Charles in GM 'disaster' warning

Charles in GM crops warning

Prince Charles says he fears the development of GM crops could create the biggest environmental disaster in history.

13 Aug 2008

Prince Charles has his own organic farm at his Gloucestershire estate

Companies developing genetically modified crops risk creating the biggest environmental disaster "of all time", Prince Charles has warned.

GM crops were damaging Earth's soil and were an experiment "gone seriously wrong", he told the Daily Telegraph.

A future reliance on corporations to mass-produce food would drive millions of farmers off their land, he said.

The government said it welcomed all voices in the "important" debate over the future potential role of GM crops.

However, Dr Julian Little, chairman of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, said he was "disappointed" by the Prince's comments because "they do not seem to be based on any solid evidence".

"Our experience from over 10 years of GM cultivation shows that GM technology has been found to deliver real environmental and economic benefits," he said.

Mr Little added: "At a time when demand for food and fuel is rising and in the face of growing environmental challenges, we need to find ways to feed an ever-increasing global population."

BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell said the Prince's "robust" comments were "likely to rankle with the government", which has given the go-ahead to a number of GM crop trials in the UK since 2000.

"Even for a prince who's a long-established champion of organic farming and critic of GM crops, these are comments which verge on the extreme," our correspondent said.

Prince Charles told the newspaper that huge multi-national corporations involved in developing GM foods were conducting a "gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong".

Relying on "gigantic corporations" for food would end in "absolute disaster", he warned.

"That would be the absolute destruction of everything... and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future."

What should be being debated was "food security not food production", he said.

He said GM developers might think they would be successful by having "one form of clever genetic engineering after another", but he believed "that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time".

Prince Charles, who has an organic farm on his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire, said relying on big corporations for the mass production of food would not only threaten future food supplies but also force smaller producers out of business.

"If they think this is the way to go, we will end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness," he said.

The prince also told the Telegraph he hoped to see more family-run co-operative farms, with producers working with nature and not against it.

The Prince's comments come at a time of rising world food prices and food shortages.

The biotech industry says that GM technology can help combat world hunger and poverty by delivering higher yields from crops and also reduce the use of pesticides.

'Untenable'

In June, Environment Minister Phil Woolas said the government was ready to argue for a greater role for the technology.

But green groups and aid agencies have doubts about GM technology's effectiveness in tackling world hunger and have concerns about the long-term environmental impact.

Responding to the prince's comments, a spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: "Safety will always be our top priority on this issue."

Anti-monarchy Campaign group Republic said: "Prince Charles is quickly making his position as heir to the throne untenable with his meddling in politics."

Missing the signs of genetic irrelevance

ANALYSIS By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website

The realities of food crops are more tangled than the Prince suggested

Prince Charles usually speaks from the heart; and his latest outpouring on genetically modified crops is expressed in terms that are forthright even for him.

Judging by readers' comments appended to the Daily Telegraph article outlining his position, he has struck a chord.

This should not be surprising. There are few, if any, such divisive subjects in the scientific firmament; and in the UK at least, polls show deep public suspicion.

But the prominence given to the Prince's words across a range of news media prompt the question: is he right?

While he is adamant that food supplied through genetic technologies would be "guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster, environmentally, of all time", he offers not a jot of evidence to support the claim.

GM agriculture is often treated as a single entity which must in its entirety be regarded as good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, environmentally benign or destructive.

In the real world, biology is rarely that simple.

The strains being grown commercially today remain products jealously guarded by the companies that market them

Take the example of gene flow, the spread of introduced genes from a GM plant into non-GM neighbours, either weeds or conventional crops

How likely it is to happen depends on many factors, among them the type of crop, how its genes may be carried (for example by insects), the way farmers manage it, the weather, and whether any related plants are growing nearby.

So even though it has been shown to occur in some situations - for example, between hybrid radishes grown on the farms of Michigan and wild radishes growing nearby - in others, it does not.

Even if gene flow is documented, it does not automatically cause problems.

And that is just one example of an isolated environmental question.

Global trends

Everyone will have their own opinion about the risks involved; and humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk, as evidenced by a common instinct that driving is safer than flying.

But it is clear that if we look at what science tells us, the GM world is considerably more complex than the one Prince Charles has painted; and you can multiply the complexity a thousand-fold if you include all the environmental, social and economic questions.

But the Prince also had some harsh things to say about the modern system of food production and distribution.

Christian Aid is among groups blaming the global food trade for shortages

There were some apparent omissions and confusions. For example, the Green Revolution crops he mentions - the rice, maize and wheat hybrids developed half a century ago that sent yields through the roof in Asia and Latin America - were not products of genetic technologies but of conventional cross-breeding.

True, problems are now arising with the crops in some areas with water shortages - they are heavy on irrigation - and soil degradation. But the Prince does not mention that the Green Revolution changed India from a country that regularly needed liberal doses of food aid to one that was self-sufficient and food secure.

Nevertheless, many of the issues he raises - pressure on small-scale farmers, the hunger of modern farming methods for water, food security - are all too real in some parts of the world.

Food production, and more especially food distribution, are increasingly in the hands of giant multinational companies. Farming has already had its industrial revolution in developed countries, and the developing world is following suit.

For society and for the environment, this is a much bigger issue than whether those industrialised farms are growing GM or non-GM crops.

Both mean increased use of pesticides and fertilisers, the trading of machinery for human muscle and the consequent loss of labour compared to traditional agriculture.

GM crops have long been opposed by UK campaigners and the public

In Britain, where GM crops have never been widely grown, intensive farming has been a factor behind a wide range of environmental ills ranging from water pollution to biodiversity decline.

European and national schemes that encourage farmers to look after the environment are repairing some of the damage.

Perhaps the most telling comments on the Farm-Scale Evaluations (FSE), the biggest UK trial of GM crops, came after the event from environmentalists who said what was really needed was a trial of intensive versus non-intensive farming methods.

They could have added that such studies might not restrict themselves to environmental questions; it would also be worthwhile investigating social and economic questions, such as whether intensive or artisanal farming benefits the entire economy more, rather than specific players such as supermarkets, and trying to find some objective answers rather than relying on the theologies of rival schools of economics.

