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Immunity for Telecoms May Set Bad Precedent, Legal Scholars Say
2007-10-22, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR20071021010...

When previous Republican administrations were accused of illegality in the FBI and CIA spying abuses of the 1970s or the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, Democrats in Congress launched investigations or pushed for legislative reforms. But last week, faced with admissions by several telecommunication companies that they assisted the Bush administration in warrantless spying on Americans, leaders of the Senate intelligence committee took a much different tack -- proposing legislation that would grant those companies retroactive immunity from prosecution or lawsuits. The proposal marks the second time in recent years that Congress has moved toward providing legal immunity for past actions that may have been illegal. The Military Commissions Act, passed by a GOP-led Congress in September 2006, provided retroactive immunity for CIA interrogators who could have been accused of war crimes for mistreating detainees. Legal experts say the granting of such retroactive immunity by Congress is unusual, particularly in a case involving private companies. "It's particularly unusual in the case of the telecoms because you don't really know what you're immunizing," said Louis Fisher, a specialist in constitutional law with the Law Library of the Library of Congress. Civil liberties groups and many academics argue that Congress is allowing the government to cover up possible wrongdoing and is inappropriately interfering in disputes that the courts should decide. The American Civil Liberties Union [said] in a news release Friday that "the administration is trying to cover its tracks."

Save the Gnostics
2007-10-06, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/opinion/06deutsch.html?ex=1349409600&en=19a...

The [US] didn’t set out to eradicate the Mandeans, one of the oldest, smallest and least understood of the many minorities in Iraq. This extinction in the making has simply been another unfortunate ... consequence of our invasion of Iraq — though that will be of little comfort to the Mandeans, whose 2,000-year-old culture is in grave danger of disappearing from the face of the earth. The Mandeans are the only surviving Gnostics from antiquity, cousins of the people who produced the ... Gospel of Thomas, a work that sheds invaluable light on the many ways in which Jesus was perceived in the early Christian period. The Mandeans have their own language ... an impressive body of literature, and a treasury of cultural and religious traditions amassed over two millennia of living in the southern marshes of present-day Iraq and Iran. Practitioners of a religion at least as old as Christianity, the Mandeans have witnessed the rise of Islam; the Mongol invasion; the arrival of Europeans, who mistakenly identified them as “Christians of St. John,” because of their veneration of John the Baptist; and, most recently, the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein. They have withstood everything — until now. Like their ancestors, contemporary Mandeans were able to survive as a community because of the delicate balance achieved among Iraq’s many peoples over centuries of cohabitation. But our reckless prosecution of the war destroyed this balance, and the Mandeans, whose pacifist religion prohibits them from carrying weapons even for self-defense, found themselves victims of kidnappings, extortion, rapes, beatings, murders and forced conversions carried out by radical Islamic groups and common criminals. When American forces invaded in 2003, there were probably 60,000 Mandeans in Iraq; today, fewer than 5,000 remain.

Note: A fascinating introduction to the culture and history of this ancient people is Edmondo Lupieri's The Mandaeans: the Last Gnostics.

Outsourcing foreign policy
2007-09-21, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks21sep21,0,4584140.column

For years, the [Bush] administration has been quietly auctioning off U.S. foreign policy to the highest corporate bidder -- and it may be too late for us to buy it back. Look at Blackwater. Blackwater increasingly promises to do everything the U.S. government can do, but better. Blackwater's facility in North Carolina is the world's largest private military facility -- it's so good that the U.S. military uses it for training. Since its founding, it has trained 50,000 "consultants" who can be deployed anywhere in the world. With no geographical limits, the company is eager to prove its value. Blackwater has trained police in Afghanistan and naval commandos in Azerbaijan, and it sent heavily armed employees to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They started off offering their services as volunteers -- or vigilantes, some critics said. FEMA, playing catch-up, followed with contracts, as did a number of other agencies. Increasingly, Blackwater looks like a miniature government. It has people, infrastructure and hardware. For instance, it is buying Brazilian-made fighter bombers -- great in combat but not really necessary if you're merely providing civilian bodyguards. Blackwater is unusual, but it's not entirely unique. Other corporations ... are also eagerly filling the vacuum as the U.S. government retreats worldwide from the business of governing. The White House's motives are obvious. Why fight another war, with all the bother of convincing Congress, if you can quietly hire a private military company to fight it for you? Why interrogate suspected insurgents if you can outsource the whole messy business? As for the corporations so eagerly lapping up the contracting dollars, there's no conspiracy -- it's just the good old profit motive.

