By Emily Ramshaw | Texas Tribune | February 22, 2010
When state health officials were sued last year for storing infant blood samples without parental consent, they said it was for medical research into birth defects, childhood cancer and environmental toxins. They never said they were turning over hundreds of dried blood samples to the federal government to help build a vast DNA database — a forensics tool designed to identify missing persons and crack cold cases.
A Texas Tribune review of nine years’ worth of e-mails and internal documents on the Department of State Health Services’ newborn blood screening program reveals the transfer of hundreds of infant blood spots to an Armed Forces lab to build a national and, someday, international mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) registry. The records, released after the state agreed in December to destroy more than 5 million infant blood spots, also show an effort to limit the public’s knowledge of aspects of the newborn blood program, and to manage the debate around it. But the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit never saw them, because the state settled the case so quickly that it never reached the discovery phase.
DSHS spokeswoman Carrie Williams says that while the department’s general philosophy was to save blood spots for public health research, “we did not have an exclusive policy.” She says DSHS participated in the project because officials believed it would help in missing-persons cases — and knew the blood spots could not be linked back to a particular individual. “Our understanding of mtDNA is that it’s not used to pinpoint exactly who a person is, but can help determine origins,” Williams says. “Our intentions were good ones.”
But Jim Harrington, the civil rights attorney who filed the blood spot lawsuit last year on behalf of five Texas parents, believes DSHS meant to deceive the public. When he was negotiating with state officials, he says, he specifically asked what research the blood spots were being used for — and there was no mention of the federal mtDNA project. He says he was stunned by how quickly the state settled the lawsuit. “Sometimes there are slam-dunk cases, but I’d never seen this kind of case settle without discovery,” says Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project. “This explains the mystery of why they gave up so fast.”
For decades, the state has screened newborns for a variety of birth defects, pricking their heels and collecting five drops of blood on a paper card. Until 2002, the cards were thrown out after a short storage period. But starting that year, the state health department began storing blood spots indefinitely, for “research into causes of selected diseases.” Four years later, DSHS began contracting with Texas A&M University’s School of Rural Public Health to warehouse the cards, which were accumulating at a rate of 800,000 a year. State health officials never notified parents of the changes; they didn’t need consent for the birth-defect screening, so they didn’t ask for it for research purposes. The agency’s rationale was that it let parents who asked opt out of the newborn blood screening and de-identified all of the samples before shipping them off.
Over the last several years, researchers have requested Texas baby blood spots for a variety of medical projects: to study the gene involved in club foot, to inspect the DNA of infants who develop childhood cancer, to examine prenatal lead exposure. Those are the projects state health officials have touted repeatedly before lawmakers and critics. But the least publicized of these research projects is arguably the most interesting. Between 2003 and 2007, the state gave 800 de-identified blood samples to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) to help create a national mtDNA database.
MtDNA is extremely valuable in forensics because it’s easier to find and extract from human cells than nuclear DNA. In addition to blood, it can be identified in hair, bones, teeth and damaged or degraded biological samples and can be used to identify victims of mass disasters or to solve long-since-cold criminal cases. But it’s only as valuable as its sample size. AFDIL scientists, in conjunction with the research branch of the Justice Department, approached Texas in a $1.9 million effort to expand the country’s mtDNA database — part of the President’s DNA Initiative launched under George W. Bush. The researchers wanted “anonymous and maternally unrelated” blood samples from Texas Caucasians, African-Americans and Asians — and from Hispanics and Native Americans in particular — to round out their genetic record. The researchers also took samples from prison populations and infant blood screening in other states, including Florida, Minnesota and California. They did not pay Texas for the samples.
Eventually, research proposals indicate, federal officials hoped to be able to share this data worldwide, “for international law enforcement and investigation in the context of homeland security and anti-terrorism efforts.”
Whether Texas officials were concerned about the perception of the project, or simply didn’t think it was newsworthy, they never mentioned it. In presentations, in public reports and in e-mails sent to reporters as recently as last year, state health officials never brought up the federal project — even when they discussed the merits of roughly two dozen medical research projects designed to “unlock the causes of childhood disorders” like autism and diabetes.
In November, when The Texas Tribune first filed an open-records request with DSHS to review blood spot records, the agency said the information requested was confidential. Two weeks later, when the lawsuit settlement was formally signed, the Tribune asked again, and this time the agency relented. But the box of documents officials turned over hardly referenced the mtDNA project, aside from a single e-mail referencing a “US Department of Justice/National Institute of Justice and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology/Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory.” When the Tribune pressed health officials about the missing research files, they produced them, saying it was an oversight, and that the documents had been overlooked in their initial search.
The records the agency initially released paint a portrait of an agency that walked on eggshells around the baby blood spot collection — from 2001, when lawmakers first debated whether to warehouse the cards, through last year, when they passed a law in response to the civil rights lawsuit giving parents better options to opt out.
In 2001, when the Legislature considered a newborn-blood-spot collection bill that state health officials didn’t like, they took action. In an e-mail chain, an associate commissioner described how she and another official “planted questions” and “planted a note” with sympathetic lawmakers (former state Reps. Bob Glaze, D-Gilmer, and Glen Maxey, D-Austin) before a public hearing. “I suspect this bill will die …” wrote the official, who no longer works for the state. (The bill didn’t make it out of committee.) Glaze couldn’t be reached for comment. Maxey said he couldn’t recall the bill but routinely met with health department staffers to pick their brains about pertinent bills.
E-mails indicate that in 2003, when the agency started to release blood spots for outside research, officials knew they had a parental consent issue on their hands — but tried to avoid it. When a researcher proposed a project, the director of birth defects monitoring wrote that he’d “prefer to not have to go through” the process of getting consent. Another agency official responded that parents “never consented for blood spots to be used for research. … On the other hand, I believe [the health department] already uses (deidentified?) blood spots for some research, so that might not be a big deal.”