Broken promises

Would the uptake of genetically modified crops across the world make these issues worse?

Perhaps. There are conflicting studies from different areas - often prepared by institutions with a vested interest - showing that GM crops either produce higher or lower yields, need a higher or lower chemical input, and generate higher or lower profits for farmers compared to their conventional equivalents.

A few indisputable facts leap out, however. One is that commercial GM farming is dominated by four crops - soybean, maize, cotton, and canola - and has been wholeheartedly embraced by only a few countries, among them the US, China, Argentina and Canada.

Prince Charles' has regularly made his views clear on GM crops

A second is that consumers in Europe do not want to eat GM food, which is one reason why farmers in the EU and in regions supplying food to Europe, especially Africa, are not going to be making a large-scale switch any time soon.

A third - and the one most pertinent to Prince Charles' argument - is that the people and institutions behind the technology have failed to deliver on promises to right their original wrongs and develop strains that would benefit people in poorer countries and loosen corporate control.

Almost exactly four years ago, I was in Cologne, Germany to cover the Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference (Abic). Scientist after scientist (many of them working in the commercial sector) told me how companies had messed up by appearing to force GM products on an unsuspecting world, and how narrow the lines of research had been.

A second wave of crops, they pledged, would bring things that people actually wanted and needed, from drought-resistant rice for Africa to vitamin-enhanced fruit for Europeans, and would largely used technologies that did not involve transferring genes from one organism to another.

On a commercial scale, these developments have not arrived.

Earlier the same year, at the Indian Science Congress in Chandigarh, I listened to Indian scientists from the president down explain how national research institutions were going to develop strains with traits such as enhanced nutrition and salt resistance, and give them away to farming communities.

That, also, has not happened.

The strains being grown commercially today have been engineered either to help farmers control weeds through proprietary herbicides or to reduce pest damage, and remain products jealously guarded by the companies that market them.

Against this backdrop it is perhaps not surprising that many commentators on Prince Charles' interview share his apparent view that GM crops would only add to the woes of farmers and the hungry in poorer countries.

But it is also possible to argue that as things stand, GM crops are irrelevant to the wider patterns of increased corporate control of food chains, the stubborn and enduring hunger felt by much of the developing world, and the global trend of environmental decline.

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Mexico anti-drug officials worked for cartel: government

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Six members of a government crime-fighting unit have been arrested on suspicion of working for a powerful drug cartel run by the country's most-wanted man, the attorney general's office said on Wednesday

The officials, who focused on organized crime, are accused of passing crucial information about anti-drug operations to the Sinaloa cartel from Mexico's Pacific coast. It is led by kingpin Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.

The suspects gave the information to a part of the cartel that has recently turned on Guzman, the government said.

That internal conflict has sparked a surge in the drug-related violence that has killed some 2,000 people in Mexico this year.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has made crushing drug gangs the main goal of his six-year term, sending troops across Mexico on taking office in December 2006.

But drug violence has spiraled as rival gangs fight for control of lucrative smuggling routes into the United States.

Endemic police corruption has further complicated efforts to rid Mexico of cartels, with some police officers moonlighting as drug hitmen and kidnappers.

(Reporting by Anahi Rama; Editing by Xavier Briand)

Why Are Contractors in War Zones Above the Law?

In January of 2008, Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, 24, was electrocuted while showering in his Baghdadcongressional report concluding that defense contractor KBR, (until a year ago a subsidiary of the oil services giant Halliburton) was well aware that the electrical system in Maseth's complex was faulty. An accident like this, the report found, was bound to happen. But this report also now raises a larger and thornier question about military defense contractors: can they be held legally liable for their actions -- or inactions? Will anyone be held responsible for Maseth's death? barracks. His death prompted last week's

This is an increasingly important question as the U.S. government hires ever more military contractors to do work that used to be done by U.S. soldiers. The war in Iraq has already involved more outsourcing of military functions than any previous war in American history. An estimated 180,000 civilian contractors now work in Iraq and Afghanistan to support the U.S.U.S. officials and dignitaries to truck fuel, food and other supplies to military bases -- all jobs that used to be done by soldiers. government there. They do everything from guard

Private contractors operating in Iraq are not subject to U.S. military authority, or to U.S. or Iraqi law. Their employees are not subject to the rigors of Army basic training; and their superiors are not held to the strict rules and ethics that apply to the U.S. military. As a result, notes Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in his book, "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry," "When the means of security are privatized, certain mechanisms of moral hazard and adverse selection might lead firms astray. Just as in the rest of commerce, war is business where nice firms do not always finish first."

Indeed, whistle-blowers at these companies run the risk of being fired. In 2007, shortly after one KBR electrician reported to a defense contracting agency official that logs were being created to make it appear that nonexistent electrical safety systems at the base were working properly, he lost his job, according to The New York Times. Another employee "said his KBR bosses mocked him for raising safety issues."

Yet, the Pentagon inspector general's interim report provided to the House Oversight Committee on July 28 said it "has not found any credible evidence that representatives from KBR were aware of imminent, life-threatening hazards" in Maseth's complex prior to his death. This is despite that fact that the Army itself had issued an urgent bulletin (pdf) in 2004 warning soldiers of the threat.

Of course, the Pentagon may have an interest in protecting its contractors. The Defense Dept. indicated, in a 2006 review, that it intends to increase its reliance on private military companies and other outsourced support services. Its handling of the death of Maseth certainly suggests that the Pentagon is defensive on the subject: the soldier's mother, Cheryl Maseth, was originally told that her son had carried an electrical appliance into the shower.

As of January, more than 1,000 private civilian contractors -- including 110 KBR employees -- had been killed in Iraq, and another 13,000 wounded. Deaths of American soldiers in battle, meanwhile, have climbed to more than 4,100. So what happens when the military contracting companies themselves are to blame for the deaths? For years now, KBR and other military contractors have argued that as a matter of law, regardless of the circumstances, they are not responsible. As government contractors, they say, just like the military, they're immune from legal suits. That's been KBR's defense in a series of cases over the past few years when the company has been accused of knowingly sending unarmed civilian employees into active combat zones -- sometimes to their deaths.