Special military group looks ahead to fight America's future wars
2007-08-26, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/26/BU5ORKEUK.DTL

For half a century, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - a low-profile but vital division of the Defense Department - has ... been the force behind dozens of weapons, from the M-16 rifle and night-vision goggles to smart bombs and stealth aircraft. Now, DARPA is planning for a long war in which U.S. troops will be expected to face guerrilla adversaries. And just as during the Cold War, DARPA is counting on high-tech Silicon Valley to give U.S. forces the edge. More than 3,000 scientists, entrepreneurs and military leaders ... gathered in Anaheim ... for the agency's 50th anniversary conference. The agency is operating on a $3.1 billion budget, up 8 percent from fiscal 2006. Virtually every Silicon Valley company, from the obvious candidates like Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space to ... Google, has been touched in some way by DARPA. "Almost every great digital oak has a DARPA acorn at the bottom," said futurist Paul Saffo. During three days in Anaheim, DARPA and Pentagon officials made 60 presentations, painting a picture of a future in which the United States will have to spend $1 million on countermeasures for every dollar shelled out by bomb-building guerrillas like those U.S. forces are encountering in Iraq. But DARPA's high-tech dreams have their critics, who view its "visions" as boondoggles the nation can't afford. "I think it (DARPA) is basically a jobs program," said Chalmers Johnson, a retired University of California political scientist. Thomas Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map, one of the treatises that lay out the scenario for these asymmetrical wars that planners expect, [said] "The million-to-one (ratio) is unsustainable."

Defense Agency Proposes Outsourcing More Spying
2007-08-19, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/18/AR20070818009...

The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount that would set a record in the outsourcing of such functions by the Pentagon's top spying agency. The proposed contracts ... reflect a continuing expansion of the Defense Department's intelligence-related work and fit a well-established pattern of Bush administration transfers of government work to private contractors. Since 2000, the value of federal contracts signed by all agencies each year has more than doubled to reach $412 billion, with the largest growth at the Defense Department. Outsourcing particularly accelerated among intelligence agencies after the [Sept. 11] 2001 terrorist attacks. The DIA's action comes a few months after CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, acting under pressure from Congress, announced a program to cut the agency's hiring of outside contractors by at least 10 percent. The DIA is the country's major manager and producer of foreign military intelligence, with more than 11,000 military and civilian employees worldwide and a budget of nearly $1 billion. It has its own analysts from the various services as well as collectors of human intelligence in the Defense HUMINT Service. DIA also manages the Defense attaches stationed in embassies all over the world. Unlike the CIA, the DIA outsources the major analytical products known as all-source intelligence reports, a senior intelligence official said.

Abu Ghraib whistleblower's ordeal
2007-08-05, BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6930197.stm

When Joe Darby saw the horrific photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison he was stunned. So stunned that he walked out into the hot Baghdad night and smoked half a dozen cigarettes and agonised over what he should do. Darby was a ... soldier with US forces at Abu Ghraib prison when he stumbled across those images which would eventually shock the world in 2004. They were photographs of his colleagues, some of them men and women he had known since high school -- torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners. His decision to hand them over rather than keep quiet changed his life forever. He fears for the safety of his family. Joe Darby knew what he saw was wrong, but it took him three weeks to decide to hand those photographs in. When he finally did, he was promised anonymity and hoped he would hear no more about it. But he was scared of the repercussions. And then he was sitting in a crowded Iraqi canteen with hundreds of soldiers and Donald Rumsfeld came on the television to thank Joe Darby by name for handing in the photographs. "I don't think it was an accident because those things are pretty much scripted," Mr Darby says. "I really find it hard to believe that the secretary of defence of the United States has no idea about the star witness for a criminal case being anonymous." Rather than turn on him for betraying colleagues, most of the soldiers in his unit shook his hand. It was at home where the real trouble started. His wife ...had to flee to her sister's house which was then vandalised with graffiti. Many in his home town called him a traitor. But he does not see himself as a hero, or a traitor. Just "a soldier who did his job - no more, no less. I've never regretted for one second what I did when I was in Iraq, to turn those pictures in," he says.

