Monday, November 4, 2013
Torture task force finds doctors
are still used in unethical ways
U.S. government doctors are still being used for unethical activities, despite steps taken to improve treatment of Guantanamo detainees, a private team of medical professionals charges.
Since September 11, 2001, the Pentagon and CIA improperly have demanded that U.S. military and intelligence agency health professionals collaborate in intelligence gathering and security practices in a way that inflicted severe harm on detainees in U.S. custody, according to the Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers.
Though steps have been taken to improve the lot of detainees, the task force says, nevertheless the Pentagon “continues to follow policies that undermine standards of professional conduct” for interrogation, hunger strikes, and reporting abuse.
Among practices the task force charges are still occurring:
- Requiring doctors and nurses to participate in the force-feeding of detainees, including forced extensive bodily restraints for up to two hours twice a day.
- Requiring medical professionals to provide interrogators access to the medical and psychological records of captives for exploitation during interrogations.
- Pressuring doctors to ignore the root cause -- torture -- of much detainee suffering.
“Abuse of detainees, and health professional participation in this practice, is not behind us as a country,” said Leonard Rubenstein, a task force member and legal scholar at Johns Hopkins. “Force-feeding by physicians in violation of ethical standards is illustrative of a much broader legacy in which medical professionalism has been undermined.”
The task force recommends a full investigation of medical practices in detention facilities and public release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review of CIA practices. It also calls for promulgation of rules that harmonize medical and psychological practices with ethical prohibitions on participation in interrogation, use of medical records for interrogation, force feeding, and abuse reporting.
Statement on misuse of doctors
http://www.imapny.org/medicine_as_a_profession/interrogationtorture-and-dual-loyalty
Sunday, November 3, 2013
a news powerhouse
The NSA is bracing for a major threat as Glenn Greenwald and his team of hard-hitting journalists prepare to unleash a frontal attack on the system and its corrupt ways with a news site financed by a billionaire advocate of government accountability.
Pierre M. Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is reported to have put up $250 million to get the as-yet-unnamed news organization off the ground. The French-born Iranian-American established the Democracy Fund, which finances "social entrepreneurs working to ensure that the political system is responsive to the public."
Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald used his Guardian position to awaken America and the world to the disturbing content of secret materials spirited out of the NSA by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previously, Greenwald wrote for Salon. The award-winning journalist is a trained constitutional lawyer.
Greenwald background
http://www.omidyargroup.com/pov/author/ggreenwald
Omidyar, whose Twitter messages display great concern about NSA surveillance, is estimated to have a financial worth of $8.5 billion. At present six corporations control more than 90 percent of U.S. media. Omidyar's presence brings another major voice to the U.S. media market, making it more difficult for these corporations to cooperate to play down or spike unwelcome stories.
The Guardian's U.S. edition, with Greenwald reporting on Edward Snowden's leaks, had already undermined the somewhat strained gentlemen's agreement between U.S. intelligence agencies and domestic media to ignore various stories.
Omidyar's organization will doubtless come under fire as a hotbed of leftism. Yet many of the issues raised by these reporters should be of concern to all Americans. It is certainly true that many libertarians have found common cause with liberals and leftists on the issue of transforming America into a national security surveillance state.
The Obama administration seems to have been lulled into a false sense of security with respect to the press, evidently believing that being on acceptable terms with the media cartel's owners made it immune to real scrutiny. But news crusading is a time-honored American tradition, intelligence system oppression or no.
Others on the Omidyar news team:
Laura Poitras
Laura Poitras says she was placed on Homeland Security's watchlist, with a maximum "threat rating," and harassed by U.S. operatives after her award-winning documentary "My Country, My Country" aired. The film portrays life in Iraq for average Iraqis under U.S. occupation.
Poitras has been working with Der Spiegel in Germany and other publications on the Snowden leaks, she says. She and Greenwald are the only journalists to have the entire trove of NSA files, Poitras says.
N.Y. Times article on Poitras
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html
Poitras background
http://www.omidyargroup.com/pov/author/lpoitras
Dan Froomkin
Dan Froomkin is contributing editor of Nieman Reports, and the former senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post. He wrote the White House Watch column for the Washington Post website from 2004 to 2009, and was editor of the site from 2000 to 2003.