In a case I wrote about in January for The American Lawyer, KBR denied responsibility for sending an unarmed convoy of trucks down a dangerous road under active insurgent attack. In what's come to be known as the Good Friday Massacre, in April 2004, six KBR drivers were killed and 14 were wounded. One driver is still officially missing, and presumed dead.

Now KBR could be facing many such claims. According to the Defense Dept.'s own inspector general, as of July 10, there have been 16 deaths due to faulty electrical wiring on U.S. military bases that KBR was supposed to be maintaining. Companies like KBR rely on a range of legal defenses when accused of wrongdoing, but the gist is always the same: working for the U.S.U.S. courts -- therefore immune from U.S. military means they're beyond the authority of the law.

That's exactly the tack KBR appears to be taking in the case of Maseth, whose mother has sued KBR, claiming that the company knew of the danger and was responsible for fixing it, but didn't. In other words, KBR, she asserts, could have prevented her son's death.

KBR, which has received $20 billion in Iraq war contracts since 2003, vehemently denies this. KBR's actions "were not the cause of any of these terrible accidents," company executive Thomas Bruni told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday. An interim DOD inspector general report, obtained by The Associated Press last Tuesday, reached the same conclusion.

But at least some evidence suggests otherwise. Under KBR's multi-billion-dollar contract with the Army, the company was responsible for maintaining U.S. military bases and facilities in Iraq. According to documents produced to the Oversight Committee, KBR had inspected and found problems with the building's electrical infrastructure at least four times in the months prior to Maseth's death. Documents show, for example, that another soldier in the complex had experienced electrical shocks while showering and submitted a work order (pdf) to KBR on July 8, 2007, stating: "Pipes have voltage, get shocked in the shower." A KBR electrician that day found a faulty pressure switch and noted: "Plumber needs to repair." On July 9, 2007, after KBR workers replaced the pressure switch and the water pump, the work order was stamped "finished".

Still, on Jan, 2, 2008, when Maseth turned on the shower, an ungrounded water pump short-circuited and electrified the water pipes. The current traveled through the pipes, the shower head and the water itself, electrocuting Maseth. He was dead within seconds. The congressional report concludes, based on the evidence, that KBR had installed the water pump that malfunctioned and caused the death.

Whether a court will hold the company liable, however, may depend less on the facts than whether a judge accepts KBR's claim of immunity. According to KBR's legal papers, even if the company knew of the problem and failed to fix it, KBR will claim that it's not legally liable because it was working for the U.S. government. In its motion to remove the case from state to federal court, KBR's lawyers wrote that they plan to invoke the "government contractor defense" - meaning the government approved the work so it is not responsible; the "official immunity doctrine" - that, as a government contractor, it's entitled to the same immunity as the U.S. military itself, and the "political question" doctrine -- a KBR favorite on which it's won several cases before. Under this, KBR argues that the court should dismiss the case because it would require the court to judge the actions of the U.S. military -- province of the president and Congress, not the federal courts.

KBR has relied on this same "political question" defense to win at least two previous cases involving the death of U.S. soldiers or of its own employees. But the courts are now starting to question the legitimacy of those defenses.

In the case of the Good Friday Massacre, the traditionally conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last May reversed a Texas district court's order that had dismissed the case under the political question doctrine. The three-judge panel noted that, contrary to KBR's argument, it may well be possible to resolve the cases without engaging in a "constitutionally impermissible review of wartime decision-making." Though the court cannot judge the military decisions of the Defense Dept., the court acknowledged, that doesn't shield every action taken by a military contractor. Judge Leslie Southwick wrote, "these tort-based claims of civilian employees against their civilian employers can be separated from the political questions that loom so large in the background."

The same reasoning likely applies to the electrocutions. Whether the political question doctrine applies "is partly determined by how closely intertwined the contractor is with the government officials," said Laura Dickinson, an expert on military contractor law at the University of Connecticut Law School. "One of the interesting things that I think we're seeing is that courts are not willing to throw these cases out when the contractor has a fair degree of discretion."

In this case, either KBR was responsible for repairing the electrical problems at the military base, or it wasn't. That is a factual dispute that would emerge as the lawyers gather evidence. It is not a legal matter that warrants dismissal of the case.

Unless carefully applied, contractor immunity defenses preclude a real investigation into what happened and who is responsible. If, as has happened over and over in this war, nobody is held responsible for the failures of military contractors, then there can be no incentive to do better next time.

The result is that, as long as something is done in a war zone, even the shoddiest work gets a pass -- regardless of the consequences.

Torture for torture's sake

Torture for torture's sake

by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News August 13, 2008
The use of torture is a defining characteristic of those in the grip of depravity. The use of torture for purportedly military or political ends is indicative of depravity brought on by ideology. In spite of the efforts of the mainstream media through such vehicles as the TV show 24 (which would be a torture to watch), deep down folks know this truth. Those who torture are in the grip of a devastating mental illness.

The main use of torture in any setting is to force the appearance of the victim's acceptance of the torturer's beliefsystem. When the victims of the Inquisition cried out admission of their guilt of fraternizing with the devil, the torturers felt validated -- they rationalized their cruelty by telling themselves that their

victims' souls had been saved. It is no different in incidents of torture for political ends. The captured "insurgent" is forced to confess to imagined crimes under the influence of pain and humiliation. The "interrogator" ends up with a lot of useless, inaccurate information which, when acted upon, actually harms the mission. The French utilized torture, especially waterboarding (watch THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS), in the counter-insurgency war in Algeria. Although this program of interrogation under torture was trumpeted at the time as a great success, and has continued to be copied by counter-insurgency campaigns around the world, time has revealed it to have been a very counterproductive effort. What is revealed in these sorts of transactions is that winning a war is not the primary objective of the torture. If that were the case, something as problematic as interrogation under torture would be abandoned as useless or worse. What turns out to be important is that a "soul" has been saved for the wholly just and justifiable religion of imperialism, of economic and cultural domination. The victim is brought to the ostensible point of agreeing with his torturers that he has been in error to think that rejecting such economic and cultural domination is justifiable. Thus those in the iron-clad denial that only the capacity for massive violence can provide, can, for a brief moment, revel in the justice of their cause.