Nations Use Fear to Distract From Rights Abuses, Group Says
2007-05-24, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/23/AR20070523014...

Powerful governments and armed groups are spreading fear to divert attention from human rights abuses ... Amnesty International said yesterday in its annual assessment of rights worldwide. "The politics of fear is fueling a downward spiral of human rights abuse in which no right is sacrosanct and no person is safe," said Irene Khan, secretary general of the human rights watchdog. Governments are undermining the rule of law and human rights with "short-sighted fear-mongering and divisive policies." The United States is "the leading country using fear to justify the unjustifiable," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. "The U.S. used to be in a position to speak out effectively against torture and military tribunals. We can't do that now because we are carrying out some of the same practices," he said. The organization urged the new U.S. Congress to take the lead in restoring respect for humane standards and practices at home and abroad. Citizens in many countries are being manipulated by fear, the group said. Amnesty applauded civil society for its "courage and commitment" in the face of abuses. Marches, petitions, blogs and armbands "may not seem much by themselves," the report said, "but by bringing people together they unleash an energy for change that should not be underestimated. People power will change the face of human rights in the 21st century."

Iran Gets Army Gear in Pentagon Sale
2007-01-16, ABC News/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2797525

The U.S. military has sold forbidden equipment at least a half-dozen times to middlemen for countries including Iran and China who exploited security flaws in the Defense Department's surplus auctions. The sales include fighter jet parts and missile components. In one case ... a Pakistani arms broker convicted of exporting U.S. missile parts to Iran resumed business after his release from prison. He purchased Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran from a U.S. company that had bought them in a Pentagon surplus sale. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents ... say those parts made it to Iran. In [another] case, convicted middlemen for Iran bought Tomcat parts from the Defense Department's surplus division. Customs agents confiscated them and returned them to the Pentagon, which sold them again -- customs evidence tags still attached -- to another buyer, a suspected broker for Iran. That incident appalled even an expert on weaknesses in Pentagon surplus security controls. Sensitive military surplus items are supposed to be demilitarized or "de-milled" rendered useless for military purposes or, if auctioned, sold only to buyers who promise to obey U.S. arms embargoes, export controls and other laws. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found it alarmingly easy to acquire sensitive surplus. Last year, its agents bought $1.1 million worth including rocket launchers, body armor and surveillance antennas by driving onto a base and posing as defense contractors. Investigators have found the Pentagon's inventory and sales controls rife with errors.

Rwandan Genocide Survivor Recalls Horror
2006-11-30, CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/30/60minutes/main2218371.shtml

The genocide in Rwanda 12 years ago was the most efficient ever carried out. 800,000 people were slaughtered in 100 days. One incredible and inspiring survivor’s tale has come to light only recently. It took Immaculee Ilibagiza, a college-educated young woman from a remote village, many years before she could confront the horrors she lived through. She is speaking out now, she says, to prevent further atrocities. It was extremely low tech ... just machetes, spears and knives, wielded by Hutus, the majority tribe as they tried to wipe out the minority Tutsis. [They] were slaughtered in their tracks, wherever they were found. When it was over, three out of every four Tutsis in Rwanda had been killed. When it began, Immaculee's father told her to run to a minister’s house three miles away, and to beg him to hide her. The minister was a Hutu. [He] put Immaculee and six other women in a tiny, rarely used bathroom in a remote corner of the house. Seven women were huddled in a bathroom measuring three feet by four feet, for 91 days. They took turns standing and stretching. "They were searching. They were there all the time," Immaculee remembers. She lost 40 pounds – one third of herself. What prompted the genocide? The Hutus had long-standing resentments against the Tutsis, who formed the nation's elite. There are things you can point to, but ... what could possibly explain what happened? Immaculee knows Rwandans can never forget but believes they must forgive. Revenge ... only prolongs the pain. Now she's a woman on a mission to spread the story ... hoping it can prevent future atrocities. She has giving lectures; she has written a book; and she is determined to stop the inevitable revisionists who claim the genocide never happened.

