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US spying violated Brazil’s sovereignty: Brazilian minister

Press TV – August 30, 2013

Brazil has criticized the United States for spying on Brazilian companies and individuals, saying the electronic surveillance is a violation of the South American country’s sovereignty.

“We expressed Brazil’s unhappiness on learning that data was intercepted without the authorization of Brazilian authorities, for the use of US intelligence,” Brazilian Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo said on Thursday, the last day of his two-day visit to the US.

“The acts imply a violation of human rights, violation of Brazilian sovereignty and rights enshrined in our constitution,” he added.

Last month, Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota expressed serious concerns over a report, which said the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying on Brazilian companies and individuals for a decade.

Brazil’s O Globo newspaper reported on July 7 that the NSA had collected data on billions of telephone and email conversations in the country.

The report said that information released by US surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals that the number of telephone and email messages logged by the NSA in the 10-year period was near to the 2.3 billion captured in the US during the same period.

During his visit to Washington, the Brazilin justice minister met US Vice President Joe Biden, US Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counter-terrorism adviser Lisa Monaco.

Cardozo said US officials could not allay his country’s concerns.

“We made a proposal to move toward an agreement to establish the rules on procedures in the interception of data. They told us the United States would not sign an agreement under those terms with any country in the world,” he said.

Cardozo said US officials claimed that the spying was used for counter-terrorism purpose.

“But for us it was clear that there was collection of data to deal with organized crime and drug-trafficking, but what is worse, also Brazilian diplomatic actions,” he said.

The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, admitted in July that Snowden’s exposés have seriously damaged US ties with other countries. “There has been damage. I don’t think we actually have been able to determine the depth of that damage.”

Snowden, a former CIA employee, leaked two top secret US government spying programs under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

The NSA scandal took even broader dimensions when Snowden revealed information about its espionage activities targeting friendly countries.

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August 30, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Economics | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Honduras: Congress Resurrects Military Police Force

Weekly News Update on the Americas | August 25, 2013

Honduras’ National Congress voted on Aug. 21 to approve a law creating the Military Police of Public Order (PMOP), a new 5,000-member police unit composed of army reservists under the control of the military. This will be in addition to a 4,500-member “community police” force that the government is forming, according to an Aug. 12 announcement by Security Minister Arturo Corrales. Although he called the move a “change of course,” Corrales failed to explain the difference between the community police, which is to be operative by September, and the existing national police force.

The government’s plan to raise the number of police agents by 9,500 is clearly meant to respond to the dramatic increase in crime in Honduras; according to the United Nations, the country now has an annual murder rate of 84 for every 100,000 people, the highest in the world. Police corruption is a major problem, and police agents have been convicted of high-profile crimes [see Update #1187]. The current police force had 14,472 agents on the payroll as of May, but in a new police scandal, only 9,350 agents could be found at work during July.

The police changes come as candidates prepare for Nov. 24 general elections, which will choose a new president, the 128 members of Congress, the 20 representatives to the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), and local mayors [Update #1162]. The main force behind the new military police is Juan Orlando Hernández, who has resigned from his post as president of the National Congress to run as the presidential candidate of the center-right National Party (PN)—the party of current president Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa, who has governed Honduras since January 2010 without being able to contain the crime wave.

Human rights activists strongly oppose the proposed military police unit. “In no part of the world have the soldiers resolved security problems,” Omar Rivera, who directs the Alliance for Peace and Justice (APJ), a coalition of civil society, organizations, told the French wire service AFP. He added that a serious fight against crime would require a fight against impunity. Bertha Oliva, the coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH), called the creation of the new force “a step backwards in the demilitarization of society and the democratization of the country.” “The soldiers in the streets have only left more death and mourning, because they aren’t prepared for being guarantors of security,” she said. The national police were removed from the military and put under civilian control in 1997. Death squads operated by the military and the police were implicated in the killings of 184 government opponents in the 1980s.

Critics also asked how the government would be able to pay for two new police units that would double the current number of active agents. José Simón Azcona, a legislative deputy from the centrist Liberal Party (PL) who supported the measure, suggested that the US would pay. The US government “offered collaboration… under the previous administration” for the conversion of four military battalions into police units, he said. (It is unclear whether he was referring to a previous administration in Honduras or in the US.) (El Nuevo Diario (Nicaragua) 8/12/13 from ACAN-EFE; Honduras Culture and Politics 8/22/13; El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 8/22/13; La Nación (Costa Rica) 8/23/13 from AFP, EFE; Prensa Latina 8/24/13)

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August 27, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Genocide Tribunal Against Israel Fails Palestinian Victims

By Yoichi Shimatsu | Global Research | August 24, 2013

KUALA LUMPUR –  Anyone with the chutzpah to accuse Israel of genocide is going to bring on a preemptive strike. That is as guaranteed as cream cheese on a bagel.

The word “genocide” is loaded, since many and probably most Jews believe themselves to have a monopoly on the term. Most often cited in reference to the Holocaust, the G word elicits an intense emotional reaction. “War crimes” is an acceptable term in international parlance, for even Israel’s  most vociferous citizens grudgingly admit to instances of unrestrained violence against Palestinians.

“Genocide”, however, is in a class by itself, being the thermonuclear bomb of moral outrage. How dare supporters of Palestinian rights charge the Mideast’s “only democratic society” with systematic annihilation prompted by racial intolerance, economic greed, cultural chauvinism and religious bigotry?

Suspicion Mars Proceedings

The organizers of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal have brought on just such woe onto themselves by summoning a panel of international judges to rule on whether Israeli is guilty of genocide ever since its national birth in 1948.

The judicial proceedings got no further than the preliminary pretrial stage before it collapsed under acrimonious accusations ranging from prosecutors allegedly “poisoning minds” of Palestinian witnesses to outrage over a judge acting as ”an agent of the Mossad.”

The trigger for the heated denunciations between the prosecution team and the judicial panel was the prosecutors’ request for Judge Eric David, a law professor with the Free University of Brussels, to recuse himself (to voluntararily withdraw from the panel of judges).

The prosecutors had raised the issue of his earlier legal opinion to the effect that the People’s Mujaheedin (PMOI), an Iranian exile paramilitary which until recently was on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist groups should not be categorized as a terrorist entity.

According to media reports, the PMOI was involved in assassinating nuclear scientists and bombing factories in Iran. The group, largely based in Iraq , was militarily trained by the Israel secret service Mossad during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation.