Froomkin urges press to fight secrecy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-froomkin/its-time-for-the-press-to_b_3455229.html
Froomkin background
http://www.omidyargroup.com/pov/author/dfroomkin
Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill reported on national security for the Nation magazine. His book "Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army" won the George Polk Book Award. His newest book is "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield" was published by Nation Books in April.
Scahill background
http://www.omidyargroup.com/pov/author/jscahill
Liliana Segura
Liliana Segura, another veteran of the Nation, where she had been an associate editor, has written a number of reports on domestic injustices, including one on the prison business. She has also written for AlterNet and ColorLines.
On prison profiteers
http://www.thenation.com/prison-profiteers
Segura background
http://www.omidyargroup.com/pov/author/lsegura/
Jefferson Airplane performs 'Revolution'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_0sg0XDfmg
Pressure builds in Germany to help Snowden
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/03/germany-edward-snowden-asylum
but Chancellor Angela Merkel's problem is that her own intelligence service is opposed to such a move and she is under heavy pressure from President Obama to treat Snowden as a criminal. One wouldn't expect Washington officials to admit to the criminal nature of their stealth attack on the Constitution. They aren't criminals, they claim, because judges and lawyers secretly said the ripoff was OK.
Greenwald's temporary blog link unresponsive
Greenwald's temporary Google Blogger blog "has been removed," according to Google. Greenwald had said he planned to keep that blog in being. Understandably, the blog may conflict with his new editorial position. However, it might be helpful if the content of that blog were reposted elsewhere, presumably at his new employer's site.
Friday, November 1, 2013
AP editor urges boycott
of staged Obama photos
The Associated Press's executive editor is urging a nationwide press boycott of staged photos of President Obama handed out by the White House, the Daily Caller reports.
Newspaper editors at a national conference heard the AP editor, Kathleen Carroll, call for them to cease printing the White House's preferred photos, according to conference participants interviewed by the Caller.
The issue is that the White House has been giving short shrift to press photographers and distributing carefully crafted handouts, conference participants were told by AP's director of photography, Santiago Lyon.
“This works because newspapers use these handout photos,” she said at the AP Media Editors national conference in Indianapolis on Wednesday. The quotation was attributed to Jack Lail, digital editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Obama has come under strong criticism from press rights groups and many journalists on grounds that his policies are too controlling and threaten the free working of democracy.
Daily Caller's report
http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/01/ap-editors-obama-relies-on-staged-propaganda-photos/
Merkel faces a political tumult
on granting Snowden immunity
German Prime Minister Angela Merkel is faced with the thorny problem of whether NSA leaker Edward Snowden should be permitted to come to Germany as a protected witness to aid parliamentary investigations or whether she and her aides should stand by their decision to effectively bar him from the country.
U.S. officials are scrambling to straighten out the foreign relations embroglio stirred by disclosure that the NSA had been tapping Merkel's cell phones. Prior to that disclosure, she had defended German cooperation with the U.S. intelligence system.
Snowden is willing to travel to Germany to testify, but "conditions must be discussed," according to Hans-Christian Stroebele, a legislator for the opposition Greens party who sits on the European parliament's intelligence panel, Reuters reports. Stroebele held a three-hour huddle with Snowden in Moscow yesterday, the news agency said.
Washington would be expected to press for Snowden's extradition should he set foot in Germany. Berlin's previous refusal to deny the former defense contractor political asylum means that if he comes to Germany he would be subject to arrest and extradition to the United States. Additionally, he must be careful not to make a misstep with respect to his status as a political refugee in Russia.
Reuters report on Snowden huddle
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/31/us-usa-security-germany-snowden-idUSBRE99U1DL20131031
"He made it clear he knows a lot," Stroebele said, adding that he told Snowden that, if necessary, he could be interviewed by German investigators in Moscow. But Snowden's lawyer said that Snowden could not disclose secret information while in Russia.
Gregor Gysi, parliamentary leader of the Left, has said Germany should include Snowden in its witness protection program so he could speak before a parliamentary committee.