Note: An intense video clip of this story is available at the CBS link above. This article fails to mention the key fact that top officials in developing nations knew very well of the mass murder as it was happening, yet refused to send help. This is graphically portrayed in the powerful movie Hotel Rwanda. Immacullee's amazing book, Left to Tell, has been an huge inspiration to many people around the world.

Cops Taser UCLA Student
2006-11-17, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2662158

There is [a] painful six-minute video that has suddenly spread all over the world. It shows part of what happened in front of students who had been studying in the UCLA library when an Iranian-American student reportedly did not show any ID to campus police. The excruciating video clip [shows] enraged students screaming at police; police yelling back and using strong force trying to get students under control. "Here's your Patriot Act!" shouts a student, using profanity after screaming out in anguished pain from the electric jolts of a police Taser. "Stand up or you'll get Tasered again!" the police shout back. Appalled fellow students crowd in, some demanding the badge numbers of the police. To watch the video, click here. Police Department Assistant Chief Jeff Young [said] "He had refused to identify himself; he had refused to leave the library, and...he went limp, which is a form of resistance." Some students saw it differently. "Tabatabainejad was also stunned with the Taser when he was already handcuffed," complained third-year student Carlos Zaragoza. Tasers are increasingly controversial — a powerful means of control for police that is apparently sometimes too powerful. While it is often referred to as a "non-lethal" weapon [a study] found that since 1999, 84 people in the United States and Canada have died after being shocked by a Taser. Four of UCLA's nearly 60 full-time police officers recently won "Taser Awards," given by the manufacturers of the electronic shock device.

Note: For lots more reliable information on "non-lethal weapons," click here.

Failures of Imagination
2006-09-01, September/October 2006 Issue Columbia Journalism Review
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/5/Umansky.asp

It was early December 2002. [Carlotta] Gall, the Afghanistan correspondent for The New York Times, had just seen a press release from the U.S. military announcing the death of a prisoner at its Bagram Air Base. Soon thereafter the military issued a second release about another detainee death at Bagram. Gall: “I just wanted to know more. And I came up against a blank wall." The body of one of the detainees had been returned, a young taxi driver known as Dilawar. Gall met with Dilawar’s family, and his brother handed Gall a death certificate...that the military had issued. “It said, ‘homicide.’ The press release announcing Dilawar’s death stated...heart attack, a conclusion repeated by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. But the death certificate, the authenticity of which the military later confirmed to Gall, stated that Dilawar — who was just twenty-two years old — died as a result of “blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease.” Gall filed a story. It sat for a month. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run.” Gall’s story...had been at the center of an editorial fight. Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor: “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.” The story ran on page fourteen under the headline "U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody." The Times also reported that officers who had overseen the Bagram prison at the time were promoted; another, who had lied to investigators, was transferred to help oversee interrogations at Abu Ghraib and awarded a Bronze Star.

Note: Why does it take a university journal to ask the hard questions? Again and again, news that should be front-page headlines is buried on insignificant pages or not reported at all. This key article from one of the most respected schools of journalism in the world tells it all about the unreported and underreported violent abuse of prisoners condoned by elements of the U.S. military. Don't miss reading this most powerful story in its entirety.

Media Shrug Off Mass Movement Against War
2005-09-28, Media Channel
http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/1192

Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country protested the Iraq War on the weekend of September 24-25, with the largest demonstration bringing between 100,000 and 300,000 to Washington, D.C. on Saturday. But if you relied on television for your news, you'd hardly know the protests happened at all. According to the Nexis news database, the only mention on the network newscasts that Saturday came on the NBC Nightly News, where the massive march received all of 87 words. CNN anchor Aaron Brown offered an interesting explanation (9/24/05): "There was a huge 100,000 people [march] in Washington protesting the war in Iraq today, and I...feel like I've heard from all 100,000 upset that they did not get any coverage, and it's true they didn't get any coverage."

