statism watch

Mitch Potter, Toronto Star
July 2, 2008

Policy trumps personality as his ministers give EU briefing on global program for climate change

PARIS—The opening message was neither subtle nor especially kind last month when President Nicolas Sarkozy’s senior cabinet colleagues gathered to brief journalists on the world according to France.

As the television crews unfurled their cables, readying to capture the sound byte du jour, they were summarily told to pack their things and leave.

“There will be no cameras. This is for people who want to think,” a government aide announced tersely.

For the next 90 minutes, Sarkozy’s ministers and the fifth estate embarked on a rare detour from personality driven politics with a freewheeling question-and-answer session all about policy.

Specifically, it was about France’s ambitious hopes and dreams to lead the world toward a truly global deal on climate change as it assumed the revolving European Union presidency yesterday for the coming six months.

“That was fantastic. That was old school,” said Louis-Gilles Francoeur, who has covered environmental issues for Montreal’s Le Devoir since the 1970s.

“After Sarkozy’s first year in power, this was the last thing we expected. But this is a government that wants to be taken seriously. So they are getting serious.”

How serious? Critics point out that the next six months — four months, really, when you allow for the summer and winter holidays that will distract European decision-makers from actually making decisions — may not be enough to win consensus on a single issue, let alone the laundry list of climate/energy, agriculture, immigration and European defence files Sarkozy has signalled as the paramount French priorities.

“The cynics view this primarily as an exercise in rebranding President Sarkozy so that people associate him less with tabloid exploits and more with issues of global gravitas,” a senior diplomatic source in Paris told the Toronto Star.

“But it is about more than making Sarkozy’s private life private again. This is a government of extremely capable senior officials who have been frustrated by all the distractions. They want to shine, to show what the Sarkozy project is really about.”

French officials say their overarching goal is to forge a comprehensive European consensus on climate change, with binding carbon reduction requirements of 20 per cent and an increase in renewable energy to 20 per cent by 2020.

They hope to work out the details by year’s end so that Europe will be able to codify the program in time for a crucial climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009, when world leaders meet to determine what is to succeed the ineffective Kyoto Protocol.

Full Story | See Also: B.C. carbon tax kicks in on Canada Day | Dion begins selling green plan | They call it cap and trade, but it’s just another fuel tax | House of Commons adopts Layton’s Kyoto Plus bill | Quebec, Ontario sign historic climate pact | Every adult in Britain should be forced to carry ‘carbon ration cards’, say MPs | Dion begins selling carbon plan | Time has come to put ‘price on waste and pollution’: Dion | Is it time for toll roads? | CEOs call for ‘aggressive’ action on climate change

Scott Shane, New York Times
July 2, 2008

WASHINGTON – The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

…

The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.”

The sessions included “an in-depth class on Biderman’s Principles,” the message said, referring to the chart from Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,” have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.

“It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.”

Full Story | See Also: US Counterinsurgency Manual Leaked, Calls for False Flag Operations, Suspension of Human Rights | Torture was expected in ‘top-down’ decision to deport Arar: lawyer | Bid to Block Afghan Detainee Inquiry Slammed | CSIS suspected U.S. would deport Arar to be tortured: documents | What Ottawa doesn’t want you to know: Government was told detainees faced ‘extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial’

CBC News
July 2, 2008

The Crown’s star witness in the trial of the first person charged under Canada’s Anti-terrorism Act told an Ottawa court Wednesday that he never discussed a fertilizer bomb plot with the accused.

The admission at the trial of Mohammad Momin Khawaja came during the defence’s cross-examination of Mohammad Junaid Babar, a former al-Qaeda operative turned police informant.

Khawaja, a 29-year-old Canadian of Pakistani descent, faces seven Canadian charges in a failed 2004 plot to bomb a London nightclub, a shopping centre and several public sites. He has pleaded not guilty and denies being part of the al-Qaeda-inspired plot.

Babar, an FBI informant who has admitted to setting up terrorist training camps in Pakistan, testified he wasn’t even aware of the plot when he met Khawaja on the way to one of the training camps in 2003.

Khawaja’s defence team tried to discredit Babar’s testimony, highlighting discrepancies between what Babar told a British court two years ago and what he told a Canadian court last week, the CBC’s James Cudmore reported from the trial.

Those attending training camp tricked: defence

Defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon suggested the men who attended the training camp in northern Pakistan were tricked by British conspirator Omar Khyam into believing they were going to fight in Afghanistan, not participate in a bomb plot in Britain.

“The trick was to talk about Afghanistan, train these guys for Afghanistan, and not tell them about the U.K. bomb plot,” Greenspon told the court. Babar agreed.

Full Story | See Also: Trial of Canadian charged in UK fertilizer bomb plot gets underway | FBI Informant in British terror trial given immunity, proceedings raise question of what MI5 knew about 2005 London bombings | Five guilty in UK bomb plot | Terror accused refuses to discuss links to Pakistan secret service, family threatened | London terror plotter was ‘hardened’ in ISI camp | Fertiliser claim in terror trial | Terror informant names plotters |  Former British Ambassador Says Liquid Bomb Terror Alert Is “Propaganda” | British ‘Terror Suspects’ Were in Contact With MI5 | Eight held in British anti-terror raids | US Allowed Taliban, Al-Qaeda Airlift Evacuation

Elaine Sciolino, New York Times
July 2, 2008

PARIS – France’s much-praised system of using sweeping arrests and aggressive interrogations and prosecutions to combat terrorism violates the rule of law and prevents suspects from receiving a fair trial, according to a human rights report released Wednesday.

France prides itself on having the most efficient counterterrorism strategy in Europe. French counterterrorism officials insist that the flexibility of French law and the French judicial system has been crucial in their ability to respond to the threat of international terrorism and has helped prevent attacks on French soil.

But an 84-page report issued by New-York-based Human Rights Watch, entitled “Preempting Justice,” argues that that French practices result in too many arrests and convictions based on scanty evidence, putting the country “on the wrong side of the law.”

There was no immediate comment from the French government,

Specifically, the reports states that the broad and much-used charge of “criminal association in relation to a terrorist undertaking” is so sweeping that it is in essence “guilt by association” that allows authorities to arrest and interrogate large numbers of people even when they have nothing to do with suspected terrorist activity.

The charge is used in a number of other countries in continental Europe.

Full Story | See Also: Armed Police to Roam Toronto High Schools | Berlusconi puts 2,500 troops on streets of Italian cities to patrol alongside police | Terror Bill Passes Narrowly in Britain’s House of Commons | Machine Gun-Toting Officers To Patrol NYC Subway | Britain is slithering down the road towards a police state

Graeme Smith, The Globe and Mail
July 2, 2008

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — The prison cells that once held Taliban sit almost empty, with little remaining except rubbish: plates of rice ready for meals never eaten, and sandals discarded by fugitives who ran away in bare feet.

Some of the debris inside Sarpoza prison offer hints about what happened amid the chaos last month when the Taliban accomplished one of the largest jailbreaks in modern history, freeing at least 800 prisoners and rampaging into Kandahar without facing any serious resistance from Canadian troops or the other forces assigned to protect the city.

…

Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, the top Canadian commander in Kandahar, confirmed that NATO surveillance tracked the fugitives as they fled. But he said it’s not Canada’s job as part of the International Security Assistance Force to hunt down escaped prisoners.

“You can ask yourself the rhetorical question, what if we find 100 fugitives in the fields?” Gen. Thompson said. “What is ISAF’s duty in that circumstance? Is it to go arrest people?”

The commander continued: “We’re not policing this country, right? It’s not our role to police this country. Our role is to stand behind our Afghan partners and assist them.”

But the Afghan forces stationed nearby did not consider themselves capable of standing up to the Taliban that evening, as police in three outposts around the prison hunkered down behind their fortifications and refused to intervene.

Local and foreign intelligence agencies also failed to understand glaring signs of trouble at the jail in the weeks before the attack, including a mass poisoning of prison guards just eight days beforehand. Taliban fighters warned local shopkeepers about an impending battle in the hours before they struck, but nobody passed the warning to the correct authorities.

Corruption likely helped the Taliban that night, too, as some indications have implicated a senior Afghan official in the jailbreak planning.

Sifting through the rubble at Sarpoza prison, it’s obvious that the attack was not just a successful Taliban operation. It was a failure of the institutions that protect Kandahar city, despite the Canadian money and lives expended to build a zone of security here in the past two years.

Three of the city’s top Afghan security officials have been fired in the aftermath of the jailbreak, and the prison director has been arrested. A review by Afghanistan’s intelligence service concluded that the prison needed more guards, better weapons and stronger fortifications. But the lessons of Sarpoza may prove more fundamental, pointing to the fragility of the international efforts in Afghanistan.

…

Prison officials say a few members of the prisoners’ committee also held regular meetings, in private, with prison director Colonel Abdul Qadir. It’s not known what they discussed; one of the prison officials who helped arrange the meetings was shot in the head during the jailbreak, and Col. Qadir was arrested soon afterward.

An insurgent who escaped, a 28-year-old father of two children who didn’t want his name published, said the Taliban planners were helped by jail officials.

“Important officials from the jail helped us bring in pistols and mobile phones, and we also bought some explosives for the bombing,” the fugitive said.

…

The insurgents shepherded the groups of escapees down narrow alleyways, through vineyards, and across streams. When they heard aircraft, they took cover under trees or lay down in fields of wheat.

Mr. Ahmad’s group spent the night camped in a village about 12 kilometres south of the prison, but others didn’t go as far, flopping down to sleep one or two kilometres away from the scene of the jailbreak.

Many of them expected the government or foreign troops to chase them, and expressed amazement at the lack of pursuers. Canada’s Quick Reaction Force, deployed from Camp Nathan Smith about six kilometres away, was seen by one Western observer arriving at Sarpoza around 11 p.m., after the shooting had stopped.

Roughly 400 Taliban escaped the national-security wing, and only three were recaptured.

“I thought that there would be big fighting, aerial bombardments, and many Taliban would be killed some arrested,” said a Taliban fighter, now enjoying freedom with his family in Kandahar city. “But when we reached our safe houses we were surprised, because there was no fighting, nothing.”

He added: “I didn’t think we would succeed like we did.”

*****

HOW IT HAPPENED:

Some events may have happened simultaneously and therefore not in the sequence given here.

1. In the hours before the bombing, insurgents warn people to evacuate the area because of an impending attack.

2. Minutes before the attack, rockets or rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) explode near Dand Chowk and Gendama police barracks.

3. A fuel tanker drives up to the main gate of Sarpoza prison. Moments later, RPGs hit it, and the explosion knocks out windows a kilometre away.

4. A metal chunk of the main gate lands in the criminal section, and other bits of debris shower down on the rest of the compound.

5. Guard towers at each corner of the prison walls have been recently constructed with Canadian funding but are unfinished. Guards return fire against the Taliban only from the southwest tower.

6. An office for the traffic police is partly destroyed by the blast.

7. A guard is blasted into pieces by a rocket-propelled grenade as he’s taking cover at this location.

8. Three more guards are killed at these locations.

9. Inmates open fire from a cell in the national-security wing that contains Taliban prisoners.

10. Six guards in the main tower, which stands in the centre of the jail, take cover and survive.

11. The Taliban go straight for the national-security wing and shoot the locks off the gates. A few go a distance inside and distribute weapons to comrades.

12. This is the national-security wing, containing accused Taliban, murderers and kidnappers.

13. After opening the national-security wing, the insurgents break open the criminal wing.

14. There is damage in the rehabilitation wing of the prison.

15. Taliban break down the door of the women’s section.

16. Most of the prisoners run across the ruins of the main gate and go south.

Full Story | See Also: Canadian military silent on Afghan civilian deaths: UN investigator | US Counterinsurgency Manual Leaked, Calls for False Flag Operations, Suspension of Human Rights | Report: U.S. Gave Green Light For Taliban Prison Attack | Don’t look, don’t tell, troops told in response to Afghani child abuse | Post-traumatic stress disorder’s hidden scars | Over 100 complaints about access to govt. info on Afghan mission: report | Canada sets up new military spy unit | Bid to Block Afghan Detainee Inquiry Slammed | Army begins using $150,000 artillery shells | FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report | Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts | 9/11 widows call for new investigation after revelations of White House, commission ties | Director of 9/11 commission “secretly spoke with Rove, White House” | Eight U.S. State Department Veterans Challenge the Official Account of 9/11 | Twenty-five U.S. Military Officers Challenge Official Account of 9/11 | Ex-Italian President: Intel Agencies Know 9/11 An Inside Job | Afghan poll not as clear as it seems | 9/11 – the big cover-up? | New Bin Laden Video: 100% Forgery | What Ottawa doesn’t want you to know: Government was told detainees faced ‘extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial’ | The Lies that Led to War | U.S. Government Caught Red-Handed Releasing Staged Al-Qaeda Videos | US Allowed Taliban, Al-Qaeda Airlift Evacuation

Deborah Kotz, US News
July 2, 2008

About a month after being vaccinated against the cervical cancer-causing HPV virus, 13-year-old Jenny Tetlock missed the lowest hurdle in gym class, the first hint of the degenerative muscle disease that, 15 months later, has left the previously healthy teenager nearly completely paralyzed. Did the vaccine, Gardasil, cause her condition? Her father, Philip Tetlock, a psychology professor at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, has embarked on an odyssey to find out whether the vaccine or random coincidence is to blame.

As father and scientist, Tetlock has contacted top medical experts, posted pleas on discussion boards looking for other teens who’ve experienced neurological problems post-vaccination and has been desperately trying to get the government to open an investigation into his daughter’s case. “The weakening process is gradual so it may take months for parents to notice what is going on,” he writes me in an E-mail. He started a blog a few weeks ago that shows photos of his sweet-faced teen and reveals his anger and frustration in the form of a box counting the days that he has yet to get a response from the government’s Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Network. As of today, it’s 28.

He’s not the only one to raise an alarm. The conservative public watchdog group Judicial Watch has been periodically obtaining adverse event reports on Gardasil from the Food and Drug Administration. I received the group’s latest warning this week: of 10 deaths linked to Gardasil since September 2007 and 140 reports so far this year of serious effects such as miscarriage and Guillain-Barré syndrome, a nervous system disease that causes weakness and tingling in the arms and legs. (But these reports filed by patients or doctors with the government’s vaccine adverse event reporting system may or may not reflect true vaccine risks. Some problems may be missed or underreported, while others, including sudden deaths, may have nothing to do with the vaccine itself.)

Judicial Watch opposes efforts in many states to make the vaccine mandatory for all girls ages 11 and 12. Those efforts have raised concerns among religious groups that protecting against the sexually transmitted virus will encourage promiscuity among teen girls. The FDA insists there’s no medical reason to be worried. “We’re monitoring the safety of the HPV vaccine very carefully, and the only adverse event that causes some concern is syncope or fainting after the vaccine,” says Robert Ball, director of the FDA’s office of biostatistics and division of epidemiology at the center for biologics evaluation and research. Higher rates of Guillain-Barré have been associated with the swine flu vaccine and possibly with the meningitis vaccine Menactra, but it is no more common in those who get Gardasil than in those who don’t, says Ball. The same goes for other side effects like spontaneous miscarriage.

What’s more, the FDA has not documented any other cases of vaccine-related peripheral motor neuropathy–what Jenny has–either in the adverse event reports filed by doctors and patients or in the manufacturer’s clinical trial data. Merck, the vaccine’s manufacturer, has dismissed the possibility that Jenny’s condition was caused by Gardasil. “We’re aware of this case and based on the facts that we’ve received, the information doesn’t suggest that this event was causally associated with vaccination,” says Merck spokesperson Kelley Dougherty.

Tetlock, though, wonders if Jenny carries genes that predisposed her to problems with the Gardasil vaccine. At age 10, Jenny developed a rare skin disease called pityriasis lichenoides that’s thought to be triggered by an overactive immune system, and her grandmother died of a nervous system disease. Could it be that certain genetic tendencies make some people more likely to develop severe reactions from vaccines? I ask Ball. “That’s an important question,” he responds. “We just don’t know.” It’s certainly going to be a topic of future research, he adds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is starting to look at whether those who developed Guillain-Barré after being vaccinated share a common set of genes. So Tetlock could find out someday if his hunches are correct.

At this moment, he and his wife, Barbara Mellers, also a professor at Berkeley, are focused on being with their daughter as she struggles to breathe on her own. “Jenny endures terrible suffering each day,” Tetlock tells me via E-mail. “She must watch her capacity to control her own body gradually ebb away–and each day her hopes of ever having a normal human life recede ever further into memory. The disease is cruel beyond belief.”

As a parent, I’ve wrestled with whether or when to get my 12-year-old daughter vaccinated against HPV. As much as vaccines are vital in protecting against life-threatening infectious diseases, they do, indeed, have the potential to cause harm–however rare that may be. Evidence is mounting that the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal could trigger autism in certain susceptible kids, as my colleague Bernadine Healy previously reported. We don’t know yet whether Jenny’s illness is linked to Gardasil, though it’s certainly plausible given the timing of symptoms several weeks after vaccination, which is when vaccine-related neurological problems typically occur. I’m not sure whether Jenny’s case has changed my opinion about the value of Gardasil. But it certainly has given me pause.

Source | See Also: CDC reports almost 8,000 adverse reactions to “Gardasil” HPV vaccine in U.S. | Alberta to offer HPV vaccine this fall | Discovery of HPV in male oral cancers leads to vaccination call | HPV vaccination program raises concerns in B.C. | Gardasil shots have earned a painful reputation | Perspective on the HPV vaccine | Deaths associated with Merck’s HPV vaccine (Gardasil), over 3500 adverse affects reported | Political Intrigue in Merck’s Push for Mandatory HPV Vaccinations