It’s being called ‘America’s New Slavery’: The incarceration of black men

Source: Charlene Muhammad, Louisiana Weekly:

A new American slave trade is booming, warn prison activists, following the release of a report that again outlines outrageous numbers of young Black men in prison and increasing numbers of adults undergoing incarceration. That slave trade is connected to money states spend to keep people locked up, profits made through cheap prison labor and for-profit prisons, excessive charges inmates and families may pay for everything from tube socks to phone calls, and lucrative cross country shipping of inmates to relieve overcrowding and rent cells in faraway states and counties.

Advocates note that the constitution’s 13th amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery in the United States, but provided an exception – in cases where persons have been “duly convicted” in the United States and territory it controls, slavery or involuntary servitude can be re-imposed as a punishment, they add. The majority of prisoners are Black and Latino, though they are minorities in terms of their numbers in the population.

According to One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, published by the Pew Center on the States, one in nine Black men between the ages of 20-34 are incarcerated compared to one in 30 other men of the same age. Like the overall adult ratio, one in 100 Black women in their mid-to-late 30s is imprisoned.

“Everyone is feeding off of our down-trodden condition to feed their capitalism, greed and lust for money. They are buying prison stock on the market and this is why they want to silence the restorative voice of Minister Louis Farrakhan, because he is repairing those who fill and would support the prison system as slaves,” said Student Minister Abdullah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam Prison Ministry.

The report states that the rising trend stems from more than a parallel increase in crime or surge in the population at large, but it is driven by policies that put more criminals in prison, extending their stay through measures like California’s Three Strikes Law.

Atty. Barbara Ratliff, a L.A.-based reparations activist, said the prison industrial complex’s extension of the slave plantation plays out in a pattern of behavior that Black people must study in order to survive.

“I’m not talking about behavior of the individual incarcerate, but the pattern of treatment that digs into institutional racism. Corporate profit from prisons is no different than how slave owners received benefit from their labor, and that impact remained even after slavery. For instance, freed Blacks were arrested and put on chain gangs for their labor which continued to benefit slave owners, so this is no accident,” she said.

Inmates produce items or perform services for almost every major industry. They sew clothes, fight fires and build furniture, but they are paid little or no wages, somewhere between five cents and almost $2.

Phone companies charge high amounts for collect calls and inmate care packages can no longer be sent from families directly. Inmates must purchase products from companies to be sent in, which feeds capitalism, activists charge.

Although the costs of prisons is skyrocketing and consuming state budgets, money continues to be spent to push more Black youth into prison, activists assert. Many education and prison advocates charge there is a plot to populate U.S. prisons based on the dumbing down of America’s youth. Figures show those most likely to be incarcerated and to return generally have the lowest level of education. The report said, “While states don’t necessarily choose between higher education and corrections, a dollar spent in one area is unavailable for another.”

U.S. spending on prisons last year topped $49 billion, compared to $12 billion in 1987. California spent $8.8 billion on prisons last year and 13 states spend more than $1 billion a year on corrections.

Data from the National Association of State Budget Officers indicates:

* Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware spent as much or more on corrections than on higher education;

* For every dollar spent on higher education, Alaska spent 77 cents on corrections;

* For every dollar spent on higher education, Georgia spent 50 cents on corrections;

* On the average, all 50 states spent 60 cents on corrections for every dollar spent on higher education; and

* For every dollar spent on higher education, Minnesota spent 17 cents on corrections.

Between 1985 and 2005, Texas’ prison population alone jumped by 300 percent.

“All we have to do is follow the logic to see this connection between prisons and enslavement. When you look at prison costs and they say it cost $45,000 to house one prisoner, where does that break down? There’s only three square meals a day. The prisoners make their clothes and bedding in sewing factories and about 90 percent of the items they use in the prisons,” said Nathaniel Ali of the National Association of Brothers and Sisters In and Out of Prison (NABSIO).

He believes the majority of prison costs support guard unions and pay enormous base and overtime salaries of prison guards and other staff.

“They receive these exorbitant wages regardless of their education and training. You don’t have an I.Q.; all you have to have is the ability to be brutal” to command these wages through this new slave system, he said.

Ali said the public school system has become the feeder to prisons and their slave populations by increasing the heavy presence of school police and sheriffs on middle school campuses and penalties students face for often trivial offenses, other activists added.

Prison watch groups note corporate-owned prisons feed job-starved communities where businesses have disappeared. By incarcerating so many people, America deals with warehousing them and not finding out why they are incarcerated in the first place, advocates said.

