Crapaganda.com

Military researchers have poured blood, sweat, tears and taxpayer dollars into all sorts of wacky experiments. There are plenty of reasons that they are willing to take a take a chance on just about anything. Some may feel that we need to invest in risky projects to keep an edge over our adversaries. Others may view unusual projects as a way of raising money for their own personal crusades.

Bat Bombs

Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.

According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

After that accident, the project was turned over to the Navy, which continued it for more than a year. During that time, the Marines conducted a successful proof of concept at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, where they released bats over a mock-up of a Japanese city. The critters were able to start quite a few fires.

Alaskan Area 51

A few years ago, Todd Pedersen, an Air Force physicist, sat in the snow and watched as auroras — similar to the famous northern lights — began to glow above his base in the Alaska wilderness. But these luminous forms weren’t created by nature. Pedersen had made them himself, with the help of an enormous array of antennas that can hurl several megawatts of radio waves into the upper atmosphere, creating brilliant light shows in the sky.

The facility is known as HAARP, or the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, and it is meant to answer some intriguing questions about the ionosphere. But it has raised even more questions among conspiracy theorists. Over the years, it’s been called a weather-control machine, a superweapon and the ultimate underground spying machine. As if creating artificial aurora borealis wasn’t freaky enough.

Nuke Test, Too Close for Comfort

When a nuclear warhead detonates, you don’t want to be anywhere nearby. And you definitely don’t want to be taking cover just a couple of miles away. But during the Cold War, a handful of soldiers were ready to start a nuke fight, right up-close and personal, using portable launchers and low-yield bombs.

In the 1960s, the Army had more than two thousand guns meant for launching small nukes, each with a maximum range of only 2.5 miles. The Army lit one of those firecrackers in the Nevada desert during the summer of 1962 while Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy watched. It exploded only 1.7 miles from where it was launched, and was the last above-ground nuclear explosion conducted by the United States.

Extreme Skydiving

In 1960, Captain Joe Kittinger rode a balloon up into the stratosphere — 20 miles above the Earth — and then jumped out of it. He hurled toward the ground at 714 miles per hour, faster than the speed of sound, and landed safely in the sands of the New Mexico desert.

His daring leap was part of Project Excelsior, an attempt to explore the safety issues that pilots would face while handling high-flying aircraft. Kittinger’s test proved that an experimental parachute, designed by Francis Beaupre, would hold up under the most extreme conditions.

To date, nobody has broken Kittinger’s altitude record. But a privately funded team, backed by the makers of Red Bull, is trying to do it.

Deadly Dolphins

In the early 1990s, a Russian military officer allegedly trained several dolphins to attack enemy ships. He conducted tests to show that they could recognize different vessels by the sounds of their propellers. In theory, the mammals could be used to drag explosives up to enemy ships, while leaving friendly boats unharmed.

Years later, when he could not afford to care for the animals, he sold them to Iran. Their fate is still unlearned. And rumors persist of even-wilder military dolphin programs — marine mammals taught to kill enemy swimmers.

Hi-tech ‘lie detectors’ have fascinated neuroscientists and the public alike for years, but whether they work is another matter

Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a machine that could tell you whether someone was telling the truth? It would, of course, be really useful – but more than that, it would represent the ultimate triumph of technology. The utterly private world of our consciousness would be private, and sacred, no more.

Given how fascinating the idea is, then, it’s no surprise that there have been plenty of attempts to design technological lie detectors, and no shortage of people willing to pay for the chance to use them. All of them have worked, in theory. But that doesn’t mean they work.

A group of Scottish neuroscientists recently warned against the seductions of the latest approach – the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect deception. A number of commercial enterprises, such as the US-based No Lie MRI now offer fMRI lie detection, and fMRI evidence has been submitted to courts of law in the US several times, although it has never yet been accepted as admissible evidence.

The judge’s conservativism is well placed. To be sure, fMRI is an incredible technology. Scientists use it to probe the workings of the brain, and doctors use it to work out which parts of the brain do what, so they can avoid damaging the important bits during brain surgery.