In 2006, when the agency was beginning to store blood spots at Texas A&M, the university asked for permission to put out a press release announcing it. The agency balked. “What do you think of this idea? Makes me a bit nervous,” the manager of the birth defects surveillance division wrote in an e-mail to five of his colleagues. Another responded: “This makes me nervous. Genetic privacy is a big ethical issue & even though … approval is required for use of the spots in most situations and great care is taken to protect the identity of the spots, a press release would most likely only generate negative publicity.” One official asked the university not to do it; the university agreed.
When asked about the e-mails, agency officials said a decision not to send out a press release “isn’t an indication of our level of openness.” “We don’t routinely do news releases about every agency initiative or contract,” Williams says, “and obviously this is a sensitive topic.” But they acknowledged that staff members are not permitted to “plant” questions with lawmakers. Given that the e-mail exchange happened in 2001, and that the employee no longer works for the agency, Williams says, “there is no way for me to definitively tell if there was any punishment.”
Scientists say baby blood spot research is incredibly valuable, and that the genetic origins of human diseases can be traced through mtDNA samples if there are enough available. They say there are fail-safe methods for stripping identifying information from the samples, so they could never be used for illicit purposes. The problem, some say, is that scientists have used the public’s unease with the subject as an excuse not to talk about it. “As scientists, we’ve failed in teaching people about genetics in the United States,” says Dr. Bennett Van Houten, a molecular oncologist at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute who formerly worked at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “We need to work harder at that — at teaching them the facts.”
Williams says that at the direction of lawmakers last session, parents now receive more information at the hospital about the storage and use of bloodspots and are given a better opportunity to opt out. While the agency is destroying more than 5 million baby blood spots collected before the new legislation took effect, she says, officials are not asking outside researchers — including those at the Armed Forces lab — to return the samples they were given. But they must destroy them when they are done with them.
“The core mission is to screen all babies for life-threatening disorders,” Williams says. “We care deeply about this mission, and we have made some changes and are moving forward.”
Source
February 24, 2010
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By Francesca Galasso | The Dominion | February 22, 2010
VANCOUVER—When the last of the Olympic athletes ski, skate and slide out of town, Vancouverites will be left with an unexpected legacy: 970 cameras.
“Security investment always leaves a good legacy of security for the country,” International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge told media gathered last February in Whistler, marking the one year countdown to the Games.
The security bill for the Olympics is expected to reach the $1 billion mark. A March 2009 Vancouver city report includes the total cost of installing Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems. The Vancouver 2010-Integrated Security Unit (V2010-ISU) will pay $2.1 million, in addition to the $435,000 the province is contributing. But all costs do not appear on the balance sheet. There are also social costs, such as the diminished personal privacy in public spaces.
In March 2009, Philip Boyle and Kevin Haggerty from the University of Alberta, published a report about surveillance and the Vancouver Olympics.
“Public officials occasionally use the pretext of the Olympics to introduce forms of surveillance that the public might oppose in any other context, capitalizing on the fact that in anticipation of the Games citizens tend to be more tolerant of intrusive security measures,” wrote Boyle and Haggerty in Privacy Games: The Vancouver Olympics, Privacy, and Surveillance.
The apparent acceptance of increased surveillance is something that requires a sober second thought, according to Adrienne Burk, professor in Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.
“It’s important to ask ourselves what happens socially when we set up this kind of system of monitoring,” she told The Dominion. “Does the presence of cameras transmitting our images to unknown viewers help us know our neighbors better, or less well? Is there an increase in fear and suspicion, or in feelings of community and safety? We have to be careful when cameras are introduced for one reason, but left in place, or re-deployed for another, without these contextual conversations taking place.”
Although the Vancouver city report Privacy Games: The Vancouver Olympics, Privacy, and Surveillance points to the cruise ship terminal and entertainment district as key areas the cameras will be installed, the City of Vancouver and the V2010-ISU have not been specific regarding locations for all CCTV systems.
“Approximately 900 CCTV security cameras will be installed at venues for the Winter Games with another 50-70 CCTV security cameras installed in the urban domain,” states the report. “The urban domain consists of areas where the public will gather outside a venue,” reads the V2010-ISU’s website.
The urban domains have been dubbed “Safe Assembly Areas” by the ISU. These are areas, also known as “Free Speech Zones,” or “Protest Pens,” where people are allowed to engage in lawful protest.
Minimal research has been conducted on the number of surveillance cameras that currently exist in the Downtown area. A collaborative effort between the Vancouver Public Space Network and the Simon Fraser University Surveillance Project aims to change that.
Late in August volunteers set out to count and record the locations of cameras they could spot on city streets and alleyways. This data will be published in a report to be released later this year.
“Surveillance cameras are distributed primarily in focused local areas or higher end shopping areas,” David Eby, Executive Director of BC Civil Liberties Association told The Dominion in a telephone interview.
Eby calls attention to the irony of the scenario of increased cameras in Vancouver. “You end up with a paradoxical situation where low income and middle income neighborhoods essentially, financially and logistically, facilitate the displacement of crime into their neighborhoods.”
People who are engaged in so-called “undesirable activities” such as panhandling in shopping districts like Robson Street or Gastown, may end up being displaced from public spaces as a result of security cameras that business owners argue are necessary in order to increase consumer confidence.
BC Civil Liberties has received confirmation from the ISU that no new cameras will be installed in the Downtown Eastside, an area of Vancouver that is the poorest off-reserve postal code in Canada.
The Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) identified some of the the problems with CCTV back in 1999 when it challenged the VPD’s efforts to install cameras in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
“Cameras do not provide employment or housing opportunities… Rather than targeting business-operators or landlords who take advantage of poverty and addictions, [the use of CCTV] focuses on the behavior of those individuals who do not fit the expectations or mores of the camera monitors,” their report states.
Ten years later, the CCAP report is still relevant to the concerns about the social costs of these cameras in the context of the Olympics and the Downtown Eastside.
Andrew Pask, director of the Vancouver Public Space Network, cautions that CCTV cameras should only be seen as a “tool of last resort.”