Note: See also Detroit News blog on this topic: http://info.detnews.com/weblog/index.cfm?blogid=5304

Stampeding Congress, Again
2007-08-03, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/opinion/03fri1.html?ex=1343793600&en=269721...

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not feel bound by the law or the Constitution. It cannot even be trusted to properly use the enhanced powers it was legally granted after the attacks. Yet, once again, President Bush has been trying to stampede Congress into a completely unnecessary expansion of his power to spy on Americans. The fight is over the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to obtain a warrant before eavesdropping on electronic communications that involve someone in the United States. Mr. Bush decided after 9/11 that he was no longer going to obey that law. He authorized the National Security Agency to intercept international telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans and other residents of this country without a court order. He told the public nothing and Congress next to nothing about what he was doing, until The Times disclosed the spying in December 2005. Ever since, the White House has tried to pressure Congress into legalizing Mr. Bush’s rogue operation. The administration and its ... supporters in Congress argue that American intelligence is blinded by FISA and have seized on neatly timed warnings of heightened terrorist activity to scare everyone. It is vital for Americans, especially lawmakers, to resist that argument. It is pure propaganda. [The question at issue is] whether we are a nation ruled by law, or the whims of men in power.

I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty.
2007-05-27, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR20070525020...

When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death. Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son's death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings. This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. What exactly is a father's duty when his son is sent into harm's way? Among the many ways to answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing his utmost to be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen. As a citizen, I have tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. foreign policy. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond. This, I can now see, was an illusion. The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of the people." To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party.

Note: The author, Andrew Bacevich, is a conservative professor on international relations at Boston University. The title of his highly praised 2006 book, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, establishes the case for an American empire which is not benign. For more on the war machine, click here.

Canada offers forum for lecturer barred from U.S.
2007-04-11, Globe and Mail (One of Canada's leading newspapers)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070411.IRAQI11/TPStory/Nat...

A highly regarded Iraqi epidemiologist who wants to tell Americans about an alarming rise in cancer levels among Iraqi children will come to Canada instead because he couldn't get a visa to the United States. Unable to travel to the University of Washington, Riyadh Lafta -- best known for a controversial study that estimated Iraq's body count in the U.S.-led war in Iraq at more than half a million -- will arrive at Simon Fraser University in B.C. this month to give a lecture and meet with research associates. "The University of Washington wanted him, but the U.S. denied his entry," said his colleague at SFU, Tim Takaro. Once in Canada, Dr. Lafta will present estimates that paint a damning portrait of the war's ravages on children: that birth defects are on the rise since the war began, and that the number of children dying from cancers such as leukemia has risen tenfold. Dr. Lafta had tried for six months to get a visa into Seattle to speak in Washington, and was ignored a half-dozen times, Dr. Takaro said.

Documents Shed Light on C.I.A.'s Use of Ex-Nazis
2006-06-06, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/washington/06cnd-nazi.html?ex=1307246400&en...

The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust overseer Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to C.I.A. documents that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis as informers after World War II. The United States government...had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The documents show the C.I.A. "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "forced us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis. As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann implemented the policy of extermination of European Jewry, promoting the use of gas chambers and having a hand in the murder of millions of Jews. The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the C.I.A. to the National Archives under Congressional pressure to make public files about former officials of Hitler's regime later used as American agents. The material reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet K.G.B. Since Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, the Interagency Working Group has persuaded the government to declassify more than 8 million pages of documents. But the group ran into resistance starting in 2002 from the C.I.A., which sought to withhold operational files from the 1940's and 50's.

Note: For more on clandestine government use of Nazi scientists in developing top-secret mind control programs with links for verification, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrol10pg

Planted PR Stories Not News to Military
2005-12-18, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-infowar18dec18,0,6619536...