But it’s just not capable of detecting lies with the kind of certainty that could stand up in court. When scientists use fMRI in an experiment to investigate brain function, it’s typical to scan 10 to 20 people. Scans are expensive, and we don’t do this for fun: we do it because it’s very difficult to interpret the results of any individual person’s scan. There’s just too much variability. Using fMRI you can see which parts of the brain tend to light up in response to, say, listening to music. Or telling lies. But everyone’s brain is a bit different and there’s a lot of random noise in every scan, so it’s only by averaging over many people that you can achieve good results.

With every new technological advance, it’s never long before someone claims to be able to use it to detect deception – for a price. Last time it was computers. An company called Nemesysco sell software – Layered Voice Analysis – which they say can mathematically process voice recordings and reveal the emotional stress-patterns associated with lying. If that doesn’t float your boat, you can buy the same technology to work out whether someone you’re chatting to online is attracted to you.

In 2007, two Swedish academics published a paper criticising the science behind Nemesysco’s system. The academic journal that printed the article was promptly slapped with a lawsuit, and the article was taken down amid much controversy, but bootleg copies are available online. It’s well worth a read, given that in 2007-2008, the government performed extensive trials of Nemesysco’s unproven technology for the purpose of catching “benefit scroungers”.

Going further back, electroencephalography (EEG), the brain-scanning technology that people used before fMRI arrived, is crude but still effective at measuring neural activation. It turns out that there’s a particular neural response, the P300, that happens when you see something that you’ve seen before – a recognition spike. So if you show a murder suspect pictures of the murder scene, say, you could tell if they’d been there. Even better than just lie detection, it’s mind reading. In theory.

This “brain fingerprinting” is certainly an interesting technique, but we just don’t know whether it’s reliable in practice. Studies have shown that it works fairly well in the lab on normal volunteers (such as students) instructed to lie about imaginary crimes, but real-life field tests are lacking. That hasn’t stopped it being promoted commercially, and EEG has been admitted as evidence in Indian courts several times, although the Indian supreme court recently banned such tests.

This is a common theme. Most “lie detectors” are based on real evidence, but they require you to disregard all of the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts, that are the stuff of science. It’s not hard to see why: lie detectors are a commercial product. Caveats don’t sell, but if you can show people even a bit of evidence that something exciting should work in theory, you’ll go far.

In theory, you can use EEG or fMRI to see through deception, but only if you assume that the brains of hardened criminals with strong motivations to lie behave the same was as the brains of college students. This is also true of the very oldest lie detector, the polygraph, invented over 100 years ago. It simply records heart rate and blood pressure etc, on the theory that when you lie, you get stressed and your body reacts. But does it work on actual criminals? Can it distinguish between stress associated with lying and stress associated with telling painful truths? It’s hard to say. Yet if we don’t know whether it works in any individual case, it’s not much use.

Neuroscience is advancing rapidly and one day, it surely will be possible to reliably read criminal’s minds with brain scans. But not yet. We must resist the temptation to let entrepreneurs blind us with science and claim to be able to peer into a world which is, for now, private.

Source: The Guardian

Thousands of people across the UK might have been stopped and searched illegally, figures released by the Home Office suggest.

Powers under section 44 of the Terrorism Act were used in “error” after the proper authorisations were not given.

In one example, for April 2004, the Met Police wrongly stopped 840 people.

Dozens of other examples from across the UK have been uncovered before rules were tightened in 2008.

Police Minister Nick Herbert said administrative errors were to blame and he has ordered an internal review of procedures.

The Metropolitan Police is also urgently considering what steps can be taken to contact the individuals concerned.

Extremists

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows police to stop and search someone without suspicion that an offence has occurred.

The controversial powers can be used only in specific areas on the orders of a police chief, with later approval by the home secretary.

Supporters say such powers can make it harder for extremists to carry out reconnaissance in public areas, such as near high-profile tourist attractions.

But critics, including the government’s reviewer of terror legislation, Lord Carlile, say they unfairly target some ethnic groups and increase community tensions.

The Met is responsible for the vast majority of section 44 operations, many of which take place in Westminster and at major transport hubs or “iconic” tourist sites such as Buckingham Palace.

The force only discovered the April 2004 blunder after a request was made under the Freedom of Information Act earlier this year.

Officials researching stop and search authorisations found a Home Office minister had not signed within 48 hours.