The pattern of Olympic cities, including Athens, Turin, and Beijing, has been to retain surveillance cameras after the Games.
The City of Vancouver has admitted the $435,000 worth of cameras will not be temporary, but part of a “redeployable unit.”
“You know, witnessing has always been a fundamental aspect of democracy, involving actors, observers, and recording of incidents,” professor Burk indicates.
“But cameras complicate that relationship, because the viewers and actors can be removed from each other, and recordings substantively altered,” she said, arguing for a public debate before more cameras are installed.
Francesca Galasso is a 4th-year sociology student at Simon Fraser University. She lives in Vancouver.
For up-to-the-minute Olympics resistance coverage, check out the Vancouver Media Co-op, and the Convergence website.
The Dominion
February 23, 2010
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By Anis Hamadeh | February 19, 2010
Dr. Norman Finkelstein wrote several books in the field Israel/Palestine/Holocaust and is one of the most sagacious analysts of our time. Similar to Professor Ilan Pappe, he formulates sharp criticism in respect to past and presence of the State of Israel, and both use very rational argumentations and are reliable researchers. Especially since the mass murders in Jenin and in Gaza, these two men and many other Jews (also in Germany) speak out, because they do not want to be taken in for violent purposes by a state that arrogates to speak and act in the name of all Jews.
As is known now, both the Heinrich Boell Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation have canceled Finkelstein talks that were already scheduled in Berlin. While the foundation close to the Green party did not even bother to explain its behavior, the board of the foundation close to the Left party explained its drawback in a media info with the empty statement that such a talk would be “explosive” (“brisant”).
What is going on there, one wonders. Does Finkelstein call for violence? Are his views outside legal norms, does he disesteem the human rights? Nothing of all this. On the contrary. The reason for banning him is the veto of groups that seek to avert criticism of Israel, connecting this issue with the reproach of anti-Semitism. This is an old chestnut and not specifically interesting. What is interesting, though, is that the German public buys this nonsense and denies a man, who lost his family in German concentration camps, to talk on German soil, tolerating that he is labeled an anti-Semite for his reflections on violence in Israel. The same thing actually happened only some months ago to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in Munich, when the city’s Lord Mayor canceled a scheduled talk. Pappe then wrote in an open letter that his father “was silenced in a similar way as a German Jew in the early 1930s”.
The German Self-Conception
So let us revisit the German self-conception and then take a short look at the historical background to understand this apparantly great fear that is going around in Germany. Recently, when the Israeli politician Shimon Peres talked on the occasion of the Holocaust Memorial Day in the German Bundestag, he received standing ovations. The few, who did not stand up for their refusal of Peres’ and Israel’s violent policies, were publically attacked. There is, for example, the quote of a member of the Bundestag: “The Nazi crimes, the Shoa, and the war of annihilation are the original crime of humanity. (…) The Jewish victims of National Socialism are memorized on January 27 in the Bundestag memorial. On this occasion, only they and the reminder of ‘Never again!’ can be the topic. Everything else in this context is a relativization of the Nazi crimes.” It is a quote typical for Germany and reveals the German angst as well as the great danger that goes with it.
The genocide of the Jews in this quote is taken out of any historical context and declared a unique event. Firstly, this reveals a “We (We!) are the greatest” narcissism. Secondly, it reveals a pro-Jewish racism, as if one racism could make up for another one. Not the victims are important, no, the Jewish victims are. The Nazi killing of Sinti and Roma thus is kind of OK. And how much then will the killing of Palestinains be OK if conducted by Jews. Put in a more general way: while calling the genocide of the Jews the “original crime”, the unique and incomparable act, every other crime is relativized and thus not so important. Finkelstein and Pappe do not fit in here, they disturb the celebration by entering the historical framework, which is all the more embarrassing as they are Jews with family ties to Nazi victims. Banning them shows that in the end even Jewish Nazi victims are not what the whole circus is about, despite all the pathetic oaths and solemn declarations. This is what Germany fears, that people realize that public “Remembering the Holocaust” is a fake and that Finkelstein and Pappe are eloquent and powerful enough to unmask this pharce.
Germany has decided to do penance for the Nazi crimes by means of supporting the State of Israel. When it stands in solidarity with the Zionist state, then Germany would fulfil its historical responsibility. This dogma is not questioned, although it is beyond any logic to support Zionism of all things in order to do penance. Beyond logic not in the first place because there had been fruitful cooperations between Nazis and Zionists. (It was in the interest of both ideologies to bring Jews out of Germany.) What is much worse is that violence is not recognized as the problem. Thus Hitler has won in the end, for the violence that made this criminal a criminal in the first place, this violence has not stopped. On the contrary: the compulsive “Never again!” serves as a justification of violence and killing. This works only because the genocide of the Jews was taken out of its historical context and floats around freely.
The Israeli Self-Conception
Both Finkelstein and Pappe write about the missing historical context and this is what people are afraid of, for both use their arguments brilliantly, even compelling, and they are concerned as Jews whose families have Nazi experiences. Like Goldstone, Chomsky, and some others, the two academics are subject to hate and rejection of the ruling Zionism and its strenuous friends. Finkelstein lives in the USA, where Zionism is even stronger than in Israel, and he does not lead an easy life. Pappe needed to go to exile in England, because life in Israel became unbearable for him. He wrote the book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” in which he clearly shows how the Israeli state was built on heavy violence. Considering that both authors face bans in Germany it is no wonder that there is not much heard of the events around 1948 other than flat stereotypes.
According to the Israeli self-conception the Zionist state emerged out of a “War of Independence”. In this view, the Jewish victims of National Socialism have created a state to protect themselves and were immediately attacked by their evil Arab neighbors. This version of the story is sacrosanct and is defended with great hysteria, be it in Israel or in Germany, because it does not bear with a neutral analysis. For when Israel was founded in May 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine had already been going on for half a year. This was called “Plan Dalet/Plan D” and everybody can read about it. Hundreds of indigenous Palestinians were killed and hundreds of thousands were expelled from their villages by Zionist militias. According to the Israeli self-conception many Palestinians went away voluntarily, as if anybody would voluntarily leave their home and property just like that.