Germany's defense minister, who is responsible for much intelligence activity, expressed disappointment with Washington. "It is clear that trust has been broken and this trust must be restored," he said. "This requires official agreements on which we can depend."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected U.S. pleas to send Snowden home to face charges, instead in August granting him temporary asylum. However, Putin, a former KGB official, has said repeatedly that Russia would shelter Snowden only if he stopped harming the United States.
As it is unlikely that the truculent Russian leader is actually overly concerned with the welfare of the Obama administration, skeptical observers wonder whether Putin's real worry is that leaked NSA data will expose situations that might jeopardize his position.
Guardian sees breaking up of global internet
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/01/nsa-surveillance-cause-internet-breakup-edward-snowden
Thursday, October 31, 2013
I haven't read The Da Vinci Code but...
. . . I have scanned a book by the painter David Hockney, whose internet-driven survey of Renaissance and post-Renaissance art makes a strong case for a trade secret: use of a camera obscura technique for creating precision realism in paintings.
Hockney's book, Secret Knowledge: rediscovering the lost legacy of the old masters, 2001, uses numerous paintings to show that European art guilds possessed this technical ability, which was a closely guarded and prized secret. Eventually the technique, along with the related magic lantern projector, evolved into photography. It's possible the technique also included the use of lenses and mirrors, a topic familiar to Leonardo da Vinci.
Apparently the first European mention of a camera obscura is in Codex Atlanticus.
I didn't know about this when first mulling over the Shroud of Turin controversy and so was quite perplexed as to how such an image could have been formed in the 14th century, when the shroud's existence was first reported. I was mistrustful of the carbon dating, realizing that the Kremlin had a strong motive for deploying its agents to discredit the purported relic.
See my old page
Science, superstition and the Shroud of Turin
http://www.angelfire.com/az3/nuzone/shroud.html
But Hockney's book helps to bolster a theory by fellow Brits Lynn Picknell and Clive Prince that the shroud was faked by none other than Leonardo, a scientist, "magician" and intriguer. Their book The Turin Shroud was a major source of inspiration for The Da Vinci Code, it has been reported.
The two are not professional scientists but, in the time-honored tradition of English amateurs, did an interesting sleuthing job.
As they point out, the frontal head image is way out of proportion with the image of the scourged and crucified body. They suggest the face is quite reminiscent of a self-portrait by Leonardo. Yet, two Catholic scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab who used a computer method in the 1980s to analyze the image had supposedly demonstrated that it was "three-dimensional." But a much more recent analysis, commissioned by Picknell and Prince, found that the "three-dimensionalism" did not hold up. From what I can tell, the Jet Propulsion pair proved that the image was not made by conventional brushwork but that further analysis indicates some type of projection.
Picknell and Prince suggest that Leonardo used projected images of a face and of a body -- perhaps a cadaver that had been inflicted with various crucifixion wounds -- to create a death mask type of impression. But the image collation was imperfect, leaving the head size wrong and the body that of, by Mideast standards, a giant. This is interesting, in that Hockney discovered that the camera obscura art often failed at proportion and depth of field between spliced images, just as when a collage piece is pasted onto a background.
Still the shroud's official history begins in 1358, about a hundred years prior to the presumed Da Vinci hoax. It seems plausible that either some shroud-like relic had passed to a powerful family and that its condition was poor, either because of its age or because it wasn't that convincing upon close inspection. The family then secretly enlisted Leonardo, the theory goes, in order to obtain a really top-notch relic. Remember, relics were big business in those days, being used to generate revenues and political leverage.
For if Leonardo was the forger, we must account for the fact that the highly distinctive "Vignon marks" on the shroud face have been found in Byzantine art dating to the 7th century. I can't help but wonder whether Leonardo only had the Mandylion (the face) to work with, and added the body as a bonus (I've tried scanning the internet for reports of exact descriptions of the shroud prior to da Vinci's time but haven't succeeded).
The Mandylion refers to an image not made by hands. This "image of Edessa" must have been very impressive, considering the esteem in which it was held by Byzantium. Byzantium also was rife with relics and with secret arts -- which included what we'd call technology along with mumbo-jumbo. The Byzantine tradition of iconography may have stemmed from display of the Mandylion.
