Many at Guantanamo had low-level or no terrorism ties

Source: Tom Lasseter, McClatchy Newspapers.

©Tom Lasseter

Mohammed Akhtiar, ISN 1036, sits in a tribal office
compound in Gardez, Afghanistan, during an interview on April 29, 2007.

The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

They shouted “Allahu Akbar” – God is great – as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar’s head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.

American troops dragged Akhtiar out of his home in Gardez, Afghanistan, in May 2003, flew him to Guantanamo in shackles that July and held him there for more than three years. The tribal leader from eastern Afghanistan belonged to an insurgent group and had taken part in rocket attacks on U.S. forces, American officials said.

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects who were imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are, the Bush administration has said, “the worst of the worst.”

The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed “infidel,” spat at Akhtiar and assaulted him, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

“He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government,” a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens and perhaps hundreds of men whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees along with a number of local officials, primarily in Afghanistan, and reviewed available U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

Most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals, the McClatchy investigation found. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials.

Of course, Guantanamo also houses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who along with four other high-profile detainees faces military commission charges. Cases also have been opened against 15 other detainees for assorted offenses, such as attending al Qaida training camps.

But because Guantanamo was set up under special rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges, it’s impossible to know how many of the 770 men who’ve been held there were terrorists.

The McClatchy investigation concluded, however, that many of the detainees there posed no danger to the United States or its allies and were imprisoned because U.S. officials were fearful of mistakenly letting a militant go free.

McClatchy’s interviews are the most ever conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee backgrounds has previously been reported on by other media outlets, but not as comprehensively.

McClatchy also in many cases did more research than either the U.S. military at Guantanamo, which often relied on secondhand accounts, or the detainees’ lawyers, who relied mainly on the detainees’ accounts.

The investigation found that although U.S. forces often didn’t know whom they were holding or how to obtain credible intelligence from them without enough trained interrogators and skilled linguists, prisoners were beaten and abused by military police, prison guards and intelligence officers.

Prisoner abuse became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.

While he was held at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, “When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, ‘What is my crime?’ the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs.”

A series of White House directives placed “suspected enemy combatants” beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions’ protections for prisoners of war.

“The policy and legal decisions at the top probably made instances of abuse more likely,” one former administration official said. “My sense is that decisions taken at the top probably sent a signal that the old rules don’t apply . . . certainly some people read what was coming out of Washington: The gloves are off, this isn’t a Geneva world anymore.”

Like many others who previously worked in the White House or Defense Department, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal and political sensitivities of the issue.

Instead of making America safer, the administration’s detainee policies have radicalized detainees, fueled support for extremist Islamist groups, troubled even America’s closest allies and turned Guantanamo into a school for jihad, Islamic holy war.

The administration may even have inadvertently sabotaged its ability to prosecute the terrorists it’s imprisoned, because evidence gained from interrogations that in some cases bordered on torture may not be admissible in military courts. If the Supreme Court rules in a pending case that detainees in the war on terrorism have a right to challenge their detentions in court, the entire legal edifice the administration has invented since 9-11 could collapse.

Little intelligence value

The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren’t “the worst of the worst.” From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn’t belong there.

Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.

Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida’s leadership, and it isn’t clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.

If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication – and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense officials said in interviews that they are – most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren’t terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.

Far from being an ally of the Taliban, Mohammed Akhtiar had fled to Pakistan shortly after the puritanical Islamist group took power in 1996, the senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. The Taliban burned down Akhtiar’s house after he refused to ally his tribe with their government.

The Americans detained Akhtiar, the intelligence officer said, because they were given bad information by another Afghan who’d harbored a personal vendetta against Akhtiar going back to his time as a commander against the Soviet military during the 1980s.

“In some of these cases, tribal feuds and political feuds have played a big role” in people getting sent to Guantanamo, the intelligence officer said.

He didn’t want his name used, partly because he didn’t want to offend the Western officials he works with and partly because Afghan intelligence officers are assassinated regularly.

“There were Afghans being sent to Guantanamo because of bad intelligence,” said Helaluddin Helal, Afghanistan’s deputy interior minister for security from 2002 to early 2004. “In the beginning, everyone was trying to give intelligence to the Americans . . . the Americans were taking action without checking this information.”

Nusrat Khan was in his 70s when American troops shoved him into an isolation cell at Bagram in the spring of 2003. They blindfolded him, put earphones on his head and tied his hands behind his back for almost four weeks straight, Khan said.

By the time he was taken out of the cell, Khan – who’d had at least two strokes years before he was arrested and was barely able to walk – was half-mad and couldn’t stand without help. Khan said that he was taken to Guantanamo on a stretcher.

Several Afghan officials, including the country’s attorney general, later said that Khan, who spent more than three years at Guantanamo, wasn’t a threat to anyone; he’d been turned in as an insurgent leader because of decades-old rivalries with competing Afghan militias.

Ghalib Hassan was an Interior Ministry-appointed district commander in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, a man who’d risked his life to help the U.S.-backed government. Din Mohammed, the former governor of that province and now the governor of Kabul, said there was no question that local tribal leaders, offended by Hassan’s brusque style, fed false information about him to local informants used by American troops.

The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy’s findings. The defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, refused to speak with McClatchy.

The Pentagon’s only response to a series of written questions from McClatchy, and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.

“These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of innocent civilians,” Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided no examples.

Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, said that detainees had supplied crucial information about al Qaida, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

“Included with the folks that were brought here in 2002 were, by and large, the main leadership of al Qaida and the Taliban,” he said in a phone interview.

Buzby agreed, however, that some detainees were from the bottom rung.

“It’s all about developing the mosaic . . . there’s value to both ends of the spectrum,” he said.

Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said McClatchy’s conclusions squared with their own observations.

“As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless,” a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail, using the military’s slang for Guantanamo.

Guantanamo authorities periodically sent analysts at the U.S. Central Command “rap sheets on various prisoners and asked our assessment whether they merited continued confinement,” said the analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “Over about three years, I assessed around 40 of these individuals, mostly Afghans. . . . I only can remember recommending that ONE should be kept at GITMO.”

‘War council’ rewrites detainee law

At a Pentagon briefing in the spring of 2002, a senior Army intelligence officer expressed doubt about the entire intelligence-gathering process.