International pressure led to the UN partition plan which deprived the native population of a little more than half of Palestine which was to be given to the Zionists. Yet the Zionists were not content with that. They received weapons and took more of the land by force. When they then built a state on this land, they did not do it in agreement with anybody, but unilaterally and surprisingly. The dogma of the “right of existence” was invented so that people would not talk about these events anymore. Here is the seed of the problems we are confronted with until today. It is possible to begin earlier, with the Sykes Picot Treaty or the first settlers from abroad who for the most part did not integrate, but appeared aggessively. One can talk about the British and about Zionist and Arab terrorism, about Jabotinsky and other pioneers. But it is the founding of the state and Plan D which show most clearly why history is escalating until today.
The massacre of Deir Yassin happened in the framework of this plan, it was covered in the world press. Nobody was ever held responsible for this blood-spree and thus a precedence was created which is working until today. Nobody has been taken to account for the mass murder in Gaza, neither, and all the other massacres that Israel habitually commits. The Plan D land theft is another precedence, for up to this day the Israeli territory gets wider while the Palestinian territory shrinks. All this is inherent in the biased concept of “right of existence”, as are the race laws from 1950 which guarantee all Jews in the world a “right of return” to Israel while the expelled native population had to keep out, an unprecedented act in the long history of the country. Their land and property was confiscated by the new masters who clinged to a blood-and-soil ideology. A lot of this reminds one of the Nazis, which by no means is a wonder, when you consider the victim/perpetrator dynamics. It is known that victims, because of their traumas, are prone to become perpetrators and it is so obvious that it takes a whole lot of energy to suppress the respective discourse. It is suppressed, in militarized Israel just like in Germany, it is taboo. For this reason, a government of right-wing extremists in Israel is not a problem. Right-wing extremism is not right-wing extremism, when it comes to Israel.
The Tip of the Iceberg
The cancelation of Finkelstein’s talks are but the tip of a huge iceberg. While these lines are written, Palestinian houses in Barta’a Ash-Sharqiya are being demolished and in Sheikh Jarrah/Jerusalem new land thefts are scheduled. A big historic Arab graveyard is to be confiscated to build a “Museum of Tolerance” on it while in Bil’in the nonviolent resistance against the wall enters its sixth year. The protesters are injured by the army on a regular basis, and also killed. The world press says almost nothing about the heroes of nonviolent resistance, because it does not fit the image. Russian Jews in Be’er Sheva in the Negev have just killed a bedouin boy and heavily injured another, while a group of fundamentalist settlers have injured a Palestinian child in Hebron. About 11.000 Palestinians are kept in Israeli prisons. The “checkpoints” to Nablus have been closed down recently so that nobody can enter. The Gaza fishermen are being shot at by the Israeli navy and Gaza is still under siege. The head of the Dubai police just confirmed that according to police investigations there is a very high probability that the Mossad is behind the murder of a Hamas politician in the Emirates. Every day you can read on http://www.theheadlines.org what happens in the country and that since 1948 there has been no change of the routine. In Germany, the Palästina Portal is one of the sources one can turn to.
Most of what happens remains unknown to us, our media skips most of it, in fear of an increasing “anti-Semitism”. It is for the same reason that we are not to listen to Finkelstein and Pappe, for they verify the terrible events and the historical development sketched above. Instead, we are fed with “information” on “terrorism”. It is well-known to some of the leading politicians and opinion-leaders that the Israeli policy can only lead to the self-destruction of the State of Israel. Call it a culture of death. Maybe self-hatred is another reason for this behavior, something human rights advocates like Finkelstein and Pappe are labeled by exactly those who display it themselves. But even according to our mainstream dogmas we have a big problem here, for this development is bad for the Jews, too, the Zionists among them and the anti-Zionists.
Norman Finkelstein (http://www.normanfinkelstein.com) will talk about Gaza in Munich on Feb. 24, 7 p.m. Amerikahaus, Karolinenplatz 3, and on Feb. 25, 7 p.m., Kulturhaus Milbertshofen, Curt-Mezger-Platz 1
SOURCE – Also available in German
February 22, 2010
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance |
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BY BENJAMIN WEINTHAL – 21/02/2010 – Excerpts
The controversial American Jewish political scientist Norman Finkelstein’s attempt to secure locations last week in Munich and Berlin to deliver anti-Israel lectures
Finkelstein, whose scheduled talk – “One year after the invasion of the Israeli army in Gaza and the responsibility of the German government in the starvation of the Palestinian population” – generated protests and cancellations last week…
Initially, he was scheduled to speak in the Trinitatis evangelical church in Berlin, with organizational and financial support from the political foundations of the Green Party, Left Party, German-Palestinian organizations, and a fringe group of anti-Zionist Jews.
Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel in 2008 because of his pro-Hizbullah solidarity activity in Lebanon. According to a February New York Times review of a documentary on Finkelstein, he waved a banner during a protest against the First Lebanon War in 1982, “urging ‘Israeli Nazis’ to ‘stop the Holocaust in Lebanon.’”
The Heinrich Böll Foundation, affiliated with the Green Party, pulled the plug on its involvement and said in a statement: “We regret our decision… and because of careless, insufficient research we made a fiercely bad decision. Finkelstein’s behavior and his theses take place, in our view, not within the framework of justified criticism.”
There has always been an insatiable market, particularly among the Left, for Finkelstein’s views in Germany, largely because he allows many Germans to air anti-Israel sentiments in a politically and socially correct way. A spokeswoman from the respectable Piper publishing house in Munich, which publishes his books, told The Jerusalem Post that Finkelstein’s anti-Israel Holocaust Industry sold 150,000 copies in 2001, catapulting it to best-seller status.