Co-Prosecutor Francis Boyle, a New York-based law professor, stated that the favorable opinion on that terrorist group implies that Judge David is politically aligned with the foreign policy of Israel , the defendant in the current tribunal on Palestinian rights. To this question of conflict of interest, Jurist David refused to give an answer, nor did the presiding judge demand him to respond.

Lead Prosecutor Gurdial Singh argued that the complainants, Palestinians who personally suffered war crimes by Israeli forces, had grounds for suspicion about Judge David’s impartiality given his past approval of Mossad-linked forces.

Gurdjial pointed out:

“This tribunal being a court of conscience, there must be not even a single blot on integrity.”

After tension-packed deliberations behind closed doors, the panel ruled in favor of Judge David without examining his controversial opinion and unanimously affirmed that he should serve on the tribunal. That ruling provoked Prosecutor Boyle to call for a mistrial, and the panel responded by accusing him of contempt of court. The proceedings soon descended into chaos and many more back-rooms parleys, before both sides agreed to an indefinite adjournment, possibly of several months, before the start of trial. In total, the preliminary session lasted less than two days, August 21-22, before it whimpered to a halt.

Procedure Matters

After many reporting assignments, along with a long stint at jury duty, in San Francisco criminal trials and New York City gun court, my immediate observation was that the panel of judges in Malaysia overemphasized courtroom decorum while inexplicably failing to follow basic judicial proceedings.

The stress on style rather than the substance of law revealed a “cultural” difference in courtroom custom between the hard-ball rhetoric bandied in American trials versus the polite and deferential manners in wig-adorned chambers under the British tradition. As sadly shown in Kuala Lumpur , however, decorum can often serve as a cloak for institutional inertia and possibly hidden agendas.

Issues of etiquette aside, the most grievous mistake was the panel’s opting for unanimous agreement as a group. Trials with more than one judge, these including tribunals and high courts, are organized for the exact opposite, that is to allow a divided opinion between the majority ruling and a minority dissent. At the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, whatever its merits and flaws, the guilty verdict of the majority of judges was famously opposed by the minority opinion of the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal. In hindsight, that lone dissenting voice rings in our consciences to this day with its warning against victor’s “justice” and lynch “law”.

For a body of judges to act in unison in favor of one of their own profession is a gross violation of the principle of independence for each judge in a court of conscience. The disturbing thought that came to my mind was that insistence on acting as a group is completely out of place in a tribunal. Whether there was verbal manipulation in the judges’ chamber is privy only to those inside, leaving those of us on the outside with nothing but doubt.

Code of Silence

Prosecutors have a right to protest a violation of judicial procedures as the basis for mistrial, as was done by the co-prosecutor. Normally, when a capital crime is at issue, a mistrial can lead to a change of venue and a new judge and jury. If a court cannot possibly render a verdict on the basis of fairness, then another fairer arena must be found.

There were other serious problems: for example, the failure of the presiding judge to order the prosecutors to rephrase aggressive accusations as questions, and his neglect to demand that judge Eric David explain his past opinion to the satisfaction of all in the courtroom.

Judge David, one of the drafters of Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Israeli war crimes against Palestinians, did not give a single word of explanation, much less a convincing argument, for his legal opinion and tacit support of a Mossad-trained terrorist group that was a combatant in the Iraq War and responsible for violent acts against Iranian civilians that are illegal under international law.

His silence smacks not only of delivering selective justice but also of harboring a hidden agenda. Instead of ethical clarity, he chose to the muddy waters. If genuinely in support of the tribunal, he would have recused himself as the source of doubt, even if his intentions were misunderstood.

From the inception of this tribunal on Palestinian rights more than a year ago, the prosecution strategy has been to seek a genocide verdict against Israel , while the defense tactic is, logically, to water-down the ruling to less onerous guilt of war crimes falling far short of genocidal state policy.

Unfortunately, the reluctance of the unified panel to accept transparency and open debate in the proceedings reinforced the perception of judicial bias among the aggrieved complainants from Palestine . That some and possibly many of the jurists were either hesitant or predisposed to reject a verdict of genocide would be understandable in an Israeli courtroom. That such has happened in a predominantly Muslim country is simply astounding.

Perversion of Justice

Unfortunately, and to their eternal shame, many pro-Israeli legal professionals are not up to ethical par, as was shown in a major investigation at The Hague during the mid-1990s. I served as one of a handful of reporters on the case involving a weapons-loaded El Al cargo jet that crashed into an apartment building in Biljmeer district of Amsterdam, killing residents in an intense fire and harming emergency crews with toxic releases. The legal case was criminally undermined by massive amounts of Israeli bribery of witnesses (guised as unofficial out-of-court settlements), interference by the Israeli security team at Schipol Airport and the eventual silencing of the Dutch team that investigated the air traffic maneuvers of the plane.

That Israeli-subverted case never got to trial in The Hague , and I cannot but now fear that the same fate could await the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal.

There are undoubtedly external factors aligned against the tribunal, other than the Israeli opposition to an undesirable verdict on Palestinian rights. Google, which cooperates with Israeli interests, posted warning signs on the website of the Kuala Lumpur foundation in its earlier tribunal hearings against the U.S. government for the illegal war on Iraq .

Closer to home, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have actively promoted protests, similar to their Arab Spring sponsorship, to weaken the Malaysia government. Under the White House strategic pivot to Asia policy and the Pentagon’s Air-Sea Battle Concept, Malaysia is perceived as a potential foe of American geopolitical intervention. Is the pressure on from Tel Aviv and Washington to crack the Kuala Lumpur tribunal?

In Bad Faith 

Laymen tend to perceive judges as men and women of ethical principle, non-partiality and free of preconceived biases. Sadly, the vast majority are not. One must remember that for every drone strike against a family home in a remote outland, a judge in a big city signs a writ of execution with not a whit of credible evidence. Constitutional guarantees have been reduced to a scrap of paper, and along with them so goes judicial standards.

For these very reasons, the tribunal in Kuala Lumpur must proceed and in accordance with the highest standard of international law. It is not a predetermined show trial nor a mock court, for this tribunal offers the legal strategy, the arguments and the precedent for the Palestinian Authority to press its long-overdue case in the International Court of Justice.