U.S. military officials in Iraq were fully aware that a Pentagon contractor regularly paid Iraqi newspapers to publish positive stories about the war, and made it clear that none of the stories should be traced to the United States, according to several current and former employees of Lincoln Group, the Washington-based contractor. In contrast to assertions by military officials in Baghdad and Washington, interviews and Lincoln Group documents show that the information campaign waged over the last year was designed to cloak any connection to the U.S. military. "In clandestine parlance, Lincoln Group was a 'cutout' -- a third party -- that would provide the military with plausible deniability," said a former Lincoln Group employee. A number of workers who carried out Lincoln Group's offensive, including a $20-million two-month contract to influence public opinion in Iraq...describe a campaign that was unnecessarily costly, poorly run and largely ineffective at improving America's image in Iraq. Lincoln Group...had little public relations or communications experience when it won its first psychological operations contract last year. Yet it has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the information war, and now has 20 Pentagon contracts.

Blackwater Down
2005-09-22, CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/22/opinion/main878822.shtml

The men from Blackwater USA arrived in New Orleans right after Katrina hit. The company known for its private security work guarding senior U.S. diplomats in Iraq beat the federal government and most aid organizations to the scene. About 150 heavily armed Blackwater troops dressed in full battle gear spread out into the chaos of New Orleans. When asked what authority they were operating under, one guy said, "We're on contract with the Department of Homeland Security." Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, "He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary." Says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, "These private security forces have behaved brutally, with impunity, in Iraq. To have them now on the streets of New Orleans is frightening and possibly illegal." Blackwater is operating under a federal contract...[that] was announced just days after Homeland Security Department spokesperson Russ Knocke told the Washington Post he knew of no federal plans to hire Blackwater. With President Bush using the Katrina disaster to try to repeal Posse Comitatus (the ban on using U.S. troops in domestic law enforcement)...the war is coming home in yet another ominous way. As one Blackwater mercenary said, "This is a trend. You're going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations."

'Soldiers of Conscience': To kill or not kill
2008-10-15, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/14/DDBL13G653.DTL

As independent documentary filmmakers from Berkeley, husband and wife Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan knew the Army's press office might be suspicious of their request to interview soldiers for a film about the morality of killing. Much to their surprise, though, the Army brass not only granted access to recruits on their way to Iraq and Afghanistan, but the couple's new film, "Soldiers of Conscience," which airs Thursday on PBS, also struck such a deep chord among the military, it's now to be shown in sophomore ethics classes at West Point. "They sent us a very nice, but terse, statement after they viewed it," Weimberg recalled of the military press aides who signed off on the finished product. "It read: This is approved. And, Thank you." In "Soldiers," Weimberg and Ryan focus on eight young soldiers, four of whom decide they can't pull the trigger after they reach the battlefield. Viewers may wonder why anyone with pacifist tendencies would join the Army, but each soldier has a trench epiphany - what the military calls a "crystallization of conscience" - and it's clear only the realities of wars can dredge up such emotions. The filmmakers do their utmost to ignore politics - their subjects barely mention their commander in chief's arguments for war - focusing, instead, on how soldiers marshall the will to attack. "It's not a film about Iraq," Ryan said. "Even in the wars that are supposed to be 'good wars' and fought for 'good reasons,' this question gets raised, and these stories occur."

Note: For many key reports on the realities of the Iraq and Afghan wars, click here.

Pentagon to Consult Academics on Security
2008-06-18, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/arts/18minerva.html?partner=rssuserland&emc...

The Pentagon has started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scientists and direct the nation’s brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has compared the initiative — named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors) — to the government’s effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. Although the Pentagon regularly finances science and engineering research, systematic support for the social sciences and humanities has been rare. But if the uncustomary push to engage the nation’s evolutionary psychologists, demographers, sociologists, historians and anthropologists in security research — as well as the prospect of new financial support in lean times — has generated excitement among some scholars, it has also aroused opposition from others, who worry that the Defense Department and the academy are getting too cozy. Cooperation between universities and the Pentagon has long been a contentious issue. The Pentagon put out its first requests for proposals last week. Minerva will award $50 million over five years. Another set of grants administered by the National Science Foundation is expected to be announced by the end of this month. [Gates] contacted Robert M. Berdahl, [former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley and] the president of the Association of American Universities — which represents 60 of the top research universities in the country — in December to help design Minerva.

Note: For many revealing reports on government corruption from reliable sources, click here.

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