A Met spokesman said the mistake was not noticed in 2004 due to an “oversight” and procedures have been reviewed.

Asked whether the force now faced a flood of legal actions, he said: “It is a matter for individuals to seek legal advice in relation to this issue.”

The spokesman also denied the force had misled the public, saying: “The Met first became aware of the issue in April 2010 during the process of compiling data in answer to a Freedom of Information request.

“All public statements issued before that date were made in good faith and there was no intention to mislead the public.”

The Met case sparked a trawl for errors across the UK.

Officials discovered 33 occasions when forces asked for a 29-day search window, even though the legislation only allows a maximum of 28 days. In two cases, forces asked for 30 days.

‘Public confidence’

The Home Office has written to each of the 14 police forces concerned to alert them to the errors.

It said the forces were now in the process of assessing how many individuals were illegally stopped and searched and would “do their best to contact those involved”.

Security Minister Baroness Neville-Jones said: “I am very concerned by these historical administrative errors. To maintain public confidence in our counter-terrorism powers, it is absolutely crucial all those responsible for exercising them do so properly.

“I take these matters extremely seriously and have instructed the department to conduct an urgent review of current procedures to ensure that errors can be prevented in future.

“The government is already committed to undertaking a review of counter-terrorism legislation which will include the use of stop and search powers in section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. We shall make our findings known as soon as possible.”

Officials at the Home Office, National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) and Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) are examining the mistakes.

The 40 flawed operations uncovered by officials include three which have previously been identified as being based on flawed paperwork.

The forces involved are: Metropolitan Police, North Yorkshire, Hampshire, Bedfordshire, Essex, Greater Manchester, Fife, South Wales and Thames Valley.

Invalid operations linked to Sussex Police and South Wales Police have been highlighted to Parliament previously.

Acpo lead officer on stop and search, Chief Constable Craig Mackey, said: “Stop and search can work well when it is carried out with the support and understanding of the community. Used correctly, it can create a hostile environment for terrorists to operate in and help protect the public.”

In January this year, the powers were ruled illegal by the European Court of Human Rights. The new coalition government has said it is reviewing their use, as part of a wider overhaul of anti-terror legislation.

Source: BBC

We understand that there may be a few malingerers still digging their fallout bunkers in anticipation of the End Of The World which has been rescheduled for 2012. For that reason, here is a video snippet of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talking to attendees at the 2010 World Science Festival about where he stands on the issue and why we might want to stand in the same spot:

Another year, another Bilderberg. The first “participants” (as the delegates are known) won’t be arriving until Thursday, but already the Hotel Dolce in Sitges is buzzing with anticipation. This Catalan seaside town hasn’t hosted an event as large and politically sensitive as Bilderberg since the legendary 2008 Foam Party at the Mr Gay Sitges awards night.

Last year, Bilderberg was held in Vouliagmeni, on the coast just south of Athens. The Greek minister of finance attended, the minister of foreign affairs, and the governor of the National Bank of Greece. A few months later, Greece was bankrupt and Athens was in flames. So … good luck, Madrid!

Police are already stretching their red stripy tape around the hotel, and zipping up and around the local roads in their squad cars, sniffing for trouble. I’m really hoping there’s none to find. The Spanish are promising a beach party and an “awareness camp”, with political discussion forums and meditation zones.

I plan to spend at least part of Friday sitting cross-legged in a campsite, sending beams of white light up the hill and into the hotel. Feel my love, Marcus Agius – Chairman of Barclays and senior non-executive director on the BBC’s new executive board. Let it surround you, Queen Sofia of Spain. Don’t fight it, president of the World Bank. You can’t beat the love.

It would be nicer if the interface between Bilderberg and the world could be softer – if it could turn an open face towards us, rather than the barrel of a machine gun. What I’m hoping is that this year, in the all-new CamCleggian spirit of openness and political transparency, any British elected official who attends the meeting – and I’m talking to you, Kenneth Clarke and George Osborne – will tell us they attended, tell us what they spoke about, and tell us what the next 12 months has in store. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Not that anyone is really asking. I’ve come along again this year because I had the horrible, nagging thought that no other journalists would.

Not that I’m a proper journalist. Hardly: consider me an interested citizen of the world come to bear witness to a peculiar, important, and unsettling event.