Ian Wilson, a credentialed historian who seems to favor shroud authenticity, made a good case for the Mandylion having been passed to the Knights Templar -- perhaps when the crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204. The shroud then showed up in the hands of a descendant of one of the Templars after the order was ruthlessly suppressed. His idea was that the shroud and the Mandylion were the same, but that in the earlier centuries it had been kept folded in four, like a map, with the head on top and had always been displayed that way.
The other possibility is that a convincing relic of only the head was held by the Templars. A discovery at Templecombe, England, in 1951 showed that regional Templar centers kept paintings of a bearded Jesus face, which may well have been copies of a relic that Templar enemies tried to find but couldn't. The Templars had been accused of worshiping a bearded idol.
Well, what made the Mandylion so convincing? A possibility: when the Templars obtained the relic they also obtained a secret book of magical arts that told how to form such an image. This of course implies that Leonardo discovered the technique when examining this manuscript, which may have contained diagrams. Or, it implies that the image was not counterfeited by Leonardo but was a much, much older counterfeit.
Obviously all this is pure speculation. But one cannot deny that the shroud images have a photographic quality but are out of kilter with each other and that the secret of camera obscura projection in Western art seems to stem from Leonardo's studios.
The other point is that the 1988 carbon analysis dated the shroud to the century before Leonardo. If one discounts possible political control of the result, then one is left to wonder how such a relic could have been so skillfully wrought in that era. Leonardo was one of those once-in-a-thousand-year geniuses who had the requisite combination of skills, talents, knowledge and impiety to pull off such a stunt.
Of course, the radiocarbon dating might easily have been off by a hundred years (but, if fairly done, is not likely to have been off by 1300 years).
All in all, I can't be sure exactly what happened, but I am strongly inclined to agree that the shroud was counterfeited by Leonardo based on a previous relic. The previous relic must have been at least "pretty good" or why all the fuss in previous centuries? But, it is hard not to suspect Leonardo's masterful hand in the Shroud of Turin.
Of course, the thing about the shroud is that there is always more to it. More mystery. I know perfectly well that, no matter how good the scientific and historical analysis, trying to nail down a proof one way or the other is a wil o' the wisp.
Syria's chem arms program
said to have been destroyed
From a UN press release
The Syrian government has met a major UN benchmark with the destruction of its chemical weapons program, a watchdog agency said today.
Syria has met the deadline of Nov. 1 set by the UN's Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to complete the scrapping of critical equipment for all of its declared chemical weapons production facilities and its mixing and filling plants
The UN agency's executive council is scheduled to review on Nov. 15 Syria's plan for destruction of its stockpile of chemical weapons.
The watchdog agency has inspected 21 of the 23 sites declared by Syria, and 39 of the 41 facilities located at those sites. The two remaining sites were not visited due to safety and security concerns in the war-torn area. But Syria declared that those sites had been abandoned, saying that WMD program components were withdrawn to areas under the government's control, where they were inspected.
The watchdog group is "satisfied that it has verified -- and seen destroyed" all chemical arms program components and facilities, according to a statement issued on behalf of Director General Ahmet Üzümcü.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
NSA can bypass secret court
with 'foreign' Google, Yahoo taps
The NSA is able to work around restrictions on surveillance of Americans with its secret taps on Google and Yahoo data centers overseas, the Washington Post reports today.
Report by Gellman and Soltani
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html
The spy agency has broken into main arteries that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to a report by Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, who cite documents leaked by Edward Snowden and "knowledgeable officials."
"By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans," the Post says.
"Intercepting communications overseas has clear advantages for the NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight," the newspaper says, adding: "NSA documents about the effort refer directly to 'full take,' 'bulk access' and 'high volume' operations on Yahoo and Google networks. Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner."
Outside U.S. territory, statutory restrictions on surveillance seldom apply and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has no jurisdiction, the paper says. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who heads the Senate intelligence committee, has acknowledged that Congress conducts little oversight of intelligence-gathering under the presidential authority of Executive Order 12333 , which defines the basic powers and responsibilities of the intelligence agencies, the paper reports.
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