The main use of torture in any setting is to force the appearance of the victim's acceptance of the torturer's belief system. When the victims of the Inquisition cried out admission of their guilt of fraternizing with the devil, the torturers felt validated -- they rationalized their cruelty by telling themselves that their victims' souls had been saved.

But the effect wears off quickly, so yet another atrocity must be committed, and another, and another, all robustly rationalized by the ostensible value of the information obtained. The final result is defeat for the torturers. This is insanity. This is the psychology of the serial rapist/murderer.

Boy in suitcase was cult victim, police say

BALTIMORE, Maryland (AP) -- A toddler whose remains were found inside a suitcase in Philadelphia in the spring was starved to death by members of a religious cult, including his mother, in part because he refused to say "amen" after meals, police said.

Ria Ramkissoon, the mother of Javon Thompson, was charged Sunday with first-degree murder in the boy's death, and Baltimore police said Monday that three other members of a group called 1 Mind Ministries have also been charged with first-degree murder. Police and Ramkissoon's family said the group is a cult.

Members did not seek medical care for Javon when he stopped breathing, and the boy died in his mother's arms, according to court documents that described police interviews with a confidential informant and two children. He would have been about 19 months old when police say adults stopped feeding him in December 2006.

Ramkissoon, 21, was being held Monday in the psychiatric ward of Baltimore's Central Booking and Intake Center, and a bail review was postponed until Tuesday. Her public defender declined comment.

The three other people charged in Javon's death -- Queen Antoinette, 40, also known as Toni Ellsberry or Toni Sloan; Marcus Cobbs, 21; and Trevia Williams, who turns 21 Tuesday -- were already in custody. They were arrested in May in New York City on warrants charging them with failure to appear in court in Baltimore. Those charges stemmed from a scuffle with police in a child custody dispute.

No one answered the phone Monday afternoon in the office of a public defender assigned to Antoinette, Cobbs and Williams.

A fifth alleged cult member, Steven Bynum, has been charged in a warrant with first-degree murder and remains at large, police said Monday. He was believed to be in New York.

Ramkissoon's family said she should not be held responsible for her son's death.

"She had no control over that situation at all," her stepfather, Craig Newton, said Monday.

Ramkissoon's mother, Seeta Khadan-Newton, told The (Baltimore) Sun on Sunday that it wasn't her daughter's decision not to feed the boy.

"My daughter was a victim, just like my grandson," Khadan-Newton said. "Somebody made that decision to not feed that child, and my daughter had to follow instructions."

Members of 1 Mind Ministries wore all white, swore off medical care and referred to some members with titles including queen and princess, according to court documents. The group was also accused of insisting that a pregnant woman give birth without access to doctors.

Ramkissoon joined 1 Mind Ministries after Javon was born. Ramkissoon's mother last saw her in April 2006; she later sued for custody of her grandson, writing in a letter to a judge that "the cult leaders" were preventing her from contacting her daughter.

The documents show police interviewed two school-age children who had been part of the group but were taken away from members by Philadelphia police. The children told investigators that members stopped feeding Javon in December 2006, in part because the boy refused to say "amen" after dinner. Members also viewed Javon as "a demon."

Another unnamed informant told police that after Javon died, Antoinette left the boy's body in a room for more than a week, claiming "God was going to raise Javon from the dead," the documents show.

Afterward, Antoinette burned the boy's clothing and a mattress and placed his body in a green suitcase, which she would periodically open and spray with disinfectant to mask the odor, police said in the court documents.

In early 2007, the group members left Baltimore for Philadelphia. They left the green suitcase and other luggage inside a shed belonging to a man they befriended while there, police said, and then relocated to Brooklyn, New York.

Police recovered the suitcase in April after they got a tip from the confidential informant. The remains of a small child were inside. DNA tests are pending to confirm the boy's identity.

Psychologists Vote Against Torture Collusion

Psychologists Vote on Referendum Against Participating in Bush Regime Detention Centers

By Stephen Soldz

11/08/08 "ICH" -- -- The American Psychological Association has been racked with controversy over the role of psychologists in Bush regime detainee interrogations. Unlike other health professions, which have determined that participation in the interrogations is unethical, the APA leadership has defended psychologists’ involvement in interrogations at Guantanamo
After reviewing the disturbing background of psychologists crucial role in U.S. torture and detainee abuse, the referendum's crucial clause states:
Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in isolation of, either International law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.
Jean Maria Arrigo, the psychologist who served on the APA’s PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] task force in 2005 and exposed the PENS report as a rubber stamp for an already determined government policy, has succinctly explained the importance of a “Yes” vote on the referendum:
The ballot arrived today from APA, and I just voted Yes on the Referendum. To my mind, the timeliness of the Referendum as social action supersedes the problem of misinterpretation of the text.

My thinking on this matter has been most strongly influenced by military and intelligence personnel I know, including senior interrogators.

At an emotional level, I was much affected by audience responses to my February presentations to anti-torture symposia at two universities in Sao Paulo and the regional psychological association. Audiences were outraged by the APA endorsement of psychologists at military interrogation centers (people standing up and shouting) and truly horrified that I had agreed to the PENS report. (In Brazil, the word “interrogation” is virtually synonymous with “torture.”) If the APA leadership accommodates current government policy on interrogations, well, Brazilian psychologists can understand…, but if the APA membership defeats the Referendum, at this point in our history, that sends a bad message I cannot explain away. They are worried about the passivity of the APA legitimizing torture by our government, which legitimizes torture by their government and delegitimizes their own protests as psychologists.

Respectfully,

Jean Maria Arrigo

In response to the referendum, the APA has launched a strong effort to convince members that they should not support this "well-intended" referendum because it would restrict the ability of psychologists to work in domestic prisons and mental hospitals. Although legally informed psychologists have opined that any such risk is extremely far fetched, the referendum authors have issued a clarifying statement that would put these concerns to rest for those sincerely concerned about the domestic application of the referendum:
This referendum is focused on settings such as Guantánamo Bay and the CIA ‘black sites’ set up by the U.S. as part of its ‘global war on terror’; settings where the persons being detained are denied the protections of either constitutional or international law, settings which have been denounced by the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
We are well aware of the harms and legal struggles facing certain prisons and jails inside the domestic U.S. criminal justice system. However, the referendum takes no position on such settings where prisoners have full access to independent counsel and constitutional protections; nor does the referendum take a position on settings that now exist within the domestic mental health system where clients and patients also possess these basic rights.
The campaign of confusion has, however, only intensified since this clarification was issued.