The Palestinian people have suffered prolonged and inexcusable violations of every human right under a state policy of eviction, banishment, imprisonment, torture and murder, repeatedly in an indiscriminate and cruel manner. If those who speak of the Rule of Law, for those who preside over our courts of law, cannot act, much less decide, against these inhumane practices and policies against a long-standing community, then there exists no law in Israel or at The Hague worthy of our respect and obedience.

The case of the Palestinian people versus the State of Israel is, in fact, a test of conscience for each and every one of us and proof of whether our global civilization is anything more than a facade for brute barbarism.

The Jewish people pride themselves at a moral lamp to humanity in darkness, but with only a few brave and notable exceptions in the cause of Palestinian rights, the dominant reaction of supporters of Israel has been toward obstruction of justice and outright injustice. The outcome can only be tragic for both peoples.

According to the Law Giver

The Hebrew term “Shoah” or calamity, which is also used to describe the Nazi policy against Jews, is the exclusive intellectual property of the Jewish people. “Genocide”, in contrast, is universal, applying to any nationality that faces systematic elimination.

To give credit where it is due, a Polish Jew coined the hybrid word “genocide”, which combines “genus”, Latin for family or breed, with “cide”, which translates as killing. A prosecutor in prewar Poland , before it was divided by German and Soviet forces, devised this word to describe the ultimate crime while drafting his book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” (published in 1944 by the Carnagie Foundation for International Peace). After immigrating to the United States , Lemkin joined the faculty of Rutgers Law School and drafted a genocide treaty adopted by the newly formed United Nations in 1948.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to summarize, forbids the killing, maiming and deliberate inflicting on a targeted group those conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

This lawgiver made very clear that the genocide is applicable to any group threatened with “a coordinated plan” for the destruction of “essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves” with objectives including disintegration of political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even their lives.”

Genocide does not necessarily mean the killing of every single member of a group since total extermination is often not feasible even with brutal efficiency.

Lemkin cited many genocide cases from our troubled world history, including “Christians of various denominations, Moslems and Jews, Armenians and Slavs, Greeks and Russians, dark-skinned Hereros in Africa and white-skinned Poles perished by millions from this crime.” The law must protect not just individuals but also groups of people, and by all accounts, the Palestinians are a group suffering most and probably all of the abuses cited.

Now 65 years after Lemkin formulated the rules of conduct, it becomes painfully apparent that yesterday’s victims can too easily become today’s perpetrators. What has anyone learned from their own suffering?

Yoichi Shimatsu is a Hong Kong-based journalist, is former editor with The Japan Times group in Tokyo and Pacific News Service in San Francisco.

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August 25, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Chiquita Playing the Victim Card in Latest Legal Battle

By Kevin Edmonds | The Other Side of Paradise | August 22, 2013

In 2007, Chiquita Brands International admitted to making payments to an array of Colombian paramilitary and guerilla groups over the past ten years in exchange for a paltry fine of $25 million. One group in particular, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) or the AUC was designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 2001 – and one of the primary recipients of the payments. Claiming no wrongdoing Chiquita argued that it was being extorted and that it had never received “any actual security services or actual security equipment in exchange for the payments.”

At the time of the initial sentencing Assistant Attorney General Kenneth L. Wainstein remarked, in a seemingly straightforward manner, that “Like any criminal enterprise, a terrorist organization needs a funding stream to support its operations. For several years, the AUC terrorist group found one in the payments they demanded from Chiquita Brands International. Thanks to Chiquita’s cooperation and this prosecution, that funding stream is now dry and corporations are on notice that they cannot make protection payments to terrorists.”

It now appears that things are not as simple as Assistant Attorney General Wainstein initially thought. In April, Chiquita Brands International filed a reverse Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to stop the public release of thousands of documents handed over to the Security and Exchange Commission. The documents are said to outline in detail Chiquita’s illegal payments to terrorist organizations such as the AUC.

Despite the clear and existing evidence that Chiquita had engaged in criminal activity, Chiquita is arguing that under Exception 7(B) of the Freedom of Information Act, mandatory disclosure provisions do not apply to “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes . . . to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information . . . would deprive a person of a right to a fair trial or an impartial adjudication.”

In an effort to portray the multinational corporation as the real victim in this case Chiquita’s lawyer, James Garland, argued that the disclosure of the documents “will make them available to the general public, including members of the press and individuals and organizations that seek to distort the facts surrounding the payments that Banadex (a subsidiary of Chiquita) made to the AUC under threat of force. Past experience with release of Chiquita’s documents has demonstrated that media campaigns based on gross mischaracterizations of released documents are certain to occur in an effort to entrench misconceptions of relevant facts in the minds of fact finders integral to the fairness of the proceedings.”

Furthermore, Garland has engaged in a campaign alleging that the National Security Archive is not an independent research organization, but instead is seeking to assist lawyers involved in a class action lawsuit against Chiquita in Colombia, on behalf of the victims of paramilitaries, in addition to an ongoing criminal investigation of former Chiquita employees in Colombia. The fact that the National Security Archive would not have found evidence of criminal wrongdoing if it had never happened in the first place seems lost on Garland.

However, this illogical line of argument is not baseless – as in 1997 Chiquita managed to overturn a brilliant investigation by the Cincinnati Enquirer on the basis of the “illegitimate” gathering of evidence. The investigation uncovered that Chiquita was engaging in widespread murder, bribery, arms trafficking, and knowingly poisoning the environment throughout Latin America, but the charges were thrown out. The newspaper was sued and the journalists had their careers cut short.

In 2007, ten years after the Cincinnati Enquirer investigation, the first batch of over five thousand documents, known as the “Chiquita Papers” were published and made available to the public by the National Security Archive. The documents were released by the Justice Department and the FBI in response to the National Security Archive’s Freedom of Information requests.

Michael Evans, Director of the Colombia Project at the National Security Archives remarked on the importance of the documents, stating that “This may well be the most important collection of records ever assembled on corporate ties to terrorism. This was a massive, years-long investigation that involved multiple federal agencies and resulted in the one of the first convictions of a major US company of financing a terrorist group.”