For a long and luxurious weekend at the Dolce Sitges, relishing its “new and creative buffet concepts” (a table with food on it), prime ministers will mingle with European royalty, with various EU commissioners, with representatives from Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, AIB, Deutsche Bank, Chase Manhattan and Royal Dutch Shell.

They’ll clink glasses with President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke (he is confirmed for this year). And join the Friday night conga line behind the US treasury secretary (Tim Geithner went last year; he goes a lot). We can reasonably expect the head of the Federal Reserve, the president of the World Bank, the secretary general of Nato … they’ve all attended in the past and many will attend again. So yes, important it is; to think otherwise is painfully naive (see below for the usual “just a big boys’ club” comments …)

The conference hotel may be perched above a golf course, and boast two ping pong tables, but this four-day event isn’t about who is better at table tennis, Ken Clarke or David Rockefeller (it’s Rockefeller). This is about big business, global financial strategy and the economic future of Europe … if indeed it has one.

And most importantly, this four-day event doesn’t start until tomorrow – and continues all the way through the weekend – so if you’re a PROPER journalist reading this, or a blogger, or simply a curious citizen of a Europe teetering on the edge, then come along. Please come. I’ll buy you a Catalan beer. I recommend the Rosita. It’s fruity but ballsy – not unlike the winner of Mr Gay Sitges 2008.

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U.S. ‘secret war’ expands globally as Special Operations forces take larger role.

Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.

Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.

The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Obama released last week.

One advantage of using “secret” forces for such missions is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.

Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed “things that the previous administration did not.”

‘More access’

Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush‘s administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“We have a lot more access,” a second military official said. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.”

The White House, he said, is “asking for ideas and plans . . . calling us in and saying, ‘Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.’ ”

The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them. In Yemen, for example, “we are doing all three,” the official said. Officials who spoke about the increased operations were not authorized to discuss them on the record.

The clearest public description of the secret-war aspects of the doctrine came from White House counterterrorism director John O. Brennan. He said last week that the United States “will not merely respond after the fact” of a terrorist attack but will “take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.”

That rhetoric is not much different than Bush’s pledge to “take the battle to the enemy . . . and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” The elite Special Operations units, drawn from all four branches of the armed forces, became a frontline counterterrorism weapon for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Read the rest of the story at: Washington Post

A US soldier serving in Iraq has been arrested for allegedly leaking a classified combat video to a whistleblower website, Wikileaks, last year.

The video footage from a helicopter cockpit shows a deadly 2007 aerial strike in the Iraqi capital that killed 12 civilians including two journalists from the Reuters news agency.

US Army Specialist Bradley Manning, 22, was arrested last month after he reportedly bragged online about having leaked the information, including the video and US diplomatic cables.

The US military in a statement said Manning, who was deployed at a base near Baghdad, is in “pre-trial confinement for allegedly releasing classified information and is currently confined in Kuwait”.

Manning’s alleged action of supplying classified video and diplomatic communications to Wikileaks was first reported by Wired.com, the website of technology magazine Wired.

Pentagon probe

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said investigators were probing allegations that Manning supplied classified video and 260,000 secret diplomatic cables to Wikileaks.

“I think that’s why the Criminal Investigative Division is taking a very scrupulous look at this,” Whitman said in Washington.

Wired said Manning, from Maryland, was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 64km east of Baghdad.

Philip Crowley, a US state department spokesman, said the department would take the leak of classified documents “seriously”.

“It has particular impact in terms of revealing what we call sources and methods, compromising our ability to provide government leaders with the kind of analysis that they need to make informed decisions,” Crowley said.

Wikileaks, a website that publishes anonymously sourced documents, released what it called previously unseen footage of the Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad in April.

‘Military whistleblowers’

At the time Wikileaks said only that it had obtained the video “from a number of military whistleblowers” but did not provide any further information on how it got hold of it.

In a Twitter feed Wikileaks said “allegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect”.

It said that “if” Manning was the “whistleblower then, without doubt, he’s a national hero”.

Manning reportedly said he had leaked other material to Wikileaks, including a separate video of a 2009 air strike in Afghanistan, a classified army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat and classified US diplomatic cables, according to Wired.