It’s not hard to explain the popularity of Finkelstein in Germany: If the son of Holocaust survivors can equate Israel with Nazi Germany and charge American Jewish organizations with exploiting the Holocaust to tap into the guilt and financial chords of Germans, then Germans can breathe more easily and alleviate their sense of guilt and connection to the Shoah.
Finkelstein’s background serves as a social-psychological crutch that allows many Germans to invoke his Jewish biography to insulate themselves from accusations of anti-Semitism.
After the cancellation of the support of the Green Party foundation and the Trinitatis church, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which is affiliated with the Left Party, offered to provide a venue for Finkelstein. A diverse group of pro-Israel organizations – including the BAK Shalom Working Group within the Left Party – protested the foundation’s decision. Henning Heine, a spokesman from the foundation, issued a statement, saying “we underestimated the political explosiveness of Finkelstein’s lecture” and rescinding its offer.
BAK Shalom is a group of young Left Party members who seek to end their party’s adherence to flourishing anti-Zionist positions within the party.
Rising pressure from the pro-Israel community also prompted the Amerika House in Munich to walk away from its support of Finkelstein’s appearance.
The last refuge for Finkelstein is the headquarters of the notoriously pro-Islamic Republic leftist Junge Welt daily, a leftover from the former communist East Germany. Finkelstein will deliver his talk on Friday in the gallery of the paper’s building in Berlin. – Full article
February 22, 2010
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By Jonathan Cook | The National | February 21, 2010
NAZARETH // The Israeli government and its right-wing supporters have been waging a “McCarthyite” campaign against human-rights groups by blaming them for the barrage of international criticism that has followed Israel’s attack on Gaza a year ago, critics say.
In a sign of the growing backlash against the human-rights community, the cabinet backed a bill last week that, if passed, will jail senior officials from the country’s peace-related organisations should they fail to meet tough new registration conditions.
The measure is a response to claims by right-wing lobbyists that Israel’s human-rights advocates supplied much of the damaging evidence of war crimes cited by Judge Richard Goldstone in his UN-commissioned report into Israel’s Operation Cast Lead.
Human-rights groups funded by foreign donors, such as the European Union, would be required to register as political bodies and meet other demands for “transparency”.
Popular support for the clampdown was revealed in a poll published last week showing that 57 per cent of Israeli Jews believed “national-security” issues should trump human rights.
In a related move, right-wing groups have launched a campaign of vilification against Naomi Chazan, the Israeli head of an American Jewish donor body called the New Israel Fund (NIF) that channels money to Israeli social justice groups. The NIF is accused of funding the Israeli organisations Mr Goldstone consulted for his report.
Billboard posters around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and a newspaper advertising campaign, show a caricature of Ms Chazan with a horn growing from her forehead under the title “Naomi-Goldstone-Chazan”.
“We are seeing the evaporation of the last freedoms of speech and organisation in Israel,” said Amal Jamal, head of politics at Tel Aviv University and the director of Ilam, a media-rights organisation that would be targeted by the new legislation. The Israeli political system, he added, was being transformed into a “totalitarian democracy”.
Leading the charge against human-rights groups – most of which are officially described as “non-governmental organisations” – has been a self-styled “watchdog group” known as NGO Monitor. Its activities have won support from the government following the international censure faced by Israel for its attack on Gaza.
The bill, approved by a ministerial committee last week, is the product of a conference staged in the parliament in December by Gerald Steinberg, NGO Monitor’s director, and a settler-backed organisation known as the Institute of Zionist Strategies.
A professor at Bar Ilan University, Prof Steinberg presented a report to MPs and ministers that referred to peace groups as “Trojan horses” and argued for imposing constraints on funding from European governments and the NIF.
In a statement at the time, Prof Steinberg said: “For over a decade European governments have been manipulating Israeli politics and promoting demonisation by funding a narrow group of favored non-governmental organisations.”
He has reserved special criticism for advocacy groups for the country’s Arab minority and for Jewish groups opposing the occupation, accusing both of promoting an image of Israel as an “apartheid” state that carries out “war crimes” and “ethnic cleansing”.
According to his report, 16 Israeli peace NGOs received US$8 million (Dh29m) in European funding in the previous three years.
Pressure has been building in the government for action. This month Yuli Edelstein, the diaspora affairs minister and a member of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, told reporters the cabinet had been “concerned for a time with a number of groups under the guise of NGOs that are funded by foreign agents”.
One of the MPs who participated in December’s conference, Zeev Elkin, also of Likud, initiated the legislation.
Although the bill will need to pass a vote of the parliament, backing from the government has dramatically increased its chances of success.
According to the legislation, human-rights groups will have to satisfy a long list of new conditions. They include: registering as political bodies; submitting ID numbers and addresses for all activists; providing detailed accounts of all donations from overseas and the purposes to which they will be put; and declaring the support of foreign countries every time an activist makes a speech or the organisation stages an event.
Senior officials in NGOs that fail to meet the requirements face up to a year in jail.
Hagai Elad, head of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s largest human-rights law centre, said there was “a very hostile political climate” and that freedoms were being attacked “one step at a time”.
“These are classic McCarthy techniques, portraying our organisations as enemies of the state and suggesting that we are aiding Hamas and terror groups.”
He added that NGOs were heavily regulated under Israeli law. “Which leaves me with a troubling question: given that we are already transparent, what is the real motivation behind this legislation?”
Caught in the middle of the campaign against the NGOs has been Ms Chazan, a former dovish MP.
Maariv, a populist newspaper, published a report last month by a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu that blamed Ms Chazan and the NIF for funding human-rights groups responsible for 90 per cent of the criticisms of Israel contained in the Goldstone Report that were from non-official sources.
A counter-report last week suggested that in reality only about four per cent of the citations were from NIF-funded groups, and many were unrelated to the Gaza operation.
But the attack on Ms Chazan has rapidly gained traction, with commentators denouncing her in the media and the derogatory billboard posters springing up across the country.