Despite Chiquita’s posturing, the most likely reason they are demanding that the additional documents be suppressed is because it would provide further the evidence of criminal wrongdoing in Colombia. Based on the first batch of documents, Evans highlighted that “we found very strong indications that Chiquita did, in some cases, receive something in return for their illicit payments – that there was a quid pro quo with both guerrilla and paramilitary groups. The evidence we found directly contradicted the U.S. Attorney’s finding, stated in the sentencing memorandum, that the company had never received “any actual security services or actual security equipment in exchange for the payments.  For instance, a legal memo written by one of Chiquita’s lawyers said that the general manager of Chiquita operations in Turbó, Colombia, had told him “that the Guerrilla Groups are used to supply security personnel at the various farms.”  It’s right there in a Chiquita legal memo written on Chiquita letterhead.”

Upon closer examination of the Chiquita Papers, it became clear that the Attorney General failed to read or truly understand evidence contained in the documents, with Evans adding that “Another document that we published in 2011 shows that Chiquita also paid right-wing paramilitary forces for security services. The March 2000 memo, again, written on Chiquita letterhead and based on a conversation with one of the managers in Colombia, says that a group known to be a front for paramilitary terrorists was formed to disguise “the real purpose of providing security” and that the “money [was] for info[rmation] on guerrilla movements.” The company manager also suggested that they “should continue making the payments,” because the company would not “get the same level of support from the military.”

It will be telling how much information is released to the public, as Chiquita Brands International has some friends in very high places. During the 2007 investigation in which Chiquita was fined $25 million, the company was represented by current Attorney General Eric Holder.

In effect, the current reverse Freedom of Information lawsuit amounts to Chiquita asking the United States District Court for the District of Colombia to hide documents which can potentially reveal the corporation’s involvement in criminal activities which have resulted in the death and assault of thousands of Colombians. The fact that the U.S. Department of Justice produced such a small penalty despite the evidence of criminal wrongdoing in 2007 should be disconcerting to all interested in human rights, as it is further evidence of the abuses of corporate political power.

Kevin Edmonds is a NACLA blogger focusing on the Caribbean. Edmonds is a former NACLA research associate and a current PhD student at the University of Toronto, where he is studying the impact of neoliberalism on the St. Lucian banana trade. Follow him on twitter @kevin_edmonds.

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August 24, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Terrifying World of Electronic Monitoring

By JAMES KILGORE | August 23, 2013

I spend a considerable part of my life doing research and writing about electronic monitors-those  black plastic ankle bracelets best known for landing on the legs of a number of the rich and notorious-Martha Stewart, Paris Hilton, Michael Vick, and Charley Sheen, just to name a few.  I hear stories about house arrest and the absurd sets of obstacles authorities put in peoples’ way as they try to wend their way back into life post-incarceration while being tracked by the latest technology.

I reflect a lot about little computer chips and spying and what some lawyers call the deprivation of liberty by technological means.  In essence, electronic monitoring is about tracking and marking. The GPS technology that is trending  in electronic monitors tracks people’s every movement with the purpose of marking them for punishment if they deviate from the program (or at least if the technology reports that they have deviated from the program.)

Though everyone keeps telling me that at least being on a monitor is better than being in prison, (which I agree with, having done both) I keep telling them they are missing the point. The point is that we need to have some control over this technology, some clear rules, guidelines and ideas about what it should and should not be allowed to do, that while it may be applied to those “guilty” of a crime today, we don’t actually know who is next.

Edward Snowden’s revelations have awakened people to this sort of reality since NSA surveillance is all about tracking and marking. Only the NSA is monitoring everyone-tracking and marking, though none of us are exactly sure who is being marked, why they are being marked or what the consequences of that marking will be. We are leaving the whole process to the security and technology experts to decide. They will determine what patterns of telecommunications amount to a threat or a violation warranting action by the authorities.

None of this comes as a big shock to me since I have seen how with the advance of GPS, people on parole who are minding their own business trying to do what normal people do-shop, get their laundry done, play with their child in the park, are constantly presented with the record of their movements.  If they stop at an address that is not on the approved list, if they go to a store that is not on the approved list they run the risk of being violated and either kept under lockdown (24 hour a day house arrest) or sent back to prison.

Not long ago I heard the story of a man who stopped for nine minutes at a house a block away from where he lived to ask about some things the owner was selling. Those nine minutes got sent to the parole office via his GPS tracker and he got a few days of lockdown in response.  The neighbor’s address was not on the approved list.

And then there are the dozen cases in Wisconsin unveiled by journalist Mario Koran where the GPS device falsely reported people  as out of the house when they were at home.  Aaron Hicks served 51 days in jail for what he claims was one of those false violations. You can’t argue with the facts. As one man on monitoring who chose to remain anonymous because he’s still on parole told me, “we are the guinea pigs.”

But this mark and track process hit a new low last week with the release of Gregory Johnsen’s Atlantic magazine story about an eight year old Yemeni boy named Barq al-Kulaybi.  Once an impoverished  street child in the village of Baty-al-Ahmar, al-Kulaybi had been taken in by an apparently kind man named Adnan al-Qadhi.  Unbeknownst to the little boy, Yemeni authorities (and likely the CIA)  suspected al-Qadhi of having links with Al Qaeda.  In a bizarre translated video, al-Kulaybi told the story of how last year his biological father, a member of the Yemeni  Republican Guard, and some fellow security personnel persuaded him to plant a computer chip on al-Qadhi.  Given precise instructions on how to activate the chip, the boy explained how he dropped it into the man’s coat pocket when al-Qadhi was out of the room.  The boy had kicked off a track and mark process with a tragic ending.  On November 7, 2012 a US drone strike killed al-Qadhi. Subsequently, Al Qaeda kidnapped the boy and his father and produced the video mentioned above.  According to a Johnsen interview on Democracy Now, Al-Qaeda has apparently executed the boy’s father.  Tracking and marking can be a deadly business.

The story of Barq al-Kulaybi is disturbing on many levels.  The use of an eight year old boy as an operative in this instance qualifies as one of the low points even in the murky amoral world of surveillance.  But the real problem is that like with the NSA monitors and with the parole agents who put people on lockdown at their own discretion, there is no process of accountability, not even any transparent guidelines of operation.  The technology experts (read: boys with toys) are in the driver’s seat and following a map that no one else can see, much less read. I wish the case of Barq al-Kulaybi would give people pause, would at least occasion a few  sighs of distress before we think about how small these chips are going to be in the future, all the new “apps” they will have, who will control them and whose pocket they may end up in. Who is next to be tracked and marked? By the way, have you switched off your cellphone?