Wired said Manning had been in touch with former hacker Adrian Lamo, who contacted army investigators and FBI agents after being told of the leaks.

“I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,” Lamo told Wired about turning Manning in to the authorities.

“He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air.”

Source: aljazeera.net

“Law must apply to everyone equally or it’s not law at all. Those who are pushing the other view have a misguided idea of what law is all about.” – Benjamin Ferencz

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) released today the results of a landmark investigation that, according to the organization’s press release, “uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody.” PHR is asking President Obama to “order the attorney general to undertake an immediate criminal investigation of alleged illegal human experimentation and research on detainees conducted by the CIA and other government agencies following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.” They are also seeking other investigations by Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Justice.

As PHR’s White Paper — “Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program” (PDF) — makes clear, illegal experimentation upon human subjects was an integral part of the Bush/Cheney/CIA “enhanced interrogation” program (EIP) from the very beginning. Medical and psychologist monitors were used to collect and analyze data from the EIP interrogations in order “to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations.” The use of illegal experimentation both reveals the actual parameters of the torture program, and raises the stakes surrounding the need for accountability for these actions to a new level.

According to PHR’s White Paper:

Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The charges are expected to resonate throughout the legal, human rights and religious communities. The executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), Rev Richard Killmer, commenting in a press release on PHR’s report, said he deplored the “deeply disturbing evidence that our government committed, in our names, forced human experimentation that recalls some of humanity’s darkest days — charges from which no person of faith can afford to turn away.” (NRCAT has also released a new video today, “Accounting for Torture.”)

Research Violated U.S. and International Law

PHR’s CEO Frank Donaghue states, “The CIA appears to have broken all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation.”

PHR examined three instances of the CIA’s illegal medical research, although it should be understood this most likely does not constitute the full extent of the torture research program. Some of the experiments concerned the elaboration of more extensive forms of waterboarding, testing the use of large-volumes of water, the use of saline solution as a substitute for plain water, as well as the use of ancillary equipment, such as a gurney that could swing the prisoner into different angles, and use of a blood oximeter to measure subject vital signs and calibrate them with experimental techniques. The CIA also experimented on different levels of sleep deprivation in order to assess effects and coordinate practice with legal definitions constructed by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

In one gruesome set of experiments, at least 25 detainees were submitted to both individual and combined use of the different “enhanced interrogation” techniques developed by the CIA through reverse-engineering of the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, techniques which were originally developed to inoculate U.S. military personnel against torture. The purpose of this experiment, monitored by doctors, was to ascertain the effects of the different combinations of techniques as they pertained to “susceptibility to severe pain,” attempting thereby to calibrate levels of pain in order to keep the interrogations within the dubious frontiers of legality proposed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee in their infamous torture memos.

The purpose of this experimental program was apparently to help provide legal cover for the torture program, as well as both examine the effects of torture upon live subjects, and further the design of the torture program itself. No existing research protocol has come to light, and the evidence has been organized via the use of open source documents and FOIA releases. From these sources, one can see that the use of medical monitors and experimental medical data was used as supposed “good faith” evidence against possible prosecution for torture.

A Legal Limbo

The actions of the Bush Administration to legally justify their torture program via the use of executive orders and OLC rulings has been well-documented. Only last February, the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Conduct released their finding that the actions of Yoo and Bybee in constructing the 2002 memos that authorized torture did not amount to unprofessional or unethical conduct, but simply constituted “bad judgment.” Whatever the judgment upon the OLC memos, it is apparent the use of torture pre-dated the OLC approval of the EIP.

While there is some evidence that the Bush administration was concerned with loosening the legal parameters surrounding research using human subjects (story to come), there is no evidence, as PHR’s White Paper points out, that OLC ever considered the legality of the medical monitoring of prisoners as part of the CIA torture program. According to Director of PHR’s Campaign Against Torture and lead report author, Nathaniel A. Raymond, “Justice Department lawyers appear to have never assessed the lawfulness of the alleged research on detainees in CIA custody, despite how essential it appears to have been to their legal cover for torture.” But, after a number of Supreme Court decisions, culminating in the Hamdan v Rumsfeld ruling in June 2006, the government apparently had second thoughts about its legal liabilities.