“He said that we’re not getting anything, and his thought was that we’re not getting anything because there might not be anything to get,” said Donald J. Guter, a retired rear admiral who was the head of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps at the time.

Many detainees were “swept up in the pot” by large operations conducted by Afghan troops allied with the Americans, said former Army Secretary White, who’s now a partner at DKRW Energy, an energy company in Houston.

One of the Afghan detainees at Guantanamo, White recalled, was more than 80 years old.

Army Spc. Eric Barclais, who was a military intelligence interrogator at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan from September 2002 through January 2003, told military investigators in sworn testimony that “We recommended lots of folks be released from (Bagram), but they were not. I believe some people ended up at (Guantanamo) that had no business being sent there.”

“You have to understand some folks were detained because they got turned in by neighbors or family members who were feuding with them,” Barclais said. “Yes, they had weapons. Everyone had weapons. Some were Soviet-era and could not even be fired.”

A former Pentagon official told McClatchy that he was shocked at times by the backgrounds of men held at Guantanamo.

” ‘Captured with weapon near the Pakistan border?’ ” the official said. “Are you kidding me?”

“The screening, the understanding of who we had was horrible,” he said. “That’s why we had so many useless people at Gitmo.”

In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn’t belong there, a former White House official said.

Despite the analyst’s findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.

Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the “War Council” devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected “enemy combatants” indefinitely with few legal rights.

The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.

The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers – along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush – should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.

With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.

The Bush administration didn’t launch a formal review of the detentions until a 2004 Supreme Court decision forced it to begin holding military tribunals at Guantanamo.

In late 2004, Pentagon officials decided to restrict further interrogations at Guantanamo to detainees who were considered “high value” for their suspected knowledge of terrorist groups or their potential of returning to the battlefield, according to Matthew Waxman, who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, the Defense Department’s head official for detainee matters, from August 2004 to December 2005.

“Maybe three-quarters of the detainees by 2005 were no longer regularly interrogated,” said Waxman, who’s now a law professor at Columbia University.

At that time, about 500 men were still being held at Guantanamo.

So far, the military commissions have publicly charged only six detainees – less than 1 percent of the more than 770 who’ve been at Guantanamo – with direct involvement in the 9-11 terrorist attacks. About 500 detainees – nearly two out of three – have been released.

During a military review board hearing at Guantanamo, Mohammed Akhtiar had some advice for the U.S. officers seated before him.

“I wish,” he said, “that the United States would realize who the bad guys are and who the good guys are.”

How foot soldiers, farmers got swept up

How did the United States come to hold so many farmers and goat herders among the real terrorists at Guantanamo? Among the reasons:

* After conceding control of the country to U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, top Taliban and al Qaida leaders escaped to Pakistan, leaving the battlefield filled with ragtag groups of volunteers and conscripts who knew nothing about global terrorism.

* The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties – advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 – there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees’ backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees – 22 out of 66 – whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S. forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who’d been captured around mid-2002 or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, a fight that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.

* American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false reports passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges in Afghanistan, a nation that had experienced more than two decades of occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with Afghan intelligence and security officials.

* Detainees at Guantanamo had no legal venue in which to challenge their detentions. The only mechanism set up to evaluate their status, an internal tribunal in the late summer of 2004, rested on the decisions of rotating panels of three U.S. military officers. The tribunals made little effort to find witnesses who weren’t present at Guantanamo, and detainees were in no position to challenge the allegations against them.

The Healthy Sceptic: Preventing heart disease without drugs

By Chris Kresser.

In today’s article we’ll discuss how to prevent heart disease without drugs. If you haven’t already read Part 1 of this series, which examined the problems with statin drugs, and Part 2, which debunks the myth that cholesterol causes heart disease, you might want to do that before reading this article.

Last week I mentioned the INTERHEART study, which looked at the relationship between heart disease and lifestyle in 52 countries around the world. What this study revealed is that approximately 90% of heart disease could be prevented by simple changes to diet and lifestyle.

Let’s just make this crystal clear: 9 out of 10 cases of heart disease are completely preventable without drugs. With sales of statin drugs reaching close to $30 billion this year with Lipitor alone bringing in close to $14 billion, this might come as some surprise. But the pharmaceutical companies are, quite literally, invested in people taking their cholesterol-lowering drugs in spite of the complete lack of evidence that lowering cholesterol prevents heart disease.

In order to understand the changes we need to make to prevent heart disease, we have to briefly examine what causes it. By now you know that the answer is not “cholesterol”. In fact, as I mentioned briefly in last week’s article, the two primary contributing mechanisms to heart disease are inflammation and oxidative damage.

Inflammation is the body’s response to noxious substances. Those substances can be foreign, like bacteria, or found within our body, as in autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. In the case of heart disease, inflammatory reactions within atherosclerotic plaques can induce clot formation.

When the lining of the artery is damaged, white blood cells flock to the site, resulting in inflammation. Inflammation not only further damages the artery walls, leaving them stiffer and more prone to plaque buildup, but it also makes any plaque that’s already there more fragile and more likely to burst.

Oxidative damage is a natural process of energy production and storage in the body. Oxidation produces free radicals, which are molecules missing an electron in their outer shell. Highly unstable and reactive, these molecules “attack” other molecules attempting to “steal” electrons from their outer shells in order to gain stability. Free radicals damage other cells and DNA, creating more free radicals in the process and a chain reaction of oxidative damage.

Normally oxidation is kept in check, but when oxidative stress is high or the body’s level of antioxidants is low, oxidative damage occurs. Oxidative damage is strongly correlated to heart disease. Studies have shown that oxidated LDL cholesterol is 8x greater stronger a risk factor for heart disease than normal LDL.

Since there may be some confusion on this point, I want to make it clear: normal LDL cholesterol is not a risk factor for heart disease in most populations, but oxidated LDL cholesterol is. This points to oxidation as the primary risk factor, not cholesterol. Why? Because when an LDL particle oxidizes, it is the polyunsaturated fat that oxidizes first. The saturated fat and the cholesterol, hidden deep within the core of the lipoprotein, are the least likely to oxidize.

It follows, then, that if we want to prevent heart disease we need to do everything we can to minimize inflammation and oxidative damage.

Top four causes of oxidative damage & inflammation

1. Stress
2. Smoking
3. Poor nutrition
4. Physical inactivity

By focusing on reducing or completely eliminating, when possible, the factors in our life that contribute to oxidative stress and inflammation, we can drastically lower our risk for heart disease. Let’s take a brief look at each risk factor.