James Kilgore is a research scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He writes on issues of mass incarceration with a focus on electronic monitoring and labor. He is also the author of three novels, all of which he drafted during his six and a half years in prison, 2002-09.  He can be contacted at waazn1@gmail.com

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August 23, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

US has ignored 5 Russian extradition demands in recent years

RIA Novosti | August 21, 2013

MOSCOW – Five of Russia’s extradition requests sent to the United States in the past few years have been left unanswered, a deputy Russian prosecutor general has said in an interview.

“Since 2008, the United States has refused 16 times to extradite people to us citing the absence of a relevant treaty,” Deputy Russian Prosecutor General Alexander Zvyagintsev told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta government daily.

“We have been insisting on concluding such a treaty but have been getting a refusal based on unconvincing arguments,” he said. “Another five of our requests sent to the United States in 2011-2012 have not been answered.”

The United States has been unsuccessfully pushing Russia for extradition of fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

Snowden, a former contractor for the US National Security Agency (NSA), is wanted by the United States on espionage and other charges after he gave journalists classified documents detailing the NSA’s far-reaching electronic and telephone surveillance programs.

Snowden formally requested temporary asylum in Russia on July 16. Washington repeatedly called on Moscow to reject his request and send him back to the United States to stand trial, but in vain. Snowden was granted the asylum in early August.

Zvyagintsev said Russia has not received any official request for Snowden’s extradition from the United States.

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August 21, 2013 Posted by | Corruption | , , , | Leave a comment

As Al Jazeera Americas Launches, Concerns Over Corporate-Driven Agenda Persist

By Adrienne Pine and Keane Bhatt | NACLA | August 20, 2013

As Al Jazeera geared up for the August 20th launch of its new channel Al Jazeera America (AJAM), excitement was in the air, judging by its Twitter feed. CNN veteran Joie Chen expressed on her Twitter profile that she was “thrilled” to anchor AJAM’s flagship nightly news program America Tonight, and would engage in “fierce journalism.” According to AJAM’s official account, Chen “can’t wait to bring you the news.”

Bringing U.S. viewers “fierce journalism”—or even simply “the news”—promises to be a welcome change from her previous work as the host of a public-relations video masquerading as an investigative report, all paid for by gun manufacturer Remington to defend its Model 700 rifle from reports of its defectiveness. (In her defense, Chen’s presentation was not done in her capacity as a journalist, but rather as Executive Vice President of Branded News Worldwide, a firm that “creates online platforms for organizations and industries to deliver news and programming models for niche audiences.”)

In anticipation of her special reports for AJAM, Soledad O’Brien of CNN fame casually tweeted about “[getting] a chance to chat with Jean Claude Duvalier”—the one-time Haitian dictator who, despite being responsible for crimes against humanity, remains a free man. The excitement continued as AJAM offered tours of its Washington, D.C. and New York studios for reporters, and promoted a Variety piece consisting of little more than quotes from a conference call hosted by “interim CEO and prez” Ehab Al Shihabi, former senior management consultant at Arthur Andersen, Andersen Consulting and Deloitte.

In preparation for AJAM’s launch, Al Shihabi met with “members of the business community” as well as political figures such as Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), and promised that AJAM would be “the voice of Main Street”; another Variety article reported that “Al Jazeera has also spent time making its case to advertisers, reaching out to ad-buying concerns to dispel any notions that the network may be biased or have an anti-American lens.”

This message was further reinforced when America Tonight’s senior executive producer, Kim Bondy (formerly of CNN) said the show will have “some of the sensibilities of CBS Sunday Morning; it should also look a little bit, probably, like [NBC’s] Rock Center, and we’re stealing a couple pages out of [HBO’s] Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” AJAM president Kate O’Brian—a 30-year veteran of ABC News—confirmed a trend: “The formats, the talent, the producers will be American.”

*

The authors of this article have appeared as frequent guest commentators to discuss U.S.-Latin America relations on Al Jazeera America’s predecessor, Al Jazeera English (AJE), which will soon be redirected exclusively toward international audiences and rendered inaccessible to most U.S. viewers, even online. With regard to much of AJE’s coverage of the Americas, we have been impressed with the rigor and dedication of AJE reporters, anchors, presenters and producers. The channel often delved into crucial yet often under-reported developments throughout the region, and proved itself an indispensible English-language source for regular, in-depth news and analysis on Latin America and the Caribbean.

But Al Jazeera’s new direction raises serious questions about AJAM. The channel now boasts a new, advertiser-revenue-driven dynamic; it has apparently taken compromising stances in its courtship of U.S. cable distributors; its recruitment of management and on-air personnel demonstrates caution and conservatism; and it has paid top dollar for close consultation with lobbying firms possessing deep rightwing ties. All of these factors may threaten to weaken Al Jazeera’s strengths and guide it toward the most insipid and insular tendencies of U.S. cable news.

A month ago The Guardian’s journalist Glenn Greenwald reported on the internal strife over Al Jazeera America, highlighting serious concerns raised in a leaked email by the host of Al Jazeera English’s program Empire, Marwan Bishara. The email excoriated management for capitulating to the “fear of contractual obligations with carriers” in attempting to expel any traces of what might appear as “anti-American,” including the “diversity, plurality and even accents of its journalists.”

Greenwald revealed highly paid consulting and lobbying firms like Qorvis Communications, ASGK Public Strategies and DLA Piper were influencing many of the channel’s questionable decisions; the temporary removal of an opinion article by Columbia Professor Joseph Massad from Al Jazeera’s website, for example, was done at the insistence of a DLA Piper consultant, according to an anonymous Al Jazeera insider.

*

One of the primary functions of public relations firms is shaping news to favor their corporate clients. While this approach is a reality in today’s corporate media environment, news organizations such as AJAM naturally sow doubt regarding their own professed commitment to hard-hitting journalism when they rely upon such firms. ASGK, one of the agencies AJAM has hired, explains its techniques of “Crisis Management,” which create clear conflicts of interest for the news agency:

From the halls of Congress, offices of the Executive Branch and Fortune 500 board rooms to the busiest newsrooms, our team knows the media inside and out. At ASGK, we have a wealth of experience in every facet of running a successful media relations campaign. We have established relationships with print, broadcast and online media outlets in local markets and on the national level. We hone messages based on our knowledge of specific reporters. From developing creative events that grab media attention and arranging reporter briefings or meetings with editorial boards, to writing powerfully and persuasively, ASGK is skilled at using media to reach key audiences.