One of the most original pieces of research in the PHR report concerns the rewriting of the War Crimes Act (WCA) as part of the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA). Concerned, it would seem, over their vulnerability to criminal prosecution for illegal and unethical research conducted upon detainees, including, as I’ve pointed out before, Abu Zubaydah, the Bush administration amended the WCA language in the MCA to weaken the protections against the strict prohibitions against scientific experiments on prisoners found in the Geneva Conventions. These changes were then made retroactive to 1997, which suggests the U.S. government was shielding interrogators and other officials for illegal acts going back four years prior to 9/11. And to their shame, Congress passed this legislation, and the language on the WCA was then retained by the Democratic Party-controlled Congress when the MCA was amended in 2009.

One of PHR’s recommendations in their report is that Congress undertake a revision of the War Crimes Act “to eliminate changes made to the Act in 2006 which weaken the prohibition on biological experimentation on detainees, and ensure that the War Crimes Act definition of the grave breach of biological experimentation is consistent with the definition of that crime under the Geneva Conventions.”

Outstanding Issues To Be Resolved

It has been some years since the experimental aspects of the torture program were first recognized. The breach of medical ethics by doctors was first discussed by M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2005. In July 2005, a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, “The Experiment,” looked at the “reverse-engineering” of the SERE techniques, and noted both the prohibition on scientific experiments of prisoners in Geneva, and the “[n]umerous experiments aimed at documenting trainees’ stress levels… conducted by sere-affiliated scientists.”

One of the authors of the PHR report, Stephen Soldz, wrote about the experimental aspects of “behavioral science-based torture techniques” in use at Guantanamo in a August 2006 article. In 2007, physician Steven Miles noted the experimental aspects of the Al Qahtani interrogation at Guantanamo in late 2002 – early 2003. The experimental aspect of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah was broached by FBI agent Ali Soufan in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2009. Soufan’s presence at the Zubaydah interrogation in April-May 2002 led him to characterize a CIA contractor’s treatment of Zubaydah as an experiment (“Once again the contractor insisted on stepping up the notches of his experiment…”). The contractor is believed to have been former SERE psychologist, James Mitchell.

The PHR report should not be seen as a full history of the torture-experimentation program, but is a blueprint offering the outlines of what that program consisted of and how it progressed. For instance, except for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, none of the CIA prisoners are named in the report, although it is noted that “the authorized policy of using multiple ["enhanced interrogation" techniques] simultaneously was officially based on medical observations of 25 detainees.”

A full understanding of all that happened awaits future investigations. A more comprehensive understanding of the issues raised, e.g., the development of the waterboarding and sleep deprivation techniques, has been investigated by Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel/Firedoglake, while the torture of Abu Zubaydah has been intensively covered by Jason Leopold at Truthout. Leopold noted the “extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials” on matters such as “medical updates” and “behavioral comments.”

In an article last April, I noted that “psychologist’s notes” had been cataloged as a part of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation materials. Such notes would indicate just what variables of interest were being recorded by the psychological experimenter, especially given recent revelations in a story by Jason Leopold that a second taping system was used in the interrogation of Zubaydah, with “torture sessions that were stored on computers and separate hard drives.”

Variables of interest to CIA psychologists might include head movements and hand movements, facial expressions or microexpressions, used in detecting deception or behavioral manifestations of stress. These types of observation are synonymous with computer analysis and argue for the use of a digital video system or the transfer of analog video into data stored on magnetic or optical media. The same release of documents… also described CIA officials asking for “instructions” regarding the “disposition of hard drives and magnetic media” associated with the torture of Zubaydah.

Among the various threads left dangling from the PHR investigation, none concerns me more than the links between the SERE research undertaken by investigators led by Dr. Charles A. Morgan and the CIA experimental torture program, as reported in an appendix to PHR’s report. In an appendix to their report, PHR describes the SERE research undertaken during the years prior to the issuance of the OLC memos, and explains that the results of that research demonstrated how the risk of harm was inherent in the SERE techniques. In addition, they note, “the experimental framework of these studies intentionally or unintentionally laid the groundwork for unethical and illegal human experimentation that would follow.”

The full details of my own investigation into those links were published back in September 2009.