The campaign against the NIF was backed this month by a petition signed by a long list of former generals, including Giora Eiland, the previous head of the National Security Council, and Doron Almog, a recent chief of the army’s southern command.
Ms Chazan has also been sacked by the right-wing Jerusalem Post newspaper after 14 years serving as one of its few liberal columnists, while an article accusing Ms Chazan of “serving the agenda of Iran and Hamas” was distributed to foreign journalists by the Government Press Office.
Ms Chazan said: “They’re using me to attack, in the most blatant way, the basic principles of democracy.”
NIF has pointed out that Im Tirtzu’s funders include Christians United for Israel, a group led by pastor John Hagee, who made the headlines in the US presidential race in 2008 when in a speech supporting contender John McCain he said “Hitler was fulfilling God’s will”.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae – Source
February 22, 2010
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By Kirk McElhearn | Macworld.com | February 19, 2010
For a company whose unofficial slogan is “Don’t Be Evil,” Google has been ignoring its so-called core value with alarming frequency as of late. And because of that, I decided to delete my Gmail account, along with all other Google services that I am able to do without. I have also deleted as much personal information as possible from my Google profile.
I still need to use some Google services–I have clients who share a couple of documents via Google Docs, I need to access one private blog on Blogger, and I will continue to use Google search (though I plan on exploring alternatives, such as Bing and Yahoo). But for the most part, I’m dropping Google wherever I can.
It was a combination of recent incidents that drove me to this point. One was the introduction of Google Buzz, which, in some cases, disclosed contact information that users thought was private. When Google launched Buzz, its “social networking tool,” the company didn’t let users opt into the program, but automatically applied it to all of the millions of users of the company’s free Gmail. Google quickly backtracked, but it is not clear whether the “turn off Buzz” link at the bottom of Gmail pages truly purges the links that Google created.
The second incident was the recent deletion of a number of music blogs from Google’s Blogger and Blogspot platforms without even notifying the owners of the blogs or attempting to determine whether the shutdowns were valid. This is not the first time that Google has pulled the plug on music blogs because of DMCA complaints, but some bloggers claim that their blogs were perfectly legal), because they had permission for every track they posted. While MP3 and music blogs are a popular way of distributing copyrighted content without the owners’ permission, not every such blog is violating the law. A similar shutdown of blogs last year lead to Google’s developing new guidelines, but this current incident shows that someone at Google didn’t read the new rules.
Google’s actions in these incidents were certainly not accidental, and they are part of a growing trend. Whether it be Google’s censorship of search results for Chinese users–the company helped build the Great Firewall of China before it was against it–or Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s flip comment regarding privacy (“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”), Google has become a corporation that has strayed from its initial values. By choosing an opt-out model for Buzz that basically forced all Gmail users to become a part of this service, Google simply hoped that everyone would ignore this lack of choice and accept it tacitly, so the next time it wanted to impose new features, people would consider it normal. That choice failed, fortunately.
Google has become so monolithic that it has reached the point of a near-monopoly in certain areas. To be fair, no other search engine comes close to Google in quality, and, while the company should be lauded for that, it’s the way Google uses that search engine, and related services, that makes it the Standard Oil of the 21st century. (I won’t discuss the potential issues involving Google Books; or how the company is milking news organizations via Google News; or the many other issues that one could raise about the company.)
But not only does Google dominate the search (and, hence, advertising) market, it also knows a lot about you. By adding more and more “free” services–free in exchange for the annoyance of ads, and for users’ giving up their privacy–Google accumulates a wealth of information about your interests, your browsing habits, your contacts, the blogs you visit (using your Google profile), pictures of your home, and much more. (Do you know how much information Google has connected to your Gmail address? Check here: You may be surprised.) Not only does Google have this information on its servers, but if anyone were to be able to hack into your Google account, they’d have a wealth of information about you too (and your business, if you use Google Docs for business documents).
(Note that, for those who use Firefox, there’s an add-on, Google Sharing, that lets you use most Google tools without sharing any private data.)
And all that information, and all those “free” services, are amassed and provided for one simple goal: to follow your every movement on the Internet and show you ads related to your searches, e-mails and documents. Many people accept the “free” services in spite of those ads, which, when you look closely, often depend on the content of your personal e-mails. Is the Trojan horse of free e-mail, YouTube videos, and online word processing documents worth giving up one’s privacy, all so a company can make billions from ads? (Your personal information and search habits earned Google more than $6 billion in profits last year.) For me, it’s not.
Google knows more about you than the NSA, and has recently shown that it doesn’t give a hoot about your privacy. The company has gotten too big, and has turned into just another corporation trying to maximize its assets–and those assets are you. Who’s to say Google won’t progressively loosen its privacy controls and monetize more and more personal information?
I’m ditching Google as much as I can, and when a competitor develops a search engine as good as Google, I’ll stop searching with Google, too. The trend that Google has been following has been looking darker and darker as the company nibbles away at the limits of privacy. This is no longer a company I trust.
Source
February 20, 2010
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ACLU, AAUP And NCAC File Brief Urging Court To Uphold First Amendment In Ward Churchill Case
ACLU | February 18, 2010
NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Colorado, American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) today submitted a brief to a Colorado Court of Appeals arguing that the University of Colorado, a publicly funded university, should reinstate a tenured professor who was wrongly terminated from his job there for exercising his right to free speech.
“The First Amendment prohibits public officials from suppressing lawful speech or retaliating against those who engage in such speech, no matter how unpopular or offensive the speech may be to some people,” said Aden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group. “That is especially the case in the university setting, where the Supreme Court has made clear that First Amendment freedoms must be vigilantly protected.”
After he was fired from the teaching post he had held for many years, Ward Churchill sued the University and its Board of Regents alleging that he was unconstitutionally terminated because of a controversial and unpopular essay he had written concerning the events on September 11. In April 2009, a jury agreed that Churchill was fired for expressing his personal opinions, which is a clear violation of his First Amendment rights.