While Al Jazeera’s business model—receiving continuous funding from the government of Qatar—has meant that reporting in some areas of the world has been decidedly biased toward that government’s interests (e.g., Syria, Libya), thus far the network has eschewed a model in which specific reporters repeat messages honed especially for them by corporate advertisers.

But the consultants AJAM has hired go beyond just converting day-to-day corporate talking points into news. On its “Crisis Communications” webpage, ASGK brags, “We have significant experience helping companies and institutions navigate through negative situations with effective communications strategies.” Examples include working “with multiple telecommunications companies on regulatory issues at the FCC” and representing “one of the largest entertainment companies with issues at the Department of Justice in the face of its merger.” Reading not too far between the lines, it is clear that ASGK is actively involved in promoting the kind of corporate media consolidation that has systematically undermined journalistic integrity within the confines of major news outlets over recent decades.

For its part, AJAM consultant Qorvis Communications has engaged in the production of what some would consider outrageously unethical news production. Before hiring Qorvis, Al Jazeera published an article titled “Suppressing the narrative in Bahrain,” detailing Qorvis’s efforts to suppress reporting on the ongoing deadly crackdown against opponents to the U.S-backed monarchy in that country:

Qorvis, which disclosed in a US Foreign Agents Registration Act a $40,000/month contract with the government of Bahrain from April to September last year, is one of a number of western PR firms that have been hired by the government. Matt Lauer, a partner at Qorvis, wrote in an email to PRNewser in August: “We help communicate the positive work the government [in Bahrain] is undertaking.”

Law and lobbying firm DLA Piper, in a flier titled “Dispute Resolution: Our Latin American Practice,” promotes its work on behalf of telecom consolidation. According to the document, it “[a]dvised a major Venezuelan telecommunications operator before Venezuelan telecommunications regulatory authorities in a dispute over interconnection rates” and “[r]epresented Spanish purchasers of Latin American telecommunications infrastructure interests in multi-jurisdictional parallel litigation proceedings against the sellers.”

Al Jazeera paid DLA $220,000 over the course of three months this year. Although the firm’s representation of the clients below does not in any way imply unethical behavior on the part of Al Jazeera, it is remarkable that the following list begs for the kind of investigative journalism that AJAM promises to provide:

  • PR firm Burson-Marsteller paid DLA $140,000 for its services in 2003-4; It is infamous for its own work representing clients like the Argentine military junta government of General Jorge Videla (1976-1983), whose security forces murdered or disappeared at least 15,000 people.
  • Venezuelan banker Nelson Mezerhane paid DLA at least $60,000 in 2012. He is the former co-owner of Venezuela’s Globovisión television station, which supported the short-lived overthrow of elected president Hugo Chávez in 2002.
  • The Drummond Company (which paid DLA $100,000 from 2003-7) was reported to have hired private security forces to murder opponents of its open-pit mining operations in Colombia.
  • Great Lakes Chemical ($100,000 from 2003-4), is the largest U.S. methyl bromide supplier in the U.S. The toxin is responsible for serious health problems to vulnerable agricultural workers, many of whom are migrants from Latin America.
  • Triple Canopy ($640,000 between 2010-2012), is a private military corporation that works extensively in Latin America. In 2005, a Triple Canopy subsidiary was expelled from Honduras for illegally training Honduran and Chilean mercenaries to be sent to fight in Iraq. The company was condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination.

Earlier this year, DLA announced that Spain’s former Prime Minister José María Aznar (who had previously paid DLA Piper’s predecessor firm Piper Rudnick $2 million of Spanish taxpayer money in a failed attempt to secure the prestigious Congressional Gold Medal) had been named to the firm’s board as Senior Advisor on Latin America. Aznar is also a member of the Board of Directors at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. To call Aznar a major player in Latin American politics would be an understatement. From his 2002 support as Spanish Prime Minister of the 48-hour coup against Venezuela’s Chávez to his work at the powerful, rightwing Latin American Board at Georgetown University, Aznar, now at Johns Hopkins, has used his considerable political and economic clout to promote reactionary policies throughout the hemisphere.

An Al Jazeera America spokesperson responded by phone to a request for comment, asserting that there was a “misconception about the role of consulting firms such as ASGK and Qorvis” with relation to AJAM’s efforts to launch its cable channel. “They are not at all involved in any editorial decisions,” he added. Regarding the reduced role that is anticipated for AJAM’s international reporting, he said, “As far as coverage of Latin America, Al Jazeera International will continue to cover the region as strongly as Al Jazeera English did.” He conceded that this content would be unavailable to U.S. viewers, but especially given “America’s substantial Latino community,” he stated that AJAM will provide news that’s “relevant to Americans” from across the region.

*

It appears, based on several news reports, that AJAM has in fact made a decision, responding to advertisers and cable providers, to reduce the scope of its predecessor’s international coverage in favor of a U.S.-centric orientation. What remains of its coverage toward the Americas—while perhaps not directly influenced by consulting firms—seems unlikely to avoid being mediated by the considerations of agencies that have publicly touted their ability to circumvent and downplay the kind of fearless, confrontational reporting that Al Jazeera English has done to expose the unsavory activities of multinational corporations and the U.S. government throughout Latin America. This tendency seems to be the principal factor behind the transformation of its flagship nightly news program Inside Story Americas.

Shihab Rattansi, the host of AJE’s Inside Story Americas, has consistently shed light on crucial if neglected issues on both continents, often by inviting on to his program human-rights activists, social critics, and grassroots and community organizers. His program also routinely probed the structural defects of the mainstream media and the Washington establishment.* In its AJAM incarnation however, Inside Story Americas has been stripped of the plural noun “Americas” and Rattansi has been replaced. In contrast, the program’s new host, Libby Casey (formerly of C-SPAN), touts her ability to connect “Americans with top leaders in Washington including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, members of Congress, governors, journalists and think tank experts.” (Rattansi declined to comment about the nature of his departure.)

Rattansi and his colleagues at Inside Story Americas were exemplars of the most commendable aspects of Al Jazeera, as they provided viewers with a range of news that could be found on no other television network. Rattansi’s team doggedly pursued the case of a lethal 2012 U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration raid in Ahuas, Honduras; they offered some of the earliest and most consistent coverage of detainees’ hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay; and for years the program invited experts to discuss the UN’s negligent introduction of cholera into Haiti, which has killed over 8,000 so far. Climate activists conveyed the high stakes of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal; human rights lawyers elaborated on the illegality of U.S. drone strikes; and a heterodox economist and independent journalist questioned the durability of capitalism—all on Inside Story Americas.* As Bishara wrote, such critical coverage is an “essential element of [U.S.] democracy and freedom of speech, not to speak of the role of global media,” despite the predictable accusations of “anti-Americanism” that are surely hurled in response.