Stress

In the INTERHEART study, stress tripled the risk of heart disease. This was true across all countries and cultured that were studies. The primary mechanism by which stress causes heart disease is by dysregulating the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. The HPA axis is directly intertwined with the autonomic nervous system, and it governs the “fight-or-flight” response we experience in reaction to a stressor.

Continued activation of this “fight-or-flight” response leads to hyper-arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, which in turn leads to chronically elevated levels of cortisol. And elevated levels of cortisol can cause both inflammation and oxidative damage.

Stress management, then, should be a vital part of any heart disease prevention program. In fact, some researchers today believe that stress may be the single most significant factor in the cause and prevention of heart disease. There are several proven methods of stress reduction, including mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), acupuncture and biofeedback. It doesn’t matter which method you choose. It just matters that you do it, and do it regularly.

Smoking

I assume that you are already well aware of the dangers of smoking, so I won’t spend much time on this one. For the purposes of this discussion, I will point out that smoking as few as 1-4 cigarettes a day has been shown to increase the risk of heart disease by 40%. But smoking 40 cigarettes a day increases that risk by 900%.

So if you smoke and you’re concerned about heart disease – quit.

Nutrition

Over the past century we’ve seen a consistent decline in the consumption of traditional, nutrient-dense foods in favor of highly processed, nutrient-depleted products. The flawed hypothesis that cholesterol causes heart disease has wrongly identified health-promoting foods like meat, organ meats, eggs and dairy products as harmful, and replaced them with toxic, processed alternatives such as chips, white breads, pastries, crackers, cookies, frozen foods, candy and soda.

There are two ways that nutrition contributes to heart disease: too much of the wrong foods, and not enough of the right ones.

The average American gets 57% of his/her calories from highly refined cereal grains and polyunsaturated (PUFA) oils. The #3 source of calories, behind grains and PUFA, is sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Refined grains, polyunsaturated oils and sugar are all major contributors to both inflammation and oxidative damage.

Not only do refined carbohydrates, vegetable oils and sugar contribute to inflammation and oxidative damage, they are also completely devoid of micronutrients that would protect us from these processes. Meats, fruits and vegetables are all high in antioxidants that prevent oxidative damage, and rich in other micronutrients that play important roles in preventing heart disease.

More than 85% of Americans are not getting the federally recommended five servings of fresh fruit and vegetables each day. The intake of dark leafy green or yellow/orange veggies for the average American is equivalent to 18g – one-half of one small carrot. Iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, french fries, orange juice and bananas constitute 30% of fruit and vegetable intake for most Americans.

Many people know that the “Standard American Diet” is extremely unhealthy. But what most do not know is that the so-called “heart-healthy” diet that has been vigorously promoted for decades actually contributes to heart disease! The “heart-healthy” diet is high in refined carbohydrates and polyunsaturated oils, which, as we have seen, cause inflammation and oxidative damage.

On the other hand, saturated fats (which have been demonized by the medical mainstream) such as butter, coconut oil, lard, tallow and ghee are protected against oxidation and possess many other important health benefits. These fats are the ones we need to be eating to protect ourselves from heart disease.

It is extremely important to buy organic meat, eggs and dairy products that come from animals that have been raised on fresh pasture rather than in commercial, factory feedlots. See this article and this one for more information on why this is so essential.

Finally, it must be pointed out that not all “organic” products are healthy. Most packaged food (including organic cereals, crackers, chips and so-called “nutrition bars”) are full of highly refined carbohydrates, sugar, and vegetable oils. And by now, I don’t need to tell you what that means!

So what would a truly heart healthy diet look like, then? Download my Guidelines for Natural Prevention of Heart Disease to find out.

Physical Inactivity

Physical inactivity is likely a major causative factor in the explosive rise of coronary heart disease in the 20th century. During the vast majority of evolutionary history, humans have had to exert themselves to obtain food and water. Even at the turn of the 20th century in the U.S., a majority of people had jobs that required physical activity (farmers, laborers, etc.) Now the majority of the workforce has sedentary occupations with little to no physical activity at all.

Currently more than 60% of American adults are not regularly active, and 25% of the adult population is completely sedentary. People that are physically inactive have between 1.5x and 2.4x the risk of developing heart disease.

On the other hand, regular exercise reduces both inflammation and oxidative damage. Even relatively low levels of activity are protective – as long as they are consistent. A public review at Harvard University showed that 30-minutes of moderate physical activity on most days of the week decreases deaths from heart disease by 20-30%.

The best strategy for people struggling to find time to exercise is to make it part of their daily life (i.e. riding a bike or walking to work, choosing the stairs over the escalator or elevator, etc.)

When combined, the four strategies listed above will significantly reduce your chances of getting heart disease – without taking a single pill of any kind.

If you already have heart disease, or you are at high risk for heart disease (overweight, high blood pressure, diabetic, etc.), then you may need additional support. See my

Recommended articles

• Natural Prevention of Heart Disease Guidelines
• The Truth About Cholesterol Brochure
• Resources for further learning
• Recommended tests for heart disease
• Recent New York Times article questioning efficacy of cholesterol-lowering drugs

Texas town releases name of anti-anxiety meds found in water

This gives new meaning to the phrase, “There must be something in the water”!

I wonder what the long-term effects are of drinking water with all these contaminants?

By MARTHA MENDOZA, AP.

Drinking water in Arlington, Texas, tested positive for trace concentrations of the anti-anxiety medication meprobamate, city officials revealed Monday in response to a series of public records requests.

In a February interview with The Associated Press, Mayor Robert Cluck said trace concentrations of one pharmaceutical had been found in treated drinking water, but he declined to name it. He said revealing the name in the post-9/11 world could cause a terrorist to intentionally release more of the drug, causing harm to residents.

“I don’t want to take that chance,” Cluck said. “There is no public hazard, and I don’t want to create one.”

Monday’s identification of meprobamate came after the Texas attorney general said those concerns were not well founded.

In water samples taken in October 2006, concentrations of the drug measured around 1 part per trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Water department officials say their drinking water meets the highest standard of quality.

The AP reported in March that trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals have been detected in drinking water systems for 24 major U.S. metropolitan areas, affecting 41 million Americans.