Psychologist and attorney Bryant Welch, who founded the organization's Practice Directorate and then served as its Executive Director for eight years, has himself penned a piece explaining what is at stake in this referendum [included here with permission]:
Vote to End the Shame APA has Inflicted on all Psychologists
By Bryant L. Welch, J.D., Ph.D.
In the eyes of the world psychologists are being seen as aiders and abettors of torture. The damage to the profession grows day by day, and the shamefulness of it reflects on all of us, whether we like it or not.
This is the third consecutive annual convention in which APA has presented new reasons for refusing to explicitly state that psychologists are not to participate in detention centers where torture is being used. In 2006 we were told, among many things, that torture was not occurring, and that it was sufficient for APA to reiterate its 1986 resolution “opposing torture.” Last year we were told that psychologists’ presence at the detention centers was actually necessary to prevent the torture whose very existence these same APA officials denied the previous year. Bizarrely, APA outlawed nineteen specific forms of torture, as if in some way the large number of proscribed techniques would cripple torture efforts.
As a result, for the first time in APA history, APA rank and file members have secured the necessary signatures to petition the APA and force APA to submit the torture issue to a referendum by the membership.
Persisting in its support for psychologists’ participation in Bush detention centers and appearing insensitive to the moral concerns of its members, APA leaders are now advising APA members to oppose the referendum because the language of the referendum might be interpreted to preclude psychologists working in certain institutional settings. This argument is based on scenarios that are extremely far fetched and could readily be addressed even were they to occur. To the public, of course, the message would be that psychologists are not willing to stop torture now if there is even a remote risk of losing jobs in the future.
Since the Bush Administration will be out of office by the next time APA meets, this will be the last opportunity psychologists will have to remove this terrible stain from our reputation and our history
Torture is not a nuanced issue.
Vote No to torture. Vote YES on the referendum.
For more information see Torture, Political Manipulation and the American Psychological Association.
[Bryant Welch, J.D., Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and licensed attorney. In 1985 he proposed and developed the APA Practice Directorate which he ran from 1985-93. He is the author of State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind. He can be reached directly at welchfirm@aol.com.]
Several nationally prominent and respected organizations which have long been active in the anti-torture struggle have spoken out in support of the referendum. The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International has issued this statement in support:
The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) is an organization each of whose members is a survivor of torture. Our mission is two-fold: to support torture survivors in any way we can and to oppose torture wherever it may be practiced.
We understand the petition submitted by Ethical APA Psychologists to be entirely consistent with this mission. That such a petition is necessary seems, at the very least, distressing but since it is, we express our support for it and thank psychologists for this action.
In solidarity,
Harold Nelson
Advocacy Coordinator
Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC)
www.tassc.org

School of the Americas Watch also has expressed support for the referendum:

We at School of the Americas Watch are all too familiar with the practice of institutional secrecy in which torture and brutality thrives. We therefore recognize and support the vital role that Psychologists for Social Responsibility and Psychologists for an Ethical APA have played in the fight to end torture and other human rights abuses.

We further support Psychologists for an Ethical APA's petition and referendum with the American Psychological Association (APA). We urge the American Psychological Association to put an end to the unhealthy relationship between psychology and the torture by removing all APA psychologists from the secret detention centers where torture and cruelty prevail. We stand in solidarity with all of those psychologists who are working to advance human rights throughout the world and who support survivors of torture.

Mike Baney
Operations and Development Coordinator
School of the Americas Watch, Washington, DC
www.soaw.org

TASSC and School of the Americas Watch understand all too clearly what is at stake here. Let's hope that, despite the campaign of confusion and fear, the members of the APA grasp this opportunity to heed the words of Drs. Welch and Arrigo and vote for this referendum. This would send a strong message to those in the forefront of the anti-torture struggle – like TASSC and School of the Americas Watch – that psychologists will no longer give their tacit or active consent to torture and other detainee abuse. Neither the profession nor the country can afford to miss this opportunity to issue a rebuke to the Bush administration and to those in our profession who have abetted it. As Dr. Welch states: "Vote No to torture. Vote YES on the referendum."

Stephen Soldz is Director, Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development. Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and the CIA "black sites." Psychologist opponents of the APA position have, for the first time in APA history, organized a referendum to change APA policy. They ask the APA membership to reject psychologists’ participation when such sites are in violation of international law or the Constitution. The ballots are currently arriving in members mailboxes.

Stop Loss

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmePzcsegk4

"Stop-loss, in the United States military, is the involuntary extension of a service member's active duty service under the enlistment contract in order to retain them beyond their initial end of term of service (ETS) date. It also applies to the cessation of a permanent change of station (PCS) move for a member still in military service. Stop-loss was used immediately before and during the first Persian Gulf War. Since then, it has been used during American military deployments to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent War on Terror.

The policy has been legally challenged several times, however federal courts have consistently found that military service members contractually agree that their term of service may be involuntarily extended."

"During August 2007, Iraq Veterans Against the War, an activist organization of former and current service members, announced a national "Stop the Stop-Loss" campaign at a press conference where they were holding a week-long vigil in a tower erected on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Other anti-Stop-Loss vigils have occurred in Bellingham, Washington, and Colorado Springs, Colorado."
Over 81,000 have been sent back to Iraq through Stop Loss.

You can watch the move here.

http://www.watch-movies.net/movies/stop-loss/

Winter Soldier Testimony

Mullen warns against USS Liberty redux

Mullen warns against USS Liberty redux

Press TV The top American military officer has warned Israel against orchestrating 'USS Liberty Part II' to provoke a US-led war against Iran.

In early July, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen visited Israel to discuss the Iranian nuclear program with his Israeli counterpart, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, and other Israeli officials.