AJAM management has expended great energy to avoid the dreaded “anti-American” label; instead, they appear to have insinuated the network into the stratum of the most powerful economic and political actors within the United States. Not only does this jeopardize Al Jazeera’s most unique and socially valuable aspects, but in the process, Bishara writes, AJAM is “insulting” the intelligence of its U.S. audience “through empty gimmicks and poor marketing theatrics.”

As recurring contributors to Al Jazeera’s programming, we also worry that AJAM—now clearly embedded within a nexus of corporate, state and mainstream-media norms and behaviors—will fail to live up to its immense potential. The network has the opportunity to offer tens of millions of people in the United States a desperately needed worldview—one that is more independent and more challenging than the deeply compromised perspective that corporate television already provides.

* The videos of the examples cited can no longer be accessed online by U.S. readers due to Al Jazeera English’s content restrictions.

Adrienne Pine is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. Her latest book is Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras (UC Press 2008). She regularly writes about Honduras and U.S. foreign policy at her blog, Quotha.net.

Keane Bhatt is an activist in Washington, D.C. He has worked in the United States and Latin America on a variety of campaigns related to community development and social justice. His analyses and opinions have appeared in a range of outlets, including NPR.org, The Nation, The St. Petersburg Times, and CNN En Español. He is the author of the NACLA blog “Manufacturing Contempt,” which critically analyzes the U.S. press and its portrayal of the hemisphere. Connect with his blog on Twitter: @KeaneBhatt

August 21, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

South Korea halts nuclear reactor over safety concerns

Press TV – August 21, 2013

South Korea’s largest power plant has shut down one of its reactors as concerns over safety in the country’s nuclear industry linger on, reports say.

The reactor, one of six in Yeonggwang nuclear complex in the southwest, was closed on Wednesday, AFP quoted a spokesman of the Korea Hydro and Power Co. as saying.

“The cause of the stoppage is as yet unknown and investigations are underway. We don’t know when it will resume operations,” the spokesman said, assuring there was no threat of radiation leak.

The developments come as the nation’s nuclear plants have been grappling with ongoing problems due to the use of substandard parts in the a number of nuclear reactors over the past decade.

In 2012, the government announced that at least eight providers were found to have fake safety tests.

Officials at the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission immediately launched a probe into the scandal, an act which led to the closure of two nuclear reactors in in the same year.

In May 2013, two other reactors went offline. The commission also deferred starting operations at two more reactors, stating that the reactors would not resume their operations until the substandard parts were replaced.

South Korea has 23 nuclear reactors which provide a third of the country’s total electricity.

Related articles

August 21, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Nuclear Power | , , , , | Leave a comment

UK ignores Russian request on former Magnitsky boss Browder – prosecutor

RT | August 20, 2013

Great Britain was the only state that refused to fulfill the official request of Russian law enforcers in the search for William Browder, the former head of an investment fund wanted for embezzlement and tax evasion.

Russia’s Deputy Prosecutor General Aleksandr Zvyagintsev said at a Tuesday press conference in Moscow, “I have signed several requests addressed to Great Britain, Cyprus, Latvia and Estonia. All these countries excluding Great Britain fulfilled the international investigation instructions ahead of time.

“We hope that Great Britain heeds the international community’s call and hands us over the people who have violated the law. In the whole history of Russian-British relations the UK has only handed one person over to us – and this was an ordinary hooligan. As for the rest – the multi-millionaires and billionaires who continue to launder money in Albion – unfortunately, these are not extradited,” Zvyagintsev added.

William Browder is a US-born British citizen who founded the Hermitage Capital Management investment fund – a major firm working with Russian securities since the mid-1990s that earned its owners hundreds of millions of dollars. Browder fled Russia in 2006 after law enforcers showed interest in some of the fund’s financial schemes.

The investigation continued and led to a court process in which Browder was found guilty of large-scale tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in prison in absentia.

Another person convicted in this case is the now famous auditor, the late Sergey Magnitsky, whose name became known after his tragic death in a Moscow pre-trial detention center in 2009. According to forensic report, Magnitsky died of pancreatitis and a heart condition, but Browder and his colleagues have claimed that Russians law enforcers deliberately tortured and killed the accountant.

The case was intensely covered in the mass media and promoted in US political circles, eventually leading to the so-called Magnitsky Act – a US law imposing sanctions on Russian state and justice officials suspected in human rights violations.

Russia blasted the move as an attempt to influence an independent court in a sovereign state and retaliated with its own Guantanamo list – an act imposing sanctions on US officials suspected of violating Human Rights.

The spat between the two countries apparently allowed the General Secretariat of Interpol to refuse Russia’s warrant for Browder in July this year, claiming that the case was influenced by politics. It also ordered to delete all information about Browder from Interpol’s international databases.

Russia’s Interior Ministry replied with a statement that it was “puzzled by Interpol’s General Secretariat’s decision.”

“[The ministry] continues to consider Interpol an organization which is not motivated by political and judgmental decisions in its work, but acts solely in accordance with international law and the organization’s constitution,” the statement read.

August 20, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Another Economic Crash Is Inevitable

By Adnan Al-Daini | Dissident Voice | August 19, 2013

The economic crash of 2008 left people in their millions across the globe bewildered and shocked by the catastrophe and devastation inflicted on their lives: the hopelessness of the unemployed young facing a bleak uncertain future, pensioners struggling to survive on pensions that have lost their value, the employed poor accepting a cut in their working hours and wages to avoid losing their jobs, the very poor, the sick and disabled trying to survive the cuts to the welfare safety net. People find it difficult to comprehend how a few powerful bankers could cause so much damage and misery to the lives of countless millions.

In a previous article (Dissident Voice), two years ago, I wrote:

How did it come to this? What sort of a system have we created that gives so much power to these people? How is it that these people, who are entrusted with the money made by working people, end up gobbling up the money for which people have laboured so hard? How were they ever allowed to have such a stranglehold on the lives of millions? Where were the people we elected to look after us when such a distorted, corrupted form of capitalism was being developed? Were they so incompetent, or have they become part of an oligarchy that enriches them as well as the gamblers of the market?