“The fact is, it’s a business and a readily accessible, ‘free’ workforce removes prisons’ incentive to rehabilitate, especially those that are owned by corporations,” Atty. Ratliff said.

Laini Coffee, a self-described “unity activist” said, “At current trend, we could very well see the number of so-called free Blacks rival to the same number of those that are incarcerated. The answer is simple: Unity.”

US backing ’secret war’ against Iran?

By Eoin O’Carroll | csmonitor.com:

The CIA disputes a report linking Washington and a Pakistani guerrilla campaign against Tehran.

The US government has been secretly supporting a Pakistani militant group that has staged a series of deadly attacks against Iran, ABC News reported, citing unnamed US and Pakistani intelligence sources.

The group, known as Jundallah, or “God’s Brigade,” is made up of members of the predominantly Sunni Muslim Baluchi tribe which inhabits Pakistan’s gas-rich province of Baluchestan, as well as neighboring regions in Iran and Afghanistan. In their exclusive report, which aired on Tuesday evening and was posted online on Wednesday morning, ABC News reporters Brian Ross and Christopher Isham said that while the US provides no direct funding, the group has been “secretly encouraged and advised” by the American government since 2005.

U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or “finding” as well as congressional oversight.

Tribal sources tell ABC News that money for Jundullah is funneled to its youthful leader, Abd el Malik Regi, through Iranian exiles who have connections with European and Gulf states.

Jundullah, which claims that Iran’s Shiite regime is oppressing its Baluchi minority, has claimed responsibility for bombings, kidnappings, and televised beheadings that have killed more than a dozen Iranian troops and officials. In February the group said it carried out a car-bomb attack targeting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in Zahedan, the provincial capital in southeastern Iran, killing 11. Jundullah’s leader Mr. Regi, who founded the group in 2003 at the age of 23, has – according to ABC – admitted to personally executing captured Iranian soldiers.

“He used to fight with the Taliban. He’s part drug smuggler, part Taliban, part Sunni activist,” said Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant who recently met with Pakistani officials and tribal members.

“Regi is essentially commanding a force of several hundred guerrilla fighters that stage attacks across the border into Iran on Iranian military officers, Iranian intelligence officers, kidnapping them, executing them on camera,” Debat said.

The ABC News report said US Vice President Dick Cheney spoke to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf about Jundullah and its campaign against Iran during Mr. Cheney’s surprise visit to Pakistan in February. When asked by Reuters about the meeting, a Cheney spokeswoman said, “We don’t discuss conversations between the vice president and foreign leaders.” Reuters also quoted a CIA official as saying the ABC “account was not accurate.”

An analysis by Strafor, a global intelligence consulting firm based in Texas, noting that Jundullah has stepped up its attacks recently, says that the US could be using Jundullah as a “poking device” [subscription only] against Iran.

U.S. support for Jundallah fits into the larger picture of U.S.-Iranian negotiations over Iraq. Iran has made painfully clear that it has — and can use — a variety of militant assets throughout the region to pressure Washington to meets its demands in Iraq. At the same time, the United States has an interest in demonstrating that it has friends among Iran’s minority groups to gather intelligence, stir up public unrest and distract the clerical regime from its Iraqi agenda.

Associated Press Photographer held by U.S. military for two years Granted Iraqi Amnesty

Source: AP. Comment from Signs of the Times:

An Iraqi judicial committee has dismissed terrorism-related allegations against Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and ordered him released nearly two years after he was detained by the U.S. military.

Hussein, 36, remained in custody Wednesday at Camp Cropper, a U.S. detention facility near Baghdad’s airport.

A decision by a four-judge panel said Hussein’s case falls under a new amnesty law. It ordered Iraqi courts to “cease legal proceedings” and ruled that Hussein should be “immediately” released unless other accusations are pending.

The ruling is dated Monday but AP’s lawyers were not able to thoroughly review it until Wednesday. It was unclear, however, whether Hussein would still face further obstacles to release.

U.S. military authorities have said a U.N. Security Council mandate allows them to retain custody of a detainee they believe is a security risk even if an Iraqi judicial body has ordered that prisoner freed. The U.N. mandate is due to expire at the end of this year.

Also, the amnesty committee’s ruling on Hussein may not cover a separate allegation that has been raised in connection with the case.

AP President Tom Curley hailed the committee’s decision and demanded that the U.S. military “finally do the right thing” and free Hussein.

In response to a question from the AP, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said it “will be up to officials in Iraq” on whether to release Hussein. The decision, he said, will be “based upon their assessment as to whether he remains a threat.”

Under Iraq’s 2-month-old amnesty law, a grant of amnesty effectively closes a case and does not assume guilt of the accused.

Hussein has been held by the U.S. military since being detained by Marines on April 12, 2006, in Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad. Throughout his incarceration, he has maintained he is innocent and was only doing the work of a professional news photographer in a war zone.

The amnesty committee’s decision covers various allegations by the U.S. military against Hussein, including claims he was in possession of bomb-making material, conspired with insurgents to take photographs synchronized with an explosion and offered to secure a forged ID for a terrorist evading capture by the military.

The committee may still be reviewing a separate allegation that Hussein had contacts with the kidnappers of an Italian citizen, Salvatore Santoro, whose body was photographed by Hussein in December 2004 with two masked insurgents standing over Santoro with guns.

Hussein was one of three journalists who were stopped at gunpoint by insurgents and taken by them to see the propped-up body. None of the journalists witnessed his death, said Santiago Lyon, AP’s director of photography. The AP wrote a story about the incident at the time.

The AP said a review of Hussein’s work and contacts also found no evidence of any activities beyond the normal role of a news photographer. Hussein was a member of an AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005, and his detention has drawn protests from rights groups and press freedom advocates such as the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“The Amnesty Committee took only a few days to determine what we have been saying for two years. Bilal Hussein must be freed immediately,” said Curley, the AP’s president.

“The U.S. military has said the Iraqi process should be allowed to work. It has, and the military must finally do the right thing by ending its detention of a journalist who did nothing more than his job. Bilal’s imprisonment stands as a sad black mark on American values of justice and fairness,” Curley added.

Comment: In March of this year Curley also made this comment:

Noting that at least a dozen other Iraqi photographers have been detained or arrested, Curley stated, “It’s impossible not to conclude that the words and pictures these journalists produced were considered unhelpful to the war effort and that their arrests would have served a broader strategy of information control.”

Given the U.S. track record of media manipulation and false flag operations, one wonders what these photographers incarcerated for long periods without charge may have recorded?

The U.S. military referred the case in December to an investigating judge, who reviewed the evidence and submitted his findings to the Central Criminal Court of Iraq to determine whether the case should go to trial.

In February, however, parliament approved a law providing amnesty to those held for insurgency-related offenses – including detainees such as Hussein who have never been convicted.

The committee from the Iraqi Federal Appeals Court ruled Monday that allegations against Hussein were covered by the Anti-Terrorist Law and were subject to the amnesty law.

The order was sent to the Iraqi public prosecutor, but it was unclear if it had been received.

A lawyer for the AP was provided a copy of the order, but Wednesday was a public holiday in Iraq and government offices were closed.

The amnesty committee – or any Iraqi institution – cannot force the U.S. military to release or turn over any of the estimated 23,000 detainees it holds in Iraq. But a provision in the amnesty law states that the Iraqi government “is committed to take the necessary measures to move the arrested people” from U.S. control.

“The detention of Bilal Hussein has been a terrible injustice, and we are relieved that his ordeal might finally come to an end after nearly two years behind bars,” said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Sylvia Smith, president of the National Press Club in Washington, called the amnesty ruling “a long-overdue decision.”

“The next step is to free him,” she said.

–

Associated Press military writer Robert Burns in Washington and AP writer Carley Petesch in New York contributed to this report.

The AP’s site on Bilal Hussein is HERE.

Torture, Inc: Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation’

Jan Crawford Greenburg, Howard L. Rosenbaum and Ariane de Vogue for ABC News:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

Contacted by ABC News today, spokesmen for Tenet, Rumsfeld and Powell declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings. Powell said through an assistant there were “hundreds of [Principals] meetings” on a wide variety of topics and that he was “not at liberty to discuss private meetings.”

The White House also declined comment on behalf of Rice and Cheney. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment today.

Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. Bush and his top aides have consistently defended the program. They say it is legal and did not constitute torture.

“I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us the information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks here in the United States and across the world,” Bush said in a speech in September 2006.

In interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson last year, Tenet said: “It was authorized. It was legal, according to the Attorney General of the United States.”

But this is the first time sources have disclosed that a handful of the most senior advisers in the White House explicitly approved the details of the program. According to multiple sources, it was members of the Principals Committee that not only discussed specific plans and specific interrogation methods, but approved them.

The discussions and meetings occurred in an atmosphere of great concern that another terror attack on the nation was imminent. Sources said the extraordinary involvement of the senior advisers in the grim details of exactly how individual interrogations would be conducted showed how seriously officials took the al Qaeda threat.

It started after the CIA captured top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in spring 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan. When his safe house was raided by Pakistani security forces along with FBI and CIA agents, Zubaydah was shot three times during the gun battle.

At a time when virtually all counterterrorist professionals viewed another attack as imminent — and with information on al Qaeda scarce — the detention of Zubaydah was seen as a potentially critical breakthrough.

Zubaydah was taken to the local hospital, where CIA agent John Kiriakou, who helped coordinate Zubaydah’s capture, was ordered to remain at the wounded captive’s side at all times. “I ripped up a sheet and tied him to the bed,” Kiriakou said.

But after Zubaydah recovered from his wounds at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, he was uncooperative.

“I told him I had heard he was being a jerk,” Kiriakou recalled. “I said, ‘These guys can make it easy on you or they can make it hard.’ It was after that he became defiant.”

The CIA wanted to use more aggressive — and physical — methods to get information.

The agency briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, led by then-National Security Advisor Rice and including then-Attorney General Ashcroft, which then signed off on the plan, sources said. It is unclear whether anyone on the committee objected to the CIA’s plans for Zubaydah.

The CIA has confirmed Zubaydah was one of three al Qaeda suspects subjected to waterboarding.

After he was waterboarded, officials say Zubaydah gave up valuable information that led to the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammad and fellow 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

Mohammad was also subjected to waterboarding by the CIA. At a hearing before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay on March 10, 2007, KSM, as he is known, said he broke under the harsh interrogation.

COURT: Were any statements you made as the result of any of the treatment that you received during that time frame from 2003 to 2006? Did you make those statements because of the treatment you receive from these people?

KSM: Statement for whom?

COURT: To any of these interrogators.

KSM: CIA peoples. Yes. At the beginning, when they transferred me…

Lawyers in the Justice Department had written a classified memo, which was extensively reviewed, that gave formal legal authority to government interrogators to use the “enhanced” questioning tactics on suspected terrorist prisoners. The August 2002 memo, signed by then head of the Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee, was referred to as the so-called “Golden Shield” for CIA agents, who worried they would be held liable if the harsh interrogations became public.

Old hands in the intelligence community remembered vividly how past covert operations, from the Vietnam War-era “Phoenix Program” of assassinations of Viet Cong to the Iran-Contra arms sales of the 1980s were painted as the work of a “rogue agency” out of control.

But even after the “Golden Shield” was in place, briefings and meetings in the White House to discuss individual interrogations continued, sources said. Tenet, seeking to protect his agents, regularly sought confirmation from the NSC principals that specific interrogation plans were legal.

According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.

Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.

“It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time,” said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. “They’d say, ‘We’ve got so and so. This is the plan.’”

Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.

“These discussions weren’t adding value,” a source said. “Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude it’s legal, (you should) just tell them to implement it.”

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department’s own legal approval in the 2002 memo, sources told ABC News.

At one meeting in the summer of 2003 — attended by Vice President Cheney, among others — Tenet made an elaborate presentation for approval to combine several different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time, according to a highly placed administration source.

A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo — the Golden Shield — that authorized the program.

But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”

Father: Child’s [Hannah Poling's] case shifts autism debate

By Jon S. Poling, for the Journal-Constitution:

Autism in the U.S. has reached epidemic levels, at 1 in 150 children. Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has recently upgraded autism to “an urgent health threat.” The most contentious issue of the autism debate is the link to routine childhood vaccines. My daughter’s case, Hannah Poling v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has changed this debate forever. Hannah has pointed us in a new and promising direction —- the mitochondria.

On Nov. 9, 2007, HHS medical experts conceded through the Department of Justice that Hannah’s autism was triggered by nine childhood vaccinations administered when she was 19 months of age. This concession was granted without any courtroom proceedings or expert testimony, effectively preventing any public hearing discussing what happened to Hannah and why. Contrary to some reports, the Special Masters, “judges” who preside over the “vaccine court,” did not issue a decision.

Four months later, on March 6, with trepidation my wife, Terry, and I stepped forward to announce this news —- providing hope and awareness to other families. The HHS expert documents that led to this concession and accompanying court documents remain sealed, though our family has already permitted release of Hannah’s records to those representing the almost 5, 000 other autistic children awaiting their day in vaccine court.