As part of that series, the AP contacted Arlington officials and learned water there had been tested, but the city near Dallas was the only place in the United States included in the AP PharmaWater series that refused to release its drinking water test results.

Cluck, a medical doctor, had directed local officials in 2006 to conduct tests after hearing that traces of Prozac had been found in water elsewhere in Texas. The tests are not required under federal or state regulations.

After the AP’s story was distributed, Arlington officials provided a few more details: trace concentrations of five pharmaceuticals — one antibiotic, two anti-seizure medications, one pain reliever and one minor tranquilizer — had been detected in the city’s untreated source water.

The city also named the five: sulfamethoxazole, dilantin, carbamazepine, naproxen and meprobamate. But it declined at that time to identify which one also had been detected in treated drinking water.

Nine different individuals in and near Arlington including reporters, attorneys and citizens submitted legal public records requests to the city demanding the release of the specific test results.

“I was driving to work one morning when I heard the mayor on the radio say he was not going to tell the public what this substance was because he was worried about terrorism,” said Frank Hill, an attorney in Arlington who requested the records. “That struck me as so disingenuous and typical of the city of Arlington that I just couldn’t let it rest. This is our water, and our money paid for those tests.”

In an editorial in March, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram said that while Cluck “deserves kudos for anticipating the problem” he should let people know what the tests found.

The city refused, prompting the attorney general to weigh in. In May the attorney general’s office responded that there was no proof that telling residents what has been found in their drinking water would help terrorists contaminate their supplies. Arlington had until Monday at 5 p.m. to release the results or sue the attorney general.

Comment: The Powers That Be must be so happy to be able to use terrorism as the scapegoat for every little problem.

Mayor Cluck said Monday he didn’t think it was safe to reveal any information about what compounds can and can’t make it through Arlington’s drinking water treatment plant.

“I do not feel comfortable releasing the names of what’s in our water supply and gets past our water treatment plant, even if it’s in parts per trillion. I don’t like the concept of releasing this information because there are people who want to do us harm. But once the attorney general said go for it, we did.”

Meanwhile, Arlington Water Utilities has posted a notice on its Web site that describes how pharmaceutical compounds and personal care products are being found at low levels in many of the nation’s lakes, rivers and streams. The agency says the mayor “is leading us to do more comprehensive testing and further research of our treatment processes as more scientific research is conducted.”

The AP Investigative Team can be reached at investigate(at)ap.org

Tomato Scare & Food Safety Concerns Driving More & More Consumers to Buying Local & Organic

My local farmer’s market is always packed with people. BigAgra can spin these food safety stories all they want, but people aren’t that dumb. We know that organic food and raw milk are much safer than their industrial counterparts.

By Alicia Coffman and Susanna Schrobsdorff
Newsweek, June 13, 2008

The Tomato Pickle
As the salmonella-tainted tomato outbreak continues to spread, small and local farm advocates say their produce is a safer bet. But experts aren’t so sure.

Note From Organic Consumer’s Association: Despite the claims of industrial agriculture proponents (see below), the facts speak for themselves. Organic foods, especially those locally produced, are qualitatively safer and more nutritious than conventional foods from chemical farms. The Centers for disease control admit that there are 78 million cases of food poisoning every year in the U.S., with almost none of these cases coming from organic foods.
-Ronnie Cummins

**********************

You can’t blame shoppers for being confused about which kinds of tomatoes are safe and where to get them. Nor could you blame them for wondering why health officials have had such a hard time containing the spread of salmonella-tainted tomatoes. The Food and Drug Administration reported on Thursday that the number of people sickened by the tainted tomatoes had risen to 228 in 28 states, and agency officials told a House subcommittee that scientists still hadn’t pinpointed the source of the contamination.

What the FDA has been able to say is that not all tomatoes are suspect. Cherry or grape tomatoes are fine, as are homegrown tomatoes and tomatoes sold with a bit of vine attached. But that information doesn’t do much to instill confidence in the nation’s food supply in consumers, especially with this latest outbreak coming on the heels of last year’s nationwide recall of spinach and peanut butter due to contamination. (You can find the FDA’s summary of states affected by the outbreak here.)

Critics of big industrial farms say that the latest foodborne outbreak has given a boost to the local food movement, which promotes buying produce from nearby farmers (advocates are sometimes called locavores). And it’s not hard to see why consumers might make the leap from thinking that if the FDA says homegrown tomatoes are OK, then tomatoes bought directly from small farmers might be the next best thing. “With each incident, it’s pushing people more and more to buy locally and from family farms,” says Craig Minowa, environmental scientist with the Organic Consumer Association, a group that avidly supports local, family farms. “So much so, in fact, that farmers’ markets across the United States are recording record sales this year.”

And it’s true that the number of people buying from farmer’s markets, food co-ops and small vendors is growing. The bulk of all produce consumed by Americans still comes from large growers and distributors, but the USDA reports that farmers’ market and direct-to-consumer farm sales rose by almost 19 percent between 2004 and 2006. And this recent outbreak may be contributing to the trend. Karine Newborn, of Brooklyn, N.Y., says the tomato scare has definitely changed her shopping choices. “I only buy vegetables at the supermarket if I have to now. I’d rather wait ’til Saturday and go to the farmers’ market, if can…”

But is locally grown food really safer? Agricultural experts aren’t convinced. “As a scientist, I cannot say smaller is better. It’s just not that simple,” says Martha Robert, a microbiologist at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and a safety adviser to the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange and the Center for Produce Safety at the University of California. “The large packers we have are extremely stringent with sanitizing techniques and measures to prevent cross-contamination, but if someone makes a mistake when they’re mixing or dicing large quantities, the problem is going to be larger too,” she explains. “But sometimes a small grower has been doing something for years, and [they] don’t know they’re putting themselves at risk.”

While both large corporate farms and small local farms can be at risk of contamination at any stage of the growing, packing and shipping process, experts say some differences between big corporate farms and smaller farms can be a factor. Industrial producers are more likely to move their packaging plants close to, if not onto, the farmland in order to get the produce on the road as quickly as possible, says Gonul Kaletunc, associate professor in the department of food, agriculture and biological engineering at Ohio State University. In that situation, water contaminated with salmonella from feces, insects or plants might be used to both irrigate and wash the produce, increasing the chances of contamination.

