman, said the “scientific failings” of the 2004 report “are indisputable. The CDC should withdraw that publication.”

The House science subcommittee reserves its strongest criticisms for Brown, whose office is responsible for funding and monitoring the District’s and states’ lead poisoning prevention efforts. In the wake of the lead revelations in the District, she worked with D.C. Health Department officials to marshal facts, review blood test results of city residents and frame CDC’s response to the problem. After a compressed several-week research process, Brown led a team in publishing the conclusion that the lead problem wasn’t having a serious health impact.

Brown summarized the paper’s “main message” this way: “There is no indication that DC residents have blood lead levels above the CDC levels of concern . . . as a result of lead in the water.”

But the committee said it found evidence — including her own words — that Brown knew this claim rested on a shaky foundation. She knew that the Health Department data they used were missing thousands of blood test results in a critical period of the lead crisis. She told investigators she believed all the missing data were for low-blood levels, but she never tried to obtain the original results from D.C. labs to check.

The committee did go back to the labs for the original test results and has now learned something striking: Three times as many children had lead poisoning during this high-lead period than the CDC said, 954 instead of 315. The difference was politically significant — because it showed lead poisoning rising during the city’s water crisis, not falling or staying the same.

In one part of the 2004 report, the CDC paper presented what was dubbed the worst-case scenario by analyzing the blood of children and adults living in homes with astronomically high lead levels in the tap water — 300 parts per billion of lead, or 20 times the amount raising concern — and said not one was suffering from elevated lead in their blood. The report never mentioned, however, that Brown and her co-authors knew most of those tested had been drinking bottled water for weeks and months before their blood was analyzed, because city officials urged them to avoid the risky tap water.

In an e-mail, a public health scientist and co-author asks Brown whether they should mention this to the public, as “this may help to explain why currently none of the persons have blood lead levels above the level of concern.” It was never mentioned.

May 19th, 2010

Israel legitimates academic boycotts

I, like many others concerned about Israeli policies, have so far not supported academic boycotts of Israel, feeling that they were potentially counterproductive and were problematic. It is ironic that Israel is itself working to legitimate the tactic. They recently refused entry to Noam Chomsky, due to objections to his writings; they thus prevented him from speaking at a Palestinian university in the West Bank. Juan Cole explains the situation in an article where he also describes the spreading boycott by cultural figures, including Elvis Costello:

Apartheid Israel, Bunker Israel: Elvis Costello and Noam Chomsky

The repercussions of the brutal shooting-fish-in-a-barrel Gaza War, of the continued Israeli siege and boycott of the Gaza Strip, and of the vigorous colonization of the Palestinian West Bank by militant Israelis, continue to grow. The clear resistance of the far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu to the two-state solution sought urgently by US president Barack Obama, in favor the massive and ongoing theft of Palestinian land and resources, has increasingly tarred Israel with the brush of Apartheid policies. The greatest danger facing Israel is no longer, as in the past, neighboring Arab armies, tank corps and missiles. It is a series of humiliations in the realm of cultural politics, most of them self-inflicted.

The arts community is often pioneers in symbolically protesting human rights violations that others find it inconvenient to mention. Artists are independent-minded and often financially independent, and so cannot easily be pressured.

Thus, singer Elvis Costello’s decision to join Carlos Santana, Sting, Gil Scott Heron, and Bono in boycotting Israel is likely a harbinger of things to come rather than being just an individual decision of conscience. Costello announced at his web page that:

‘ It is after considerable contemplation that I have lately arrived at the decision that I must withdraw from the two performances scheduled in Israel on the 30th of June and the 1st of July.

One lives in hope that music is more than mere noise, filling up idle time, whether intending to elate or lament.

Then there are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung and it may be assumed that one has no mind for the suffering of the innocent.

I must believe that the audience for the coming concerts would have contained many people who question the policies of their government on settlement and deplore conditions that visit intimidation, humiliation or much worse on Palestinian civilians in the name of national security. ‘

If some world cultural figures will not go to Israel anymore, increasingly irrational and Draconian Israeli restrictions on dissidents have excluded from Israel Jewish-American linguist and activist Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky was told that the Israeli government did not like his writings and that it objected to him speaking at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank but not in Israel proper. He accused Israel of acting like a totalitarian state.

Ironies abound here. The Likud government has by this action legitimated academic boycotts, a political technique that the British Left in particular has advocated be used against Israel itself. Those who argued against boycotting Israel earlier were able to say that it upheld academic freedom and exchange and so should not be isolated. Chomsky himself pointed out that Israel was in essence boycotting Bir Zeit University in preventing his appearance there.

(Another important point is that Israel was making this decision for occupied Palestinians. The latter have no voice in the matter, since they cannot vote for the Israeli government that rules them and decides whose lectures they may attend).

Another irony is that Chomsky could not get official confirmation that he would be permitted to enter the West Bank on a second try, and so he addressed his Bir Zeit audience by video from Amman, with Aljazeera helping out. In the region, Aljazeera has played an important role in giving a platform to a very wide range of political views, and now this Arab media outlet is more open than the supposedly democratic Israel.

The stories of Elvis Costello and Noam Chomsky illuminate two over-arching processes. Israel’s growing reputation as an Apartheid state will not result in major economic boycotts in the near term. But the step Costello took may become more and more common if the Palestinians continue to be deprived by Israel of their basic human rights. Chomsky’s story is one of self-imposed isolation on the part of Israeli officials, mired in the proto-fascist political philosophy of Vladimir Jabotinsky– the intellectual background of the Likud Party and of Netanyahu.

4 comments May 19th, 2010