However, a judge denied Churchill’s petition to be reinstated to his job, essentially denying him any relief for the blatant denial of his rights. Churchill is appealing that decision to the Colorado Court of Appeals. The ACLU, ACLU of Colorado, AAUP and NCAC filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting reversal of the trial court’s decision, arguing that plaintiffs whose constitutional rights have been violated must be provided with a remedy, and that in this case, Churchill should be reinstated to the job from which he was wrongly fired.
“Denying a remedy to people whose rights have been violated amounts to gutting the Constitution,” said Mariko Hirose, a legal fellow with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group. “The court has a responsibility to ensure the University of Colorado rights its wrong and reinstates Professor Churchill immediately.”
“Unless the trial court’s ruling is corrected, university professors will receive the chilling message that silence is smart and voicing unpopular views can be fatal to their careers,” said Mark Silverstein, ACLU of Colorado Legal Director. “The First Amendment right to speak out is meaningful only if it is enforceable in court.”
Today’s friend-of-the-court brief is available online at: www.aclu.org/free-speech/ward-churchill-v-university-colorado-et-al-amicus-brief
Attorneys include Fine and Hirose of the ACLU First Amendment Working Group, Silverstein of the ACLU of Colorado, Rachel Levinson of AAUP and Joan Bertin of NCAC.
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
February 19, 2010
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Ewa Jasiewicz, The Electronic Intifada, 17 February 2010
The Polish army’s announcement that it will buy seven Aerostar Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) from Israel’s Aeronautics earlier this month was heralded as a step forward for Poland’s “stabilization” mission in Afghanistan. The UAV, or drone, has long been a key tool in the military arsenals of both the United States and Israel. The US leads the export market, followed by Israel, which as of last year was the planet’s third-biggest arms exporter, arming regimes around the world to the tune of $6.75 billion in 2009
The drone is more than simply a flying camera; it is killing machine in itself. American-made “Predator” and “Reaper” drones are currently used above Afghanistan and Pakistan and carry a payload of 200 kilograms — the weight of three adult men. In January 2010 alone, Predators killed 123 innocent civilians in Pakistan. During this period only two missiles hit their intended targets, in the extrajudicial killings of three al-Qaeda leaders.
Israel’s “Hermes 450” drone was used extensively during the invasion of Gaza last winter, dubbed “Operation Cast Lead” by the Israeli military. Like its American counterparts, the Hermes can also fire missiles, including the “Spike” missile which weighs up to 150 kilograms. Despite being defined as a “battlefield reconnaissance” weapon, drone-launched missiles were the biggest single cause of death during the 23-day invasion. According to Palestinian human rights organization Al Mezan, 519 persons — more than a third of the total casualties — were killed by UAVs. The next closest were 473 Palestinians killed by Israeli warplanes, including American-made F-16s.
The majority of Palestinians killed during the invasion were civilians. Palestinian medics reported a preponderance of civilian deaths by drones — families like the Berbakhs in Rafah who lost five members or the Abed Rabbo family’s six members who were killed by UAV-launched missiles. During the fighting it was common to find the mangled bodies of unarmed men cut down in the streets at night — victims of Israel’s UAV-enforced “aerial curfew.”
Poland’s military has embarked on a “Polonization of Israeli technology” drive, coupling Israeli weapons-manufacturing technology with Polish manpower and raw materials. Poland’s Bumar Group has a 10-year offset deal worth $400 million with Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to produce Spike missiles for drones and helicopter gunships. Under the deal, Rafael must accept Polish components in its own weapons.
The Spike missiles are currently produced at the ZM Mesko factory in southern Poland. During the Second World War Mesko was occupied by German forces and both Jewish Polish and Polish slave-workers manufactured ammunition for the Third Reich. According to the Israeli Embassy’s Defense Attache here, the venture at Mesko represents the most successful example of the Polonization of Israeli technology. He told this writer, “Now, 60 years after the Holocaust, this company is providing Israeli technologies with Polish manpower for the benefit of the whole world.” The residents of Afghanistan, Palestine and West Papua wouldn’t agree.
The current round of UAVs being sold to Poland are unarmed but will be used to guide F-16 bombing missions in Afghanistan. Poland, with 2,600 troops occupying the country is one of the US’s top ten biggest recipients of Foreign Military funding. Following the completion of a $3.8 billion contract for delivery of 42 F-16s in 2003, the US Air Force has been training Polish pilots how to use the new planes. According to Colonel Timothy Burke, Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the US Embassy in Warsaw, “The pilots should be qualified in the next few years. Once training has been completed, they will be using the F-16s for aerial missions” armed with laser-guided, GPS-enabled “smart-weapons.”
The first Polish S-70i Blackhawk helicopter is also ready to roll this year. It is the product of a trilateral geopolitical military alliance comprised of Israel’s Elbit Systems, the US’s United Technology Corporation and Poland’s PZL Mielec. This alliance is expected to deepen in the coming years.
Israel has also given regular strategic and technical advice to the Polish military command. According to the Polish Ministry of Defense, between 1995 and 2009 there were more than 200 activities including mutual trainings of military units, exchange of expertise, courses, seminars and symposiums organized by the Polish-Israeli Working Group. The working group is comprised of officials from the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs of both countries.
Last autumn, Poland’s Chief of Staff Gen. Franciszek Gagor participated in a training session with Israeli defense specialists on lessons learned from “Cast Lead” and “how to deal with the headlines.” According to the Israeli government, “Information warfare is one of the most developed issues of the past two decades. We have built a structure in the Israeli Defense Forces which includes information warfare. Coping with media challenges is one of our biggest issues.”
The Polish Ministry of Defense’s Vision of the Armed Forces 2030 Plan has a similar structure including “Information Forces” to police enemy media. According to the plan, “The enemy shall use a broad range of mass media in order to support its actions. By diffusing images displaying inhumane aspects of military operations, suffering of the civilian population, including children and persons advanced in years, the enemy shall try to preserve perception of the intervention forces as occupying troops which do not respect human rights. Based on the ideology or religion, it will instill fear, feed hatred and strive for mobilization of the local and international public opinion against military forces and states fulfilling mandate of international organizations.”
