US accused of torture

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

 

THE United States's willingness to resort to harsh interrogation techniques in its so-called war on terror undermined human rights and the international ban on torture, a United Nations spokesman says.

Manfred Nowak, UN Special Rapporteur on torture, said the US's standing and importance meant it was a model to other countries which queried why they were subject to scrutiny when the US resorted to measures witnessed at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison.

Mr Nowak was speaking after releasing his finding that the use of torture was routine and widespread in Sri Lanka ,despite laws against it.

"I am very concerned about the undermining of the absolute prohibition of torture by interrogation methods themselves in Abu Grahib, in Guantanamo Bay and others, but also by rendition and the whole CIA secret places of detention. All that is really undermining the international rule of law in general and human rights but also the prohibition of torture," said Mr Nowak...

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CIA director defends interrogation techniques

31 Oct 2007

 

[JURIST] CIA Director Michael Hayden [official profile] defended the CIA's interrogation tactics Tuesday in the wake of the refusal [JURIST report] of US Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey [WH profile] to say whether waterboarding [JURIST news archive] constitutes torture. In an address [CCGA materials] to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Hayden called the CIA's interrogation programs "as lawful as they are valuable." AP has more.

Both Democrats and Republicans [JURIST reports] have said they will oppose Mukasey's nomination if he does not unequivocally state that waterboarding is torture. The US military forbids waterboarding - a technique that simulates drowning, but the CIA will not confirm whether it has banned the practice. Former CIA director George Tenet has repeatedly denied [JURIST report] that waterboarding has been used during interrogations of terror suspects.

 

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'The Neo-Cons Unfettered Access to Americas Secrets'

Sep. 18, 2005
 
EXCLUSIVE REPORT: THE DEMISE OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS SECURITY

By Wayne Madsen

During the Cold War, if the United States suffered a massive
compromise of its own cryptographic security and, at the same, time
experienced a thorough penetration of its communications intelligence
yielding the sensitive sources and methods whereby the U.S.
intelligence community tapped and decrypted the communications of
its adversaries, the Soviet Union would have been able to dictate
surrender terms for America and its allies.

For years, the National Security Agency (NSA) maintained highly
classified back doors into the encrypted communications of worldwide
foreign ministries, military commands, banks, international
organizations, and even the Vatican, the International Committee
of the Red Cross, and the United Nations. In addition, the United
States spent billions of dollars to develop highly secure cryptographic
systems to protect its military, intelligence, and diplomatic
communications from the prying ears and eyes of its enemies.

However, according to U.S. intelligence sources with connections
to both the Reagan and Clinton administrations, Americas most
sensitive communications security and cryptologic secrets have been
totally compromised by a Fifth Column embedded within the recent
past and current administrations  the group generally identified
as neo-conservatives, political ideologues rooted in a peculiar
blend of Trotskyism and fascism -- ideologues who are neither new
nor conservative in ideology but whose intentions are to weaken
Americas national security to a degree that ruins the very foundations
on which the nation was built.

One of the major NSA success stories since its establishment on
October 24, 1952 was the rigging of the encryption machines of the
Swiss company Crypto AG in a secret deal cut between NSAs William
Friedman and Boris Hagelin, the developer of the Hagelin cipher
machine used by the Allies in World War II. In 1958, Hagelin, who
founded Crypto AG in 1950, agreed to the deal with NSA. It was the
height of the Cold War.

For U.S. intelligence, the Hagelin-NSA deal was an intelligence
coup on the level of the U.S. breaking of Germanys Enigma code and
Japans Purple code in World War II. Neutral nations trusted a Swiss
company to sell encryption machines as highly-reliable as Swiss
watches and as trusted as Swiss bank accounts....

 

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Secrecy threatens historical record, State Dept is told

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2007, Issue No. 108
November 1, 2007

Secrecy News Blog:  http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Broad classification restrictions on the disclosure of historical
intelligence information are making it difficult or impossible to
accurately represent the record of U.S. foreign policy, an official
advisory committee warned the Secretary of State last summer.

By law, the Department of State is obliged to publish "a thorough,
accurate and reliable documentary record" of United States foreign
policy in its official Foreign Relations of the United States series.

But due to official secrecy, "the credibility of the series... remains
in the balance," according to the newly disclosed report of the State
Department's Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation.

For example, "The blanket denial by the CIA of the right to quote or
cite from the President's Daily Briefs of the Nixon years and beyond
will make it difficult to give a full and accurate rendering of the
effect of intelligence assessments on the foreign relations of the
United States.... [T]he continued exemption of the President's Daily
Briefs may cause serious harm to the intellectual integrity of the
Foreign Relations series."

Similarly, the Committee complained, the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board "has not allowed the historians of the
[Foreign Relations] series access to its records [which] need to become
accessible to the staff of the [State Department] Office of the
Historian and be made available for inclusion in appropriate volumes of
Foreign Relations of the United States."

In short, "Committee members believe that unless policies consistent
with respect for the right of the American people to be fully informed
about their government's conduct of foreign policy are adopted and
implemented by the Executive Branch, it may become impossible for The
Historian [of the State Department] to carry out his duties or for the
committee to carry out its Congressionally mandated obligations."