And when produce is packed and shipped over long distances, there’s more time for a bacterium like salmonella to colonize. Once the germs come in contact with a tomato, it takes about 90 minutes for them to attach themselves to the surface. Then, under suitable conditions, the colonies of microorganisms will eventually cover the surface of the tomato, says Kaletunc. If the tomato has any cuts or bruises, the salmonella can also grow inside the fruit, where it can survive even if the tomato is washed thoroughly.

Locavores insist that smaller farms have a safety advantage because they avoid the lengthy multistep packing and shipping process that is used by many corporate farms. “The produce is harvested by migrant workers, shipped to a processing facility, then a packaging facility, then a delivery truck and finally to a grocery store. There are just so many steps that contamination issues can and do occur,” says Gary Cox, the legal council for the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.

Roberts counters that there’s no real evidence that smaller farms are inherently more immune to contamination. “Regrettably, mistakes can happen along the line with any size farm. It’s so difficult to have generalities, to say this is bad food and this is good food. The real key is for everyone to follow good safety practices.”

But exactly what those practices should be and how they should be put in place is in question. On Thursday the General Accounting Office issued a report slamming the FDA for providing little guidance on how to fund or implement the food protection plan it introduced last November. The office also says the FDA has enacted only three of 24 GAO food safety recommendations. Lisa Shames, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment, said in testimony to a House subcommittee on Thursday that her agency had sounded the alarm about the FDA’s problems in enforcing food safety in 1998. “A decade later,” she said, “the story remains the same and has only taken on a greater sense of urgency.”

Apart from the public health concerns, a produce outbreak can be devastating for agriculture-dependent states such as Florida, which produces an annual tomato crop valued at $500 million to $700 million and provides more than 90 percent of the nation’s tomatoes at this time of year. The FDA said on Thursday that Florida was not a source of the outbreak, but the two-week period when some types of tomatoes could not be sold cost the industry millions in lost revenue.

In response to the loss, Florida officials have stepped in to create stricter measures on their own. Roberts says that the state has taken the lead nationwide by introducing the first mandatory produce safety regulations and record-keeping requirements on top of the more general federal guidelines, and that California growers are considering a similar move. The Florida regulations will be backed up by state inspections as of July 1. “With several outbreaks in 2004 and 2005, the industry in Florida said, ‘We don’t want to wait for someone else to craft something and have further outbreaks’,” Roberts says.

Florida’s new record-keeping rules may be key to protecting the industry in the future. Tracing contamination is much more difficult with produce than it is with a packaged product, like cereal, where there are tracking codes stamped on the box, says Roberts. It requires documentation at every stage, from where the tomato seeds were purchased to which labor crews were used to where the produce was sold or repacked. But the benefits are there for farmers, even if the paperwork seems onerous, says Roberts. “If there’s a possibility you could be involved in some sort of outbreak, you want to be able to pull out a record and show that you were doing what you were supposed to be doing.”

In the meantime, some wary consumers may decide to rediscover the pleasures of an old-fashioned backyard garden.

Setback for Big Brother: Federal Court Suspends National Animal Identification System

Source: R-CalfUSA.

Court Decision Suspends USDA’s Efforts to Establish a New Privacy Act System of Records for NAIS

Billings, Mont. ­ R-CALF USA was pleased to learn that on June 4, 2008, the U.S. District Court ­ District of Columbia forced the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to suspend indefinitely its plan to establish a new Privacy Act system of records titled “National Animal Identification System (NAIS).” In April, USDA proposed to establish the NAIS system of records, which was to become effective June 9, 2008, and had published a notice soliciting public comments. R-CALF USA and other organizations submitted comments with the agency in opposition to USDA’s plan. The court-ordered suspension was a result of the Mary-Louise Zanoni v. United States Department of Agriculture case. The suspension was published in Tuesday’s Federal Register.

In its comments to USDA, R-CALF USA states: “R-CALF maintains that USDA has misrepresented the purpose, scope and nature of its proposed new system of records, and that USDA’s actual purposes of the proposed new system was simply to develop a national registry of real, personal and private property.”

“In fact, it is R-CALF’s position that the actual scope of this NAIS registry was anything but voluntary, as media reports indicate there likely are thousands of U.S. citizens whose property was added to the NAIS registry against their will or without their knowledge,” said R-CALF USA President Max Thornsberry, a Missouri veterinarian who also chairs the group’s animal health committee.

“It’s also important to note that USDA has provided no evidence to demonstrate that the NAIS registry is even feasible, as no cost/benefit analysis has been conducted to determine if the cost of NAIS to food-animal owners can be recovered in the marketplace, nor has USDA provided evidence to show that things like normal loss of ear tags, data entry errors and/or computer malfunctions would not effectively thwart any traceback efforts,” Thornsberry pointed out. “As a result of this lack of information, USDA cannot justify the need for its NAIS system or its related proposal for a new system of records.

“R-CALF USA will continue to request that Congress put a moratorium on any funding for NAIS, and we are grateful that the judicial system has blocked the agency’s misguided plan,” he concluded. “We believe the pending lawsuit will demonstrate that USDA has improperly acquired information about many U.S. citizens and has wrongfully included their information into its so-called ‘voluntary’ data base without their permission.”

Note: To view R-CALF USA’s comments filed May 30, 2008, on USDA’s proposed new system of records, please visit the “Animal Identification” link at www.r-calfusa.com .

The Beginning Of Global Order

Source: Pablo Ouziel, Countercurrents.org.

We can continue to believe our politicians as they echo messages of stability and order around our planet, and we can continue to feed off the BBC or the New York Times to get an insight into the normality of the global situation, but sooner or later, the collapse of our economies is going to affect us directly by hitting our pockets, and then perhaps we will be ready to act. Hopefully, against those politicians and global capitalists who are infecting our daily life by bringing a painful and miserable reality to the majority of humanity.

Yesterday, as I drove on the motorway towards Barcelona, I was overcome with tears. Lining the roads were truckers slowing the traffic, waving banners and making noise to be heard in order to be understood, while the rest of the drivers in their cars were feeling annoyed at the inconvenience of a minority obstructing their daily routine. The radio was repeating negative messages about the truckers, the politicians were repeating over and over again that these people were a minority, and that the rest of us should not worry, because they would not achieve the goal of disrupting the flow of petrol or the arrival of goods from one point to another.