By equating the broadcast of the horrific realities of war and particularly its effects on a civilian population with “propaganda” and de facto enemy activity, this policy risks censoring and criminalizing investigative journalism and respect for human rights and international law. We journalists and human rights activists could be the enemy. And if we step out of line, the “Information Forces” could whip us into shape as “The units shall be intended for offensive and defensive actions carried out in order to get information predominance over the enemy and to achieve expected military [political] results of the conducted operation.”
As modern warfare takes on an ever more aerial, alienated and indiscriminate approach to “the enemy,” governments are forcing us to keep our distance. Whether it is soldiers in bunkers guiding UAVs with joysticks or keeping the men, women and children being bombed by our militaries out of our sight through media gagging orders, it is ever more urgent that this distance be closed and those in charge of military policy be held accountable for their devastating results.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a co-Editor of Le Monde Diplomatique Polish Edition where a version of this article was originally published.
Source
February 17, 2010
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Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes |
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Current law prohibits ambiguous sorts of help — “training,” “personnel,” “expert advice or assistance” and “service.”
By Adam Liptak | New York Times | February 10, 2010
WASHINGTON — Ralph D. Fertig, a 79-year-old civil rights lawyer, says he would like to help a militant Kurdish group in Turkey find peaceful ways to achieve its goals. But he fears prosecution under a law banning even benign assistance to groups said to engage in terrorism.
Ralph D. Fertig, a civil rights lawyer, is challenging a law that bans even benign assistance to groups said to engage in terrorism.
The Supreme Court will soon hear Mr. Fertig’s challenge to the law, in a case that pits First Amendment freedoms against the government’s efforts to combat terrorism. The case represents the court’s first encounter with the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks — and its first chance to test the constitutionality of a provision of the USA Patriot Act.
Opponents of the law, which bans providing “material support” to terrorist organizations, say it violates American values in ways that would have made Senator Joseph R. McCarthy blush during the witch hunts of the cold war. […]
“Congress wants these organizations to be radioactive,” Douglas N. Letter, a Justice Department lawyer, said in a 2007 appeals court argument in the case, referring to the dozens of groups that have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the State Department.
Mr. Letter said it would be a crime for a lawyer to file a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a designated organization in Mr. Fertig’s case or “to be assisting terrorist organizations in making presentations to the U.N., to television, to a newspaper.”
It would be no excuse, Mr. Letter went on, “to be saying, ‘I want to help them in a good way.’ ” […]
Mr. Fertig is president of the Humanitarian Law Project, a nonprofit group that has a long history of mediating international conflicts and promoting human rights. He and the project, along with a doctor and several other groups, sued to strike down the material-support law in 1998.
Two years earlier, passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act had made it a crime to provide “material support” to groups the State Department had designated as “foreign terrorist organizations.” The definition of material support included “training” and “personnel.” Later versions of the law, including amendments in the USA Patriot Act, added “expert advice or assistance” and “service.”
In 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright designated some 30 groups under the law, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Khmer Rouge and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The United States says the Kurdish group, sometimes called the P.K.K., has engaged in widespread terrorist activities, including bombings and kidnappings, and “has waged a violent insurgency that has claimed over 22,000 lives.”
The litigation has bounced around in the lower courts for more than a decade as the law was amended and as it took on a central role in terrorism cases. Since 2001, the government says, it has prosecuted about 150 defendants for violating the material-support law, obtaining roughly 75 convictions.
The latest appeals court decision in Mr. Fertig’s case, in 2007, ruled that the bans on training, service and some kinds of expert advice were unconstitutionally vague. But it upheld the bans on personnel and expert advice derived from scientific or technical knowledge.
Both sides appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the consolidated cases in October. The cases are Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, No. 08-1498, and Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, No. 09-89. The court will hear arguments on Feb. 23.
David D. Cole, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Mr. Fertig and other challengers to the law, told the court that the case concerned speech protected by the First Amendment “promoting lawful, nonviolent activities,” including “human rights advocacy and peacemaking.”
Solicitor General Elena Kagan countered that the law allowed Mr. Fertig and the other challengers to say anything they liked so long as they did not direct their efforts toward or coordinate them with the designated groups.
A number of victims of McCarthy-era persecution filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to remember the lessons of history.
“I signed the brief,” said Chandler Davis, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, “because I can testify to the way in which the dubious repression of dissent disrupted lives and disrupted political discourse.”
Professor Davis refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954 and was dismissed from his position at the University of Michigan. Unable to find work in the United States, he moved to Canada. In 1991, the University of Michigan established an annual lecture series on academic freedom in honor of Professor Davis and others it had mistreated in the McCarthy era.
Mr. Fertig said the current climate was in some ways worse.
“I think it’s more dangerous than McCarthyism,” he said. “It was not illegal to help the communists or to be a communist. You might lose your job, you might lose your friends, you might be ostracized. But you’d be free. Today, the same person would be thrown in jail.”
A friend-of-the-court brief — prepared by Edwin Meese III, the former United States attorney general; John C. Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer; and others — called the civil liberties critique of the material-support law naïve.
The law represents “a considered wartime judgment by the political branches of the optimal means to confront the unique challenges posed by terrorism,” their brief said. Allowing any sort of contributions to terrorist organizations “simply because the donor intends that they be used for ‘peaceful’ purposes directly conflicts with Congress’s determination that no quarantine can effectively isolate ‘good’ activities from the evil of terrorism.”
Mr. Fertig said he could understand an argument against donating money, given the difficulty of controlling its use. But the sweep of the material-support law goes too far, he said.
“Fear is manipulated,” Mr. Fertig said, “and the tools of the penal system are applied to inhibit people from speaking out.”
NYT
February 11, 2010
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