See "Report of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic
Documentation, January 1-December 31, 2006," transmitted to the
Secretary of State on June 19, 2007:

     http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/state/hac2006.pdf

The Radiation Poisoning Of America

By Amy Worthington

Prior to 1996, the wireless age was not coming online fast enough, primarily because communities had the authority to block the siting of cell towers. But the Federal Communications Act of 1996 made it nearly  impossible for communities to stop construction of cell towers "even if they pose threats to public health and the environment. Since the decision to enter the age of wireless convenience was politically determined for us, we have forgotten well-documented safety and environmental concerns and, with a devil-may-care zeal that is lethally short-sighted, we have incorporated into our lives every wireless toy that comes on the market. We behave as if we are addicted to radiation. Our addiction to cell phones has led to harder "drugs" like wireless Internet. And now we are bathing in the radiation that our wireless enthusiasm has unleashed. Those who are addicted, uninformed, corporately biased and politically-influenced may dismiss our scientifically-sound concerns about the apocalyptic hazards of wireless radiation. But we must not. Instead, we must sound the alarm.
 
----
 
Illa Garcia wore jewelry the first day she went back to work as a fire lookout for the state of California in the summer of 2002. The intense radiation from dozens of RF/microwave antennas surrounding the lookout heated the metals on her body enough to burn her skin. "I still have those scars," she says. "I never wore jewelry to work after that."
 
Likely Mountain Lookout, on U.S. Forest Service land with a spectacular view of Mount Shasta, is one of thousands of RF/microwave "hot spots" across the nation. A newly-erected cellular communications tower was only 30 feet from the lookout. "One antenna on that tower was even with our heads," recalls Garcia. "We could hear high-pitched buzzing. There were also three state communications antennas mounted on the lookout, only 6 feet from where we walked. We climbed past them every day."
 
Motorola company manuals for management of communications sites confirm that high frequency radiation from these antennas is nasty stuff. Safety regulations mandate warning signs, EMF awareness training, protective gear, even transmitter deactivation for personnel working that close to antennas. Garcia and co-worker Mary Jasso were never warned about the hazards. This,  they say, demonstrates extreme malfeasance on the part of agencies and commercial companies responsible for their exposure.
 
By the end of fire season, Garcia and Jasso were so ill they were forced to retire and the lookout was closed to state personnel. Garcia, 52, is now severely disabled with fibromyalgia, auto-immune thyroiditis and acute nerve degeneration. Medical tests confirmed broken DNA strands in her blood and abnormal tissue death in her brain.
 
Dr. Gunner Heuser, a medical specialist in neurotoxicity, states that Garcia's disorders are a result of chronic electromagnetic field exposure in the microwave range and that "she has become totally disabled as a result." Dr. Heuser wrote, "In my experience patients develop multisystem complaints after EMF exposure just as they do after toxic chemical exposure."
 
Jasso, who worked the lookout for 11 seasons, is also disabled with brain and lung damage, partial left side paralysis, muscle tremors, bone pain and DNA damage. Jasso discovered that all lookouts who worked Likely Mountain since 1989 are disabled. At only 61 years of age, she has lost so much memory that she cannot remember back to when her first three children were born. She fears that communications radiation may be a major factor in the nation's phenomenal epidemics of dementia and autism....

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"Think of the psychedelics as Google's biggest trade secret"

From the Reality Sandwich blog:

This here and now is the frontier. Round two for the monkeys playing with fire. Round one with wood-burning fire was fun. Scary. Awesome when it rips through the forest. Delicious when it leaves a roast pig in the ashes. But how to use and control fire—warmth, protection, metallurgy, better spears, pottery, roast pig on demand—took a lot of experimenting, accidental discoveries, and risk before it became an evolutionary catalyst. Ditto for the psychedelic fires. Seeing the tsunami of evolutionary change as it approaches—and you can see it from altered states, as you know, noetically, grokkingly—this changes everything.

I have the advantage of hindsight, but I’ve noticed even the best-traveled psychonauts, the navigators and pilots of the interdimensional transport systems, the manufacturers and distributors of the fuel, have trouble holding the knowledge that this changes everything—in baseline consciousness. The findings are orthogonal to baseline paradigms of history and evolution, or a baseline sense of scale, or baseline perceptual settings. It’s just too big. Few have grokked the cognitive, creative, and ethical advantages conferred by the psychedelics. Those that have are already implementing the findings, and, well, taking over the world.

Take Google snagging Larry Brilliant to run Google.org. What do you get when you hire a phormer phreak, a Neem Karoli Baba spiritual guy who worked to eradicate smallpox with the WHO, later a Seva Foundation founder and doctor bringing sight to the blind in Nepal with his wife and Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy? Brilliant was on “The Bus,” for gawd sakes, and he brings, quoting the San Francisco Chronicle article, “ his pursuit of humanitarian goals and his longtime obsession with the technology business, particularly the potential for technology to connect people with each other and with information” [emphasis mine].

Think of the psychedelics as Google’s biggest trade secret.

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Rachel Marsden: "One man's torture is another man's CIA-sponsored swim lesson"

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IHT: 'Bush's dangerous liaisons'

By Francois Furstenberg
28 Oct 2007

Much as George W. Bush's presidency was ineluctably shaped by Sept. 11,
2001, so the outbreak of the French Revolution was symbolized by the events
of one fateful day, July 14, 1789. And though 18th-century France may seem
impossibly distant to contemporary Americans, future historians examining
Bush's presidency within the longer sweep of political and intellectual
history may find the French Revolution useful in understanding his curious
brand of 21st-century conservatism.

Soon after the storming of the Bastille, pro-Revolutionary elements came
together to form an association that would become known as the Jacobin Club,
an umbrella group of politicians, journalists and citizens dedicated to
advancing the principles of the Revolution.

The Jacobins shared a defining ideological feature. They divided the world
between pro- and anti-Revolutionaries - the defenders of liberty versus its
enemies. The French Revolution, as they understood it, was the great event
that would determine whether liberty was to prevail on the planet or whether
the world would fall back into tyranny and despotism.

The stakes could not be higher, and on these matters there could be no
nuance or hesitation. One was either for the Revolution or for tyranny...

 

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