So what has happened since then; have the masters of the universe who caused the crash changed their ways? Are they contrite for the misery they have caused? Have our politicians taken the necessary action to prevent another crash happening, or at least if it happens, ensure that it doesn’t threaten the entire economies of nations?

The Independent (April 2013), quotes Jeffrey Sachs, the well-known Columbia University economist as saying:

I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now…I am going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I am talking about the human interactions … I’ve not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably…. They have no responsibility to pay taxes; they have no responsibility to their clients; they have no responsibility to people, to counterparties in transactions.… We have a corrupt politics to the core, I am afraid to say, and … both parties are up to their neck in this. This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans.

It is clear that the “moneymen” have not changed their behaviour; their arrogance is undiminished, with no recognition of their responsibility to society.  The politicians, it seems, are unwilling or unable to take action to protect society from the next crash, which will surely happen if the necessary rules, laws, and regulations are not in place. Every attempt at reform is vigorously resisted with the argument that it interferes with the sanctity of the free market.

What is a free market? Is it something that can be objectively defined?  Professor Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge University argues this point thus:

The free market does not exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them…There is no scientifically defined boundary for a free market. If there is nothing sacred about any particular market boundaries that happen to exist, an attempt to change them is as legitimate as the attempt to defend them. Indeed, the history of capitalism has been a constant struggle over the boundaries of the market.

He cites the legislation in 1819 to regulate child labour in Britain as an example. This was a law prohibiting the employment of children under nine in cotton mills, which were considered particularly hazardous to workers’ health. This caused a huge controversy with opponents seeing it as ”destroying the very foundations of the free market.” No one, I hope, in the industrialised rich nations today, is suggesting that we should bring back child labour as part of liberalising our labour laws.

Our government, using hundreds of billions of pounds of our taxes, rescued the banks from collapse. Have they got the guts to do what is required to save us from the next collapse? I am not holding my breath.

Dr Adnan Al-Daini (PhD Birmingham University, UK) is a retired University Engineering lecturer. He is a British citizen born in Iraq. He writes regularly on issues of social justice and the Middle East.

August 19, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

Three-Quarters of Members of “Expert” Medical Guideline Panels Have Ties to Drug Industry

By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | August 17, 2013

The vast majority of medical experts in the U.S. who help formulate disease and diagnostic guidelines are taking money from the pharmaceutical industry, according to a new study.

The research published in the journal PLoS Medicine found that 75% of panelists who propose changes in disease definitions and diagnostic criteria had been paid by drug companies either as consultants, advisers or speakers.

Among those serving as chairs of these panels, 12 out of 14 were financially connected to the drug industry.

“Companies with financial relationships with the greatest proportion of panel members were marketing or developing drugs for the same conditions about which those members were making critical judgements,” Ray Moynihan, of Bond University in Robina, Australia, and colleagues wrote.

Examples cited by the researchers included GlaxoSmithKline, which had paid 20 of the 24 members of a 2009 task force that developed new definitions regarding asthma. It just so happens that the company sells the billion-dollar Advair, used to help asthma patients.

Also, Biogen, maker of the multiple sclerosis drug interferon beta-1a (Avonex), had ties to 13 of the 18 participants on a 2010 MS panel that expanded the definition to simplify diagnosis, the study revealed.

To Learn More:

Expanding Disease Definitions in Guidelines and Expert Panel Ties to Industry: A Cross-sectional Study of Common Conditions in the United States (by Raymond N. Moynihan, Georga P. E. Cooke, Jenny A. Doust, Lisa Bero, Suzanne Hill and Paul P. Glasziou, PLoS Medicine)

Pharma Ties Common on Guideline Panels (by David Pittman, MedPage Today)

Experts Related to Drug Makers Promote Narcotics for Seniors in Pain (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Doctors who Earn Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars Speaking for Drug Companies (by David Wallechinsky, AllGov)

August 18, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NSA to open new $60mln facility in N. Carolina university amid surveillance scrutiny

RT | August 16, 2013

While new disclosures this week have exposed inept oversight and gross privacy violations within the National Security Agency, news out of North Carolina has revealed that the NSA is spending $60.75 million on another brand new facility.

In the midst of an international debate focused on how the United States’ premier spy agency has conducted dragnet surveillance over much of the world, including at home, the NSA is expanding even further. The News & Observer reported on Thursday that North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC is receiving a $60.75 million grant from the NSA to develop a top-secret data analysis lab.

The grant, the paper reported, is three times larger than any award ever received by the university in the school’s history.

Randy Woodson, the school’s chancellor, said Thursday that the deal had been in the works for three years. He said he hoped the data center would make North Carolina a more attractive destination for technology companies. Woodson predicted that the project would create 100 jobs over five years.

“We appreciate the confidence of the National Security Agency to select NC State for this groundbreaking endeavor,” Woodson said in a statement. “Not only will it enhance the academic experience for our students and faculty, it will also add to the economic prosperity of our community through new jobs, new industry and new partnerships.”

Many details on the project have been kept secret because of national security, according to officials. But North Carolina State already has contracts with the Department of Defense, helping the agency research technology which will help soldiers identify improvised explosive devices and expand their foreign language capabilities, among other functions.

The NSA has come under harsh scrutiny in recent months due to the disclosure of classified surveillance programs which the government has used to justify monitoring the communications of Americans, as well as the international community. Internal emails published by the News & Observer reveal that North Carolina State originally intended to announce their deal with the NSA just before the leaks were published but decided to delay in fear of potential blowback.

“A very important announcement about our new NSA-funded Laboratory for Analytic Sciences was supposed to be made public this morning, but with that bit out of The Guardian newspaper on NSA collecting phone records of Verizon customers – everyone thought it best to not make the announcement just yet,” Randy Avent, the associate vice chancellor for research at NCSU, wrote in a message to other administrators. “By the way – our Lab is just that – a research program studying the fundamental science behind analytics. It is not a storage facility for classified data and does not work with any data like that mentioned in the article.”

The delayed announcement comes after another disclosure which further harmed the NSA’s reputation. The Washington Post published top-secret documents Thursday night which provide a glimpse into just how often the NSA breaks the law and invades the privacy of Americans. Thousands of violations were recorded in each of the years since the NSA’s power was expanded in 2008.

August 17, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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