During the talks, Adm. Mullen cautioned that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 is the type of incident that should be 'avoided in any future military actions' in the Middle East, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The USS Liberty, a $40m state-of-the-art surveillance ship, was 'inadvertently' attacked by Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats in international waters north of the northern Sinai Peninsula coast.

The USS Liberty was attacked by Israel in 1967.

The attack, which lasted at least 40 minutes, claimed the lives of 34 American soldiers and wounded at least 170 crewmembers.

Although there are many conspiracy theories as to why Israel committed such a 'mistake' against its closest ally, former US seamen who served on Liberty claim authorities are guilty of a cover-up.

American Free Press quoted Adm. Mullen as saying that it is very 'important' at this time that 'history not repeat itself', referring to increasing speculation that Israel might stage another such scenario to push the US into a war with Iran.

Israel, the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, accuses Iran, a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of pursuing a nuclear weapons program and threatens to take military action against the country should Tehran continue uranium enrichment.

While Washington echelons are said to agree with the views of Tel Aviv on Tehran, the release of a Dec. 3 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has rapidly weakened the prospects of the US participating in an attack on Iran.

This is while, according to US and Israeli intelligence services, an Israeli strike would only 'cripple' the Iranian nuclear drive and not destroy it.

Israel is reportedly lobbying the Bush administration to launch a joint attack on Iran before President George W. Bush leaves office in January 2009.

In an Aug. 2 interview with the USS Liberty radio show, former army intelligence officer and CIA analyst Ray McGovern claimed Israel is planning a scenario similar to that of the 67 Liberty incident.

"It is obviously something bigger. The name of the game is to 'decapitate the Iranian nuclear program' whether it is aimed at a weapon or not," said McGovern.

The war threats and speculation come despite the UN nuclear watchdog declaring that Iran is enriching uranium to 3 percent, a rate consistent with electricity generation.

The most recent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report conceded that there is no link between the use of nuclear material and the 'alleged studies' of weaponization attributed to Iran.

FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out, the Daily News has learned.

After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was "beaten up" during President Bush's morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.

"They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East," the retired senior FBI official told The News.

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, "There may be some possible link" to Bin Laden, adding, "I wouldn't put it past him." Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden's henchmen were trained "how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together."

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. "Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with," the ex-FBI official said. "They couldn't go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next."

jmeek@nydailynews.com

Glenn Greenwald

Friday Aug. 1, 2008 05:36 EDT

Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News

(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V - Update VI - Update VII - Update VIII)

The FBI's lead suspect in the September, 2001 anthrax attacks -- Bruce E. Ivins -- died Tuesday night, apparently by suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the attacks. For the last 18 years, Ivins was a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where he was one of the most elite government anthrax scientists on the research team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID).

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters -- with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 -- that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks. This was the letter sent to Brokaw:


The letter sent to Leahy contained this message:

We have anthrax.

You die now.

Are you afraid?

Death to America.

Death to Israel.

Allah is great.

By design, those attacks put the American population into a state of intense fear of Islamic terrorism, far more than the 9/11 attacks alone could have accomplished.

Much more important than the general attempt to link the anthrax to Islamic terrorists, there was a specific intent -- indispensably aided by ABC News -- to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. In my view, and I've written about this several times and in great detail to no avail, the role played by ABC News in this episode is the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade. News of Ivins' suicide, which means (presumably) that the anthrax attacks originated from Ft. Detrick, adds critical new facts and heightens how scandalous ABC News' conduct continues to be in this matter.

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein. And look where -- according to Brian Ross' report on October 28, 2001 -- these tests were conducted:

And despite continued White House denials, four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica.

Two days earlier, Ross went on ABC News' World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and, as the lead story, breathlessly reported:

The discovery of bentonite came in an urgent series of tests conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and elsewhere.

Clearly, Ross' allegedly four separate sources had to have some specific knowledge of the tests conducted and, if they were really "well-placed," one would presume that meant they had some connection to the laboratory where the tests were conducted -- Ft. Detrick. That means that the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.

It's extremely possible -- one could say highly likely -- that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them. What we know for certain -- as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax -- is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims. Feeding claims to ABC News designed to link Saddam to those attacks would, for obvious reasons, promote the goal of the anthrax attacker(s).

Seven years later, it's difficult for many people to recall, but, as I've amply documented, those ABC News reports linking Saddam and anthrax penetrated very deeply -- by design -- into our public discourse and into the public consciousness. Those reports were absolutely vital in creating the impression during that very volatile time that Islamic terrorists generally, and Iraq and Saddam Hussein specifically, were grave, existential threats to this country. As but one example: after Ross' lead report on the October 26, 2001 edition of World News Tonight with Peter Jennings claiming that the Government had found bentonite, this is what Jennings said into the camera:

This news about bentonite as the additive being a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program is very significant. Partly because there's been a lot of pressure on the Bush administration inside and out to go after Saddam Hussein. And some are going to be quick to pick up on this as a smoking gun.

That's exactly what happened. The Weekly Standard published two lengthy articles attacking the FBI for focusing on a domestic culprit and -- relying almost exclusively on the ABC/Ross report -- insisted that Saddam was one of the most likely sources for those attacks. In November, 2001, they published an article (via Lexis) which began:

On the critical issue of who sent the anthrax, it's time to give credit to the ABC website, ABCNews.com, for reporting rings around most other news organizations. Here's a bit from a comprehensive story filed late last week by Gary Matsumoto, lending further credence to the commonsensical theory (resisted by the White House) that al Qaeda or Iraq -- and not some domestic Ted Kaczynski type -- is behind the germ warfare.

The Weekly Standard published a much lengthier and more dogmatic article in April, 2002 again pushing the ABC "bentonite" claims and arguing: "There is purely circumstantial though highly suggestive evidence that might seem to link Iraq with last fall's anthrax terrorism." The American Enterprise Institute's Laurie Mylroie (who had an AEI article linking Saddam to 9/11 ready for publication at the AEI on September 13) expressly claimed in November, 2001 that "there is also tremendous evidence that subsequent anthrax attacks are connected to Iraq" and based that accusation almost exclusively on the report from ABC and Ross ("Mylroie: Evidence Shows Saddam Is Behind Anthrax Attacks").