As this was happening in Spain, discontented truckers in different points of the planet were also complaining. Their complain was a simple one, “We can no longer afford to feed our families”. Yet, solidarity is running so short these days, that isolated groups get affected by the global economic situation, while the rest of us continue our routine without paying much attention to their pleas. What people are failing to see, is the connection between the truckers today, the fishermen a few weeks ago, the homeowners losing their homes, and the global revolts because of rising food prices. The people being affected directly are giving us a warning of things to come, and the only way this can be reversed, is if we group together and begin to show support to those who are feeling the pain right now.

We have not been smart enough as a collective of global citizens to understand that we are being taken on a ride, that affected groups are being kept isolated by the magic wand of the mainstream media regurgitating the propagandistic message of the ruling elite. Everyday, the global situation is getting worse. As strikes are on the rise and unemployment is increasing, we must be alert, we must understand what is happening. The elites will continue to keep us divided, because divided is how they can control us, but we must be smarter than them and understand that the only strength we have against their policies, is the collective strength of united discontent.

When will we understand that our politicians are lying to us? Will we ever understand that the mainstream media is not democratic and that the police are there to defend the interests of the wealthy? One can see clearly whose interest the police serves when those who protest and strike have guns pointed at them. Only a few years ago, Argentineans were going to the bank to retrieve their money, and instead of happy clerks, they found hostile policemen telling them to go away. Their money was not theirs anymore, it was gone. Yet, the owners of the banks never lost anything, all their money was out of the country, and once that country had collapsed, they came back again with smiles buying things cheap. I often come cross Argentineans, and frequently they tell me that a global ‘corralito’ is what is about to happen. The sad thing is that I do not need their wisdom to understand that, because I am seeing it with my own eyes. Friends are losing their homes, others are losing their jobs, oil prices are making life hard for those close to me who have to commute everyday, and the hopelessness of the situation is slowly breaking the fabric of the community in which I live.

Because of the internet, I am able to communicate with lots of people around the world, and everything which I see around me, many in other places are seeing around them. So, while bankers and politicians speak of inflation being under control, recession being an illusion, and economic fundamentals being strong, I am led to believe that in their world — wherever that is — they are not exposed to reality. Yet the truth is, that they know the reality much better than I do, they have access to information which I will only see years from now, when hopefully they are punished for their crimes against humanity.

Going back to those truckers whom I saw furious yesterday on the motorway, people must begin to see that they were not obstructing normality, but rather pointing out an abnormality which global citizens must unite to correct. Yesterday, we should have all stopped our cars in support of the truckers, because by supporting the truckers we would be supporting ourselves. We should have demanded that CEOs of oil companies stop receiving multimillion dollar salaries, we should have demanded that our governments implement measures to limit the rising prices of oil, we should have ultimately asked that our governments seize all their hostilities against the oil producing countries, many of those currently in the Middle East.

The last time oil prices skyrocketed was in 1973 when the members of Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries OAPEC, announced, as a result of the ongoing Yom Kippur War, that they would no longer ship oil to nations that had supported Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt. What a coincidence that oil prices are rising today, as the West is on a rampage against the Arab world, supporting the slaughter of the people in Gaza, supporting the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and showing an ever growing hostility towards Iran.

We must begin to pave the path to peace in order to gain global stability, and that must be done by setting measures to stop speculators from benefiting from the misery of others, by punishing corrupt politicians, and by collectively understanding that bankers are rich because we have placed our money in their hands. Ultimately, unless we begin to see the world as a whole, in which things are truly interconnected, our governments will continue their hostilities, oil prices will keep on rising, and when the time comes for us to complain, we will be faced with the guns of the police whom we have helped to create with the payment of our taxes. The only positive thing coming out of this chaos, is that we are no longer able to avoid facing reality, and soon after this social Tsunami which has begun to unravel is over, we will be faced with a true opportunity to collectively construct global order.

Pablo Ouziel is a sociologist and freelance writer

UK: 23 people died and 123 hospitalised after being given flu vaccine in the last five years

Be suspicious of the low numbers of reported deaths and reactions from vaccines. Doctors are extremely loath to report them; even people in the medical field, like the parents of Hannah Poling, didn’t know about VAERS (The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System).

Source: Mail On Sunday.

Twenty-three people have died in the past five years after a routine flu jab.

Official figures show that a further 123 people given the winter vaccine suffered a suspected reaction so severe they were taken to hospital.

Causes of death included heart attacks, blood infections and pneumonia, while asthma and kidney failure were among reported side-effects.

The statistics, revealed by Health Minister Dawn Primarolo, raise fears over the safety of the vaccine, which is taken by eight million people in Britain every year.

Government policy is to offer the jabs to everyone over 65 and those with existing conditions that could be worsened by flu.

Experts say the deaths could be coincidental and no direct link to the injection has been established.

But there are now calls for further research to identify whether some people could be put in danger by having the jab.

Ms Primarolo insisted the flu vaccine was safe and added: ‘The balance of benefits to risks remains overwhelmingly positive.’

Feds Scrape Together $30M for Plug-In Hybrids. That’s All?

Source: By Chuck Squatriglia, Wired.

The Bush Administration has shown its support for plug-in hybrids by promising a measly $30 million to get them on the road within eight years, a figure and a timeline some automakers and plug-in advocates say is too little and too long. Getting these cars on the road quickly, they say, should be a national priority with the funding to match.

The Department of Energy made a big deal of the hand-out, announcing it at a plug-in hybrid conference in Washington D.C., but c’mon — $30 million? To be spread out among three companies over three years? What’d it do — scrounge change from couch cushions in the Pentagon? EV advocates were quick to thank Uncle Sam for the money but said it’s going to take a whole lot more than that to wean us from oil — which, by the way, will collect $17 billion in tax breaks during the next decade.

“It’s great to see the DOE upping its support of plug-in vehicles and getting the major car companies involved,” Sherry Boschert, vice-president of Plug In America, told Wired.com. “Unfortunately, the $30 is a drop in the bucket compared with funding that DOE blows on less viable and potentially harmful options like hydrogen fuel cell cars and corn-based biofuels.”

General Motors, Ford and General Electric will share the money, which Assistant Energy Secretary Andy Karsner said would accelerate development of the cars to make them cost-competitive by 2014 and commercially viable by 2016.

2016? When the Chevrolet Volt and a plug-in Prius could be in showrooms by 2010 and Nissan says it’ll skip plugs entirely and give us an EV at about the same time?