What is indisputable is that by virtue of his position, Dr. Morgan had access to CIA officials just at the time that another department of the CIA, one to which he is affiliated, was, according to the CIA’s own Office of Inspector General Report (large PDF) involved in vetting the SERE techniques for use in interrogations….

… it looks like the CIA used DOD/JPRA as a cover for the safety of techniques that it knew were in fact harmful from their own analysis of the “data.” [JRPA, or Joint Recovery Personnel Agency is, among other things, the "Executive Agency" for the SERE training schools.]

One especially lingering thread concerns the assertion in the PHR report that all of Dr. Morgan’s SERE research had been properly vetted by Institutional Research Boards. While this is true for his published research, a report for which Dr. Morgan is listed as second author, The War Fighter’s Stress Response: Telemetric and Noninvasive Assessment, conducted on behalf of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Ft. Detrick, beginning approximately in November 2001, states — even by its final addendum in October 2003 — that “due to Institutional Review Board delays no human subjects data are available.”

The exact interactions between CIA and DoD/JPRA, between the White House and both DoD and CIA, the role of other actors, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and Joint Special Operations Command, not to mention the actual origins of the torture research program, remain unclear. It is a vital necessity that that investigations take place, and hopefully PHR’s report will provide the added impetus to push this issue to the forefront of a tired, confused, and frightened country, a country misled in so many ways over the past decade, and now forced to confront the full panoply of evil that has resulted from having a portion of the government held apart from public scrutiny. That must end now.

Source: FireDogLake

George W. Bush’s casual acknowledgment Wednesday that he had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded — and would do it again — has horrified some former military and intelligence officials who argue that the former president doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of what he is admitting.

Waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, is “unequivocably torture”, said retired Brigadier General David R. Irvine, a former strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for 18 years.

“As a nation, we have historically prosecuted it as such, going back to the time of the Spanish-American War,” Irvine said. “Moreover, it cannot be demonstrated that any use of waterboarding by U.S. personnel in recent years has saved a single American life.”

Irvine told the Huffington Post that Bush doesn’t appreciate how much harm his countenancing of torture has done to his country.

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” Bush told a Grand Rapids audience Wednesday, of the self-professed 9/11 mastermind. “I’d do it again to save lives.”

But, Irvine said: “When he decided to do it the first time, he launched the nation down a disastrous road, and we will continue to pay dearly for the damage his decision has caused.

“We are seen by the rest of the world as having abandoned our commitment to international law. We have forfeited enormous amounts of moral leadership as the world’s sole remaining superpower. And it puts American troops in greater danger — and unnecessary danger.”

James P. Cullen, a retired brigadier general in the United States Army Reserve Judge Advocate General’s Corps, told HuffPost that the net effect of Bush’s remarks — and former Vice President Cheney’s before him — is “to establish a precedent where it will be permissible to our enemies to use waterboarding on our servicemen in future wars.

Cheney famously once agreed with an interviewer that “a dunk in the water” was “no-brainer” if it saves lives.

“This is not the last war we’re going to fight,” Cullen said. “Americans not yet born are going to be prisoners of war in those conflicts. And our enemies are going to be able to point back to President Bush and Vice President Cheney saying that waterboarding is OK.

“It’s just shocking to me how he can be so flip about something that is so serious,” Cullen said.

Matthew Alexander, the pseudonymous former Air Force interrogator and author of “How To Break A Terrorist” e-mailed HuffPost that Bush’s statement “is de facto approval of the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers in Iraq who were killed by foreign fighters that Al Qaida recruited based on the President’s policy of torture and abuse of detainees.

“At least now we know where the blame for those soldiers’ deaths squarely belongs. President Bush’s decision broke with a military tradition dating back to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War and the consequences are clear: Al Qaida is stronger and our country is less safe.”

Cullen and Irvine are among 15 former military and intelligence officials currently working with Human Rights First in Pennsylvania, meeting with congressional candidates from both parties to help inform them about issues of prisoner treatment and interrogation.

Source: Huffington Post

This latest drone, developed by researchers at University of Pennsylvania, can perform precision flying maneuvers that would deliver a payload into the open window of house.  The payload could potentially consist of a CCTV camera or a small bomb.