And then, when President Bush named Iraq as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his January, 2002 State of the Union speech -- just two months after ABC's report, when the anthrax attacks were still very vividly on the minds of Americans -- he specifically touted this claim:

The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade.

Bush's invocation of Iraq was the only reference in the State of the Union address to the unsolved anthrax attacks. And the Iraq-anthrax connection was explicitly made by the President at a time when, as we now know, he was already eagerly planning an attack on Iraq.

There can't be any question that this extremely flamboyant though totally false linkage between Iraq and the anthrax attacks -- accomplished primarily by the false bentonite reports from ABC News and Brian Ross -- played a very significant role in how Americans perceived of the Islamic threat generally and Iraq specifically. As but one very illustrative example, The Washington Post's columnist, Richard Cohen, supported the invasion of Iraq, came to regret that support, and then explained what led him to do so, in a 2004 Post column entitled "Our Forgotten Panic":

I'm not sure if panic is quite the right word, but it is close enough. Anthrax played a role in my decision to support the Bush administration's desire to take out Saddam Hussein. I linked him to anthrax, which I linked to Sept. 11. I was not going to stand by and simply wait for another attack -- more attacks. I was going to go to the source, Hussein, and get him before he could get us. As time went on, I became more and more questioning, but I had a hard time backing down from my initial whoop and holler for war.

Cohen -- in a March 18, 2008 Slate article in which he explains why he wrongfully supported the attack on Iraq -- disclosed this:

Anthrax. Remember anthrax? It seems no one does anymore -- at least it's never mentioned. But right after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, letters laced with anthrax were received at the New York Post and Tom Brokaw's office at NBC. . . . There was ample reason to be afraid.

The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.

For this and other reasons, the anthrax letters appeared linked to the awful events of Sept. 11. It all seemed one and the same. Already, my impulse had been to strike back, an overwhelming urge that had, in fact, taken me by surprise on Sept. 11 itself when the first of the Twin Towers had collapsed. . . .

In the following days, as the horror started to be airbrushed -- no more bodies plummeting to the sidewalk -- the anthrax letters started to come, some to people I knew. And I thought, No, I'm not going to sit here passively and wait for it to happen. I wanted to go to "them," whoever "they" were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us. One of "them" was Saddam Hussein. He had messed around with anthrax . . . He was a nasty little fascist, and he needed to be dealt with.

That, more or less, is how I made my decision to support the war in Iraq.

Cohen's mental process that led him to link anthrax to Iraq and then to support an attack on Iraq, warped as it is, was extremely common. Having heard ABC News in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack flamboyantly and repeatedly link Saddam to the anthrax attacks, followed by George Bush's making the same linkage (albeit more subtly) in his January, 2002 State of the Union speech, much of the public had implanted into their minds that Saddam Hussein was not just evil, but a severe threat to the U.S., likely the primary culprit behind the anthrax attacks. All along, though, the anthrax came from a U.S. Government/Army research lab.

Critically, ABC News never retracted its story (they merely noted, as they had done from the start, that the White House denied the reports). And thus, the linkage between Saddam and the anthrax attacks -- every bit as false as the linkage between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks -- persisted.

We now know -- we knew even before news of Ivins' suicide last night, and know especially in light of it -- that the anthrax attacks didn't come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government's scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government -- from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role -- I'd argue a very major role -- in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue -- including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework -- were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and -- as importantly -- to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.

UPDATE: One other fact to note here is how bizarrely inept the effort by the Bush DOJ to find the real attacker has been. Extremely suspicious behavior from Ivins -- including his having found and completely cleaned anthrax traces on a co-worker's desk at the Ft. Detrick lab without telling anyone that he did so and then offering extremely strange explanations for why -- was publicly reported as early as 2004 by The LA Times (Ivins "detected an apparent anthrax leak in December 2001, at the height of the anthrax mailings investigation, but did not report it. Ivins considered the problem solved when he cleaned the affected office with bleach").

In October 2004, USA Today reported that Ivins was involved in another similar incident, in April of 2002, when Ivins performed unauthorized tests to detect the origins of more anthrax residue found at Ft. Detrick. Yet rather than having that repeated, strange behavior lead the FBI to discover that he was involved in the attacks, there was a very public effort -- as Atrios notes here -- to blame the attacks on Iraq and then, ultimately, to blame Steven Hatfill. Amazingly, as Atrios notes here, very few people other than "a few crazy bloggers are even interested" in finding out what happened here and why -- at least to demand that ABC News report the vital information that it already has that will shed very significant light on much of this.

UPDATE II: Ivins' local paper, Frederick News in Maryland, has printed several Letters to the Editor written by Ivins over the years. Though the underlying ideology is a bit difficult to discern, he seems clearly driven by a belief in the need for Christian doctrine to govern our laws and political institutions, with a particular interest in Catholic dogma. He wrote things like this:

Today we frequently admonish people who oppose abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide or capital punishment to keep their religious, moral, and philosophical beliefs to themselves.

Before dispensing such admonishments in the future, perhaps we should gratefully consider some of our country's most courageous, historical figures who refused to do so.

And then there's this rather cryptic message, published in 2006:

Rabbi Morris Kosman is entirely correct in summarily rejecting the demands of the Frederick Imam for a "dialogue."

By blood and faith, Jews are God's chosen, and have no need for "dialogue" with any gentile. End of "dialogue."

It should be noted that the lawyer who had been representing Ivins in connection with the anthrax investigation categorically maintains Ivins' innocence and attributes his suicide to "the relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo."

On a note related to the main topic of the post, macgupta in comments notes the numerous prominent people in addition to those mentioned here -- including The Wall St. Jorunal Editors and former CIA Director James Woolsey -- who insisted rather emphatically from the beginning of the anthrax attacks that Saddam was likely to blame. Indeed, the WSJ Editorial Page -- along with others on the Right such as Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report and Fox News -- continued even into 2007 to insist that the FBI was erring by focusing on domestic suspects rather than Middle Easterners.