Plug-in advocates weren’t alone in expressing dismay at the DOE timeline. Sen. Robert Mendez, D-N.J., chastised the agency for not thinking bigger and pushing harder, saying, “The administration lacks a sense of urgency on this issue.”

To be fair, plug-in hybrids still face challenges and even Toyota is telling people not to expect miracles. Bill Reinert, the automakers U.S. head of advanced technology, told Automotive News the range may not be as great as people expect. “When we see the (claims of) 100 mile-per-gallon stuff, not everybody’s going to get 100 miles per gallon,” he says.

They don’t have to. Seventy percent of us don’t drive more than 40 miles a day. A car that will go that far on a single charge will free most people from gasoline. But even that’s a tough goal to meet, and lithium-ion batteries remain the biggest hurdle. Congress has said it will increase research funding in the years to come, but how much is anyone’s guess.

Automakers could use nickel metal hydride batteries, which Toyota’s been putting in the Prius for 10 years. But Mark Fields, president of the Americas for Ford Motor Co., says battery technology is just one problem. He laid out several others in a speech during the plug-in conference and said it’s time for Washington to get involved in solving them.

“In order for us to succeed, we must make this a national priority,” he says. “We are doing our part to transform the industry and invest in new technologies. However, in a global environment, a substantial government partnership is required. The governments of Japan, China, Korea, and India are significantly funding the research, development and deployment of plug-in hybrid vehicle technologies. This is a race that we must win.”

What would it take to win? David Sandalow, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Clinton Administration official, says we could transform the nation’s vehicle fleet if we spent about $18.5 billion over the next decade. He lays it out like this in “Freedom from Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States’ Oil Addiction“:

• $5 billion to help automakers retool production plants.
• $12 billion in consumer tax credits for plug-in hybrids.
• $1 billion to add 30,000 plug-in hybrids to the government fleet each year for 10 years.
• $500 million to underwrite warranties on lithium-ion batteries until the technology is proven.

Eighteen-point-five billion. The proposal that Congress shot down this week to tax Big Oil’s windfall profits and take away its tax subsidies would have just about covered that.

Antonin Scalia and police-state rule

Source: By David Walsh, World Socialist Web Site.

On June 12 the United States Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, ruled that so-called “enemy combatants” held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba have the right to challenge their detention in US courts.

Many of the inmates have been held for six years at Guantánamo, under barbaric conditions. None of them have been found guilty of a crime in a court of law.

The four dissenting Supreme Court justices, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Joseph Alito, defend the right of the Bush administration to proceed in its “war on terror” with utter disregard for the Constitution and elementary democratic rights. They are, in essence, proponents of authoritarian rule. The savagery at Guantánamo is not a source of shame or even concern for them, but the wave of the future.

Chief Justice Roberts, in his dissenting opinion, denounced the majority view, arguing that the “political branches” (the executive and the Congress) had “crafted these procedures [for trials of detainees] amidst an ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough debate.” The former—“the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants,” according to Roberts—include interrogation through coercion and torture and kangaroo courts run by the military.

Roberts, in one extraordinary passage, observes that “The majority rests its decision on abstract and hypothetical concerns.” There is nothing “abstract and hypothetical” about the denial of basic rights to the Guantánamo prisoners or the character of their detention.

In December 2004, for instance, the Washington Post reported the allegations of an FBI agent who revealed that inmates at Guantánamo “were shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time, left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on themselves.” Other techniques included the use of growling dogs, extreme heat and cold and sexual humiliation. ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero told the Post that the incidents described in the FBI documents “can only be described as torture.”

While Roberts retains a “respectful” tone throughout most of his dissent, Antonin Scalia cannot control his anger and venom. In his dissent, this extreme right-winger writes a political diatribe. He begins by lambasting the “disastrous consequences of what the Court has done today.”

Scalia then adds up the American victims of the alleged “war with radical Islamists.” He goes on, “The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

Shamelessly, Scalia argues that had the military not been assured by Bush administration legal advisers that Guantánamo was outside the jurisdiction of the federal court system, it would not have transported the detainees there, “but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.”

He heaps scorn on the majority for refusing to bow down before Bush and Congress and declaring unconstitutional provisions of the 2006 Military Commissions Act. Scalia observes bitterly at one point that the majority “cannot resist striking a pose of faux deference to Congress and the President,” when presumably they should be showing genuine deference to a widely despised president and a discredited Congress, responsible for an illegal, unpopular war.

The court majority in its ruling, claims Scalia, “elbows aside” not only the military, but “Congress and the Executive—both political branches,” which “have determined that limiting the role of civilian courts in adjudicating whether prisoners captured abroad are properly detained is important to success in the war that some 190,000 of our men and women are now fighting.” This is simply a right-wing, demagogic appeal, not a reasoned legal opinion.

He concludes, threateningly, “And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner. The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.”

The media frequently refers to “the brilliant Antonin Scalia,” in an attempt to endow a veneer of intellectual respectability to a legal “philosophy” that draws its inspiration from the religious obscurantism of the Inquisition and the political aims of extreme reaction. It is well known that Scalia’s approach to legal issues is unprincipled and cynical. Scalia decides his cases on the basis of political convictions, which are rabidly antidemocratic, and then works backward to concoct a sophistical justification for the objective he has decided on in advance.

In calling a halt to the recount of the presidential vote in Florida in 2000 and installing George W. Bush in power, for example, Scalia and the four other majority justices insisted that their ruling set no precedent and could not be used to justify any future court decision. When it suits his purpose, as in the present case involving the Guantánamo detainees, Scalia denounces “judicial activism.”

He is a thug in black robes, who talks and acts like a gangster. When asked about criticism that the 2000 election ruling was based on his personal political preferences, Scalia replied with consummate arrogance that people should “Get over it.”

A number of observers have noted the apparent influence of reactionary German legal thinker Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) on Scalia and other right-wing judges.

A thoroughly unsavory figure, Schmitt became a professor at the University of Berlin in 1933, the same year he joined the Nazi party. Hermann Göring appointed him Prussian State Councilor and Schmitt became president of the Union of National-Socialist Jurists in November 1933. In October 1936 he put himself forward as a rabid anti-Semite, calling for German law to be cleansed of the “Jewish spirit” and all publications of Jewish scientists to be marked with a small symbol. He later had a falling out with sections of the Nazi movement, but he retained his professorship thanks to Göring.