Mitochondria key

To understand Hannah’s case, it is important to understand mitochondria, which act like batteries in our cells to produce energy critical for normal function. Because the government’s concession hinged on the presence of Hannah’s underlying medical condition, mitochondrial dysfunction, some claim the decision is relevant to very few other children with autism. As a neurologist, scientist and father, I disagree.

Emerging evidence suggests that mitochondrial dysfunction may not be rare at all among children with autism. In the only population-based study of its kind, Portuguese researchers confirmed that at least 7.2 percent, and perhaps as many as 20 percent, of autistic children exhibit mitochondrial dysfunction. While we do not yet know a precise U.S. rate, 7.2 percent to 20 percent of children does not qualify as “rare.” In fact, mitochondrial dysfunction may be the most common medical condition associated with autism.

Biological markers

Although unlikely, if the Portuguese studies are incorrect and mitochondrial dysfunction were found to be a rarity occurring in less than 1 percent of all autism, it would still impact up to 10,000 children (250,000 worldwide), based on current estimates that 1 million people in the U.S. (25 million worldwide) have autism. If, on the other hand, the research showing that 7.2 percent to 20 percent of children with autism have mitochondrial dysfunction is correct, then the implications are both staggering and urgent.

Autism researchers do not currently understand whether mitochondrial dysfunction causes autism or is simply a secondary biological marker. Autism clearly has many different causes, and should really be separated into multiple autism(s). I propose that we clearly identify and research the subpopulation term of “mitochondrial autism,” which is distinguished by its unique biological, but not genetic, markers.

Based on what we know now, it is time to follow the prestigious Institute of Medicine 2004 report regarding autism and vaccines:

“Determining a specific cause (for autism) in the individual is impossible unless the etiology is known and there is a biological marker. Determining causality with population-based methods requires either a well-defined at-risk population or a large effect in the general population.”

A paradigm shift

When the IOM report was published, mitochondrial dysfunction defining an autistic subpopulation was not firmly established. Today there is no doubt that mitochondrial dysfunction represents a distinct autism subpopulation biological marker. I urge health officials and the IOM to embrace their own report and pursue this breakthrough in the science of autism. National public health leaders, including those at CDC, must now recognize the paradigm shift caused by this biological marker with regard to their current position of dispelling a vaccine-autism link.

In light of the Hannah Poling concession, science must determine more precisely how large the mitochondrial autism subpopulation is: 1 percent, 7.2 percent, 20 percent?

Based on the 2004 IOM analysis, if the mitochondrial autism subpopulation is found to be relatively uncommon, then all conclusions from prior epidemiological studies refuting an autism-vaccination link must be discarded. New studies then need to be performed exclusively with the mitochondrial subpopulation. If mitochondrial autism turns out to be common, then we could re-analyze the data from prior studies to determine if these studies were powered sufficiently based on a predicted effect size. If not powered appropriately, the conclusion refuting an autism-vaccine link would again have to be rejected. These statistical concepts are basic.

The current vaccine schedule, co-sponsored by the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics, injures a small but significant minority of children, my daughter unfortunately being one of those victims. Every day, more parents and some pediatricians reject the current vaccine schedule. In an abundance of caution, meaningful reform must be performed urgently to prevent the re-emergence of serious diseases like polio or measles.

Need for research

As a neurologist, I have cared for those afflicted with SSPE (a rare but dreaded neurological complication of measles), paralytic polio and tetanus. If these serious vaccine-preventable diseases again become commonplace, the fault will rest solely on the shoulders of public health leaders and policymakers who have failed to heed the writing on the wall (scribbled by my 9-year old daughter).

The mitochondrial autism scenario that my daughter has so eloquently painted has the CDC and public health experts logically cornered. Denial and fear tactics won’t close Pandora’s Box. Whether we find that mitochondrial autism is rare or common, there is urgent research left to be done to fully understand the interrelationship of vaccines, autism and mitochondria.

Reform of the vaccine schedule will be an important part of the solution, whether vaccines play a major or minor role in autism. Our public health agencies and programs need a reconstruction plan. Day one of the reconstruction hopefully starts at the Vaccine Safety Advisory Committee’s Working Group, to be held at HHS headquarters today in Washington.

> Dr. Jon S. Poling is a practicing neurologist in Athens and clinical assistant professor at the Medical College of Georgia.