The Nation's Michael Massing noted at the time (in November, 2001) that as a direct result of the anthrax attacks, and the numerous claims insinuating that Iraq was behind them, "the political and journalistic establishment suddenly seems united in wanting to attack Iraq." There has long been an intense desire on the neoconservative Right to falsely link anthrax to Saddam specifically and Muslims generally. ABC News was, and (as a result of its inexcusable silence) continues to be, their best friend.

UPDATE III: See this important point from Atrios about Richard Cohen's admission that he was told before the anthrax attacks happened by a "high government official" to take cipro. Atrios writes: "now that we know that the US gov't believes that anthrax came from the inside, shouldn't Cohen be a wee bit curious about what this warning was based on?"

That applies to much of the Beltway class, including many well-connected journalists, who were quietly popping cipro back then because, like Cohen, they heard from Government sources that they should. Leave aside the ethical questions about the fact that these journalists kept those warnings to themselves. Wouldn't the most basic journalistic instincts lead them now -- in light of the claims by our Government that the attacks came from a Government scientist -- to wonder why and how their Government sources were warning about an anthrax attack? Then again, the most basic journalistic instincts would have led ABC News to reveal who concocted and fed them the false "Saddam/anthrax" reports in the first place, and yet we still are forced to guess at those questions because ABC News continues to cover up the identity of the perpetrators.

UPDATE IV: John McCain, on the David Letterman Show, October 18, 2001 (days before ABC News first broadcast their bentonite report):

LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

MCCAIN: I think we're doing fine . . . I think we'll do fine. The second phase -- if I could just make one, very quickly -- the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don't have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may -- and I emphasize may -- have come from Iraq.

LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?

MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that's when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.

ThinkProgress has the video. Someone ought to ask McCain what "indication" he was referencing that the anthrax "may have come from Iraq."

After all, three days later, McCain and Joe Lieberman went on Meet the Press (on October 21, 2001) and both strongly suggested that we would have to attack Iraq. Lieberman said that the anthrax was so complex and potent that "there's either a significant amount of money behind this, or this is state-sponsored, or this is stuff that was stolen from the former Soviet program."

As I said, it is not possible to overstate the importance of anthrax in putting the country into the state of fear that led to the attack on Iraq and so many of the other abuses of the Bush era. There are few news stories more significant, if there are any, than unveiling who the culprits were behind this deliberate propaganda. The fact that the current GOP presidential nominee claimed back then on national television to have some "indication" linking Saddam to the anthrax attacks makes it a bigger story still.

UPDATE V: I tried to be careful here to avoid accepting as True the matter of Ivins' guilt. Very early on in the article, I framed the analysis this way: "If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab," and I then noted in Update II that Ivins' lawyer vehemently maintains his innocence. My whole point here is that the U.S. Government now claims the anthrax attacks came from a Government scientist at a U.S. Army lab, and my conclusions follow from that premise, accepted as true only for purposes of this analysis.

It's worth underscoring that it is far from clear that Ivins had anything to do with the anthrax attacks, and someone in comments claiming (anonymously though credibly) that he knew Ivins personally asserts that Ivins was innocent and makes the case as to why the Government's accusations are suspect. As I see it, the more doubt there is about who was responsible for the anthrax attacks, the greater is the need for ABC News to reveal who fabricated their reports linking the attacks to Iraq.

UPDATE VI: I'll be on Rachel Maddow's radio show tonight at 8:30 p.m. EST to discuss this story. Local listings and live audio feed are here.

Numerous people have advised me in comments and via email that ABC News is deleting any mention of my piece today in the comment section to their article on the Ivins suicide (though many such comments now seem to be posted there). Last year, ABC was in full denial mode

UPDATE VII: Two prominent journalism professors -- Jay Rosen of NYU and Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University and a practicing journalist for 25 years -- have added their names to the list of people calling on ABC News and Brian Ross to reveal their sources for ABC's false bentonite story that was used to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq. Rosen and Gillmor both write that ABC and Ross should answer three questions which they jointly outline, and they both set forth the reasons, grounded in widely accepted principles of journalistic ethics, as to why ABC and Ross should do so.

UPDATE VIII: More here. when responding to the stories I wrote about this issue. The key here, I think, will be to try to devise the right strategy to induce the right Congressional Committee to hold hearings on the false ABC News stories and the anthrax issue generally. I hope to have more details on that effort shortly.

British Defence admits to nuclear exposure

BRITISH Defence chiefs have admitted servicemen were exposed to dangerous radiation levels during nuclear tests in Australia and the South Pacific in the 1950s.

The dramatic admission, made after years of denials, features in papers filed with the High Court in London by Ministry of Defence lawyers.

The Sunday Mirror newspaper said the court papers reveal that the Ministry of Defence now believes that nuclear tests were responsible for the deaths of some British servicemen.

However, the MoD insists that only 159 men were affected out of the 20,000 who were present.

About 800 former servicemen from Britain, New Zealand and Fiji earlier this year launched a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the MoD, claiming they had been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during tests at sites including Maralinga in South Australia and Christmas Island.

While the case is not due to start until January, court documents seen by the newspaper show that two British Royal Air Force servicemen Eric Denson and John Brothers were irradiated after being ordered to fly through mushroom clouds of nuclear bombs to collect samples.

Film badges worn by the men recorded the amount of radiation they were exposed to.

"Eric had a dose equivalent to 190 years of background radiation," the newspaper said.

"John's was 107. The MoD's maximum safe dose was just 30."

Mr Denson's widow Shirley Denson, who is part of the group suing the MoD, said she hoped the truth about the tests would finally be revealed.

"Hopefully this will mean they have to admit everything else," she told the newspaper.

"There were 20,000 others there. They and their families suffered just as badly.

"In reality they have no idea who had how much dose. Eric and John had records taken but most had none. Those who had film badges for the explosions were made to hand them in and they were never labelled to show who was wearing them."

Earlier this year, Australian nuclear test veterans said they would monitor the mass compensation claim in Britain as they prepare to launch their own class action against the Federal Government.

In June, the Federal Government announced it would provide free cancer tests and treatment to about 100 Australian police who patrolled the British nuclear test site at Maralinga up to 1988.

Only about 450 of the test veterans are still alive and many claim to have suffered serious illness, including cancer, as a result of exposure to radiation during the 1950s tests.