Schmitt, a virulent anticommunist and opponent of liberalism, is closely identified with the concept of “exception,” which asserted that rapid changes in the political situation rendered any legal system built on fixed legal codes unstable. He is a kind of theorist of permanent emergency powers. A well-known example of the practical implications of the theory of exception was given by Schmitt in the aftermath of the “Night of the Long Knives” on June 30, 1934, during which Hitler carried out a bloody purge of suspected dissidents within his own movement. Schmitt sanctioned the event—involving the murder of several thousand people—as the highest form of administrative justice.

Scott Horton on the Harper’s magazine web site noted June 13 that “the notion of a state of exception … underlies the whole architecture of Bush war on terror policies. Simply put, these policies argue that while the Executive is limited by the checks and balances of the American constitution during peacetime and at home, all those shackles fall away when war erupts and when he acts outside the nation’s territory.”

Horton continues: “The true roots of this notion lie in the thinking of a troubling figure, Carl Schmitt. The most important conservative legal thinker on the European continent between the wars, Schmitt felt that modern liberal democracy crafted on the Anglo-American model was too weak to cope with the social and political shockwaves that racked Europe between the wars…. For the past seven years, Americans have witnessed an effort to engineer a ‘state of exception’ to the American constitution.”

Scalia and the other extreme right-wingers on the Supreme Court, not to beat around the bush, represent a fascistic element, who hold democratic rights in contempt and in whose theory of jurisprudence the interests of the state take precedence over everything else.

If Scalia proceeds with a peculiar arrogance and self-confidence, it is because he feels, on the one hand, that he has a definite political constituency behind him, and on the other, that his liberal opponents will wring their hands but do nothing. And in this latter conviction, he is entirely correct.

While the right wing has never shied away from slandering and calling for the removal of Supreme Court justices of which it did not approve, such as William O. Douglas and others, no one in the establishment liberal media, much less the Democratic Party, would suggest that the current filthy lot of right-wing conspirators on the high court should simply be impeached and removed.

Friday’s New York Times editorial exemplified this impotent approach. While the Times recognizes that Bush “has denied the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency to the hundreds of men that he decided to label ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ and throw into never-ending detention,” and that the Supreme Court “turned back the most recent effort to subvert justice” only by the narrowest of margins, its editors draw no far-reaching political conclusions from these extraordinary and alarming facts.

“It was disturbing,” writes the newspaper, “that four justices dissented from this eminently reasonable decision.” The Times, as always, puts the mildest interpretation on the event and fails to investigate the socio-political significance of the fact “that habeas hangs by a single vote in the Supreme Court of the United States,” i.e., that one vote separates the American political machinery from an open endorsement of police-state rule.

The editorial’s punch line, of course, is that the decision is “a reminder that the composition of the court could depend on the outcome of this year’s presidential election.” But recent history, the Times’ own lack of outrage, and the character of the Barack Obama campaign put the lie to this claim.

American liberalism has done nothing to prevent the wholesale assault on democratic rights over the past decade—the hijacking of a national election, the stampede to an illegal war, the ripping up of the Bill of Rights.

On the contrary, the Democrats have either stood by uselessly or joined in the assault, voting in large numbers to authorize the war against Iraq, helping to pass the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act and a myriad of other pieces of reactionary legislation. To rely on Obama, the Times, and the corpse of American liberalism to defend habeas corpus or democratic rights as a whole would be fatal.

See Also:
US Supreme Court upholds habeas corpus for Guantánamo Bay prisoners
[13 June 2008]
Supreme Court overrides US voters: a ruling that will live in infamy
[14 December 2000]

Propaganda alert: Get Osama Bin Laden before I leave office, orders Dubya

Signs of the Times wondered if they’ll rustle up a patsy to kill so Bush could take credit. I’m always suspicious when I see news “stories” about Osama bin Forgotten, since in all likelihood the dude is dead already.

Source: Sarah Baxter, Times Online.

President George W Bush has enlisted British special forces in a final attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden before he leaves the White House.

Defence and intelligence sources in Washington and London confirmed that a renewed hunt was on for the leader of the September 11 attacks. “If he [Bush] can say he has killed Saddam Hussein and captured Bin Laden, he can claim to have left the world a safer place,” said a US intelligence source.

Bush arrives in Britain today on the final leg of his eight-day farewell tour of Europe. He will have tea with the Queen and dinner with Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah before holding a private meeting with Brown at No 10 tomorrow and flying on to Northern Ireland.

The Special Boat Service (SBS) and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment have been taking part in the US-led operations to capture Bin Laden in the wild frontier region of northern Pakistan. It is the first time they have operated across the Afghan border on a regular basis.

The hunt was “completely sanctioned” by the Pakistani government, according to a UK special forces source. It involves the use of Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles fitted with Hellfire missiles that can be used to take out specific terrorist targets.

One US intelligence source compared the “growing number of clandestine reconnaissance missions” inside Pakistan with those conducted in Laos and Cambodia at the height of the Vietnam war.

America rarely acknowledges the use of Predator and Reaper drones, but the most recent known strike was on a suspected Al-Qaeda safe house in the Pakistani province of North Waziristan earlier in June. Villagers said the house was empty.

Intelligence on the whereabouts of Bin Laden is sketchy, but some analysts believe he is in the Bajaur tribal zone in northwest Pakistan. He has evaded capture for nearly seven years. “Bush is swinging for the fences in the hope of scoring a home run,” said an intelligence source, using a baseball metaphor.

A Pentagon source said US forces were rolling up Al-Qaeda’s network in Pakistan in the hope of pushing Bin Laden towards the Afghan border, where the US military and bombers with guided missiles were lying in wait. “They are prepping for a major battle,” he said.

The main operations in Pakistan are being undertaken by Delta, the US army special operations unit, and the British SBS.

Special forces are being sent to capture or kill Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters based on intelligence provided by the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and its US counterpart, the Security Co-ordination Detachment.

The step-up in military activity has increased tensions between Pakistan and the US. A senior Pakistani government source said President Pervez Musharraf had given tacit support to Predator attacks on Al-Qaeda.

Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said last week that the US would “partner [the Pakistanis] to the extent they want us to” to combat insurgents.

Pakistan lodged a strong diplomatic protest last week over what it claimed was an airstrike on a border post with Afghanistan that killed 11 of its troops.

The United States declined to accept this version of events. “It is still not exactly clear what happened,” said Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser.