Crapaganda.com

“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

Right now, preparing for new viral threats means looking to the past, creating hypotheses based on how pathogens have changed before. Now Darpa wants to reverse that strategy: test every possible outcome, to create a prophetic almanac that warns of viral mutations and outbreaks in advance — giving scientists the chance to change the course of the future before illness strikes.

The Pentagon’s far-out research arm has been zeroing in on the danger of mutating pathogens, and the corresponding problem of drug resistance, for years now. The agency is already funding tobacco-based vaccine production, a seven-day plan to thwart biothreats, and prescient viral infection detectors. And they’ve even set their sights on psychic medics, with a 2007 program that sought to turn docs into all-knowing illness predictors.

Now, Darpa wants the powers of premonition to wipe out viral threats altogether. They’re hosting a workshop for a new program, called “Prophecy,” that’ll develop methods to predict the rate, location and likely mutations of viral agents.

First, the agency wants novel lab-based methods to reproduce “virus-host interactions,” in different environments. After that, researchers will sequence different viral genomes, and test how they adapt and change under diverse conditions.

Ideally, that’ll yield a host of algorithms, capable of accurately predicting “the rate, direction and phenotype of viral mutations.” From there, scientists will be able to develop appropriate attack strategies in the right geographic locations. Most notably, Darpa wants to see mere mortals outdo the forces of nature, by creating “high energy evolutionary boundaries” that keep genetic mutations at bay.

Even if Darpa’s program doesn’t result in omniscient predictive powers, the possibility of more accurately anticipating viral mutations would have widespread implications. Health agencies could  prep for looming outbreaks, new vaccines could be fast-tracked — and if scientists do manage to thwart evolution, the threat of resistance to antibiotic and antiviral meds could be all but eliminated.

Hundreds of members of the BMA have passed a motion denouncing the use of the alternative medicine, saying taxpayers should not foot the bill for remedies with no scientific basis to support them.

The BMA has previously expressed scepticism about homoeopathy, arguing that the rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence should examine the evidence base and make a definitive ruling about the use of the remedies in the NHS.

Now, the annual conference of junior doctors has gone further, with a vote overwhelmingly supporting a blanket ban, and an end to all placements for trainee doctors which teach them homeopathic principles.

Dr Tom Dolphin, deputy chairman of the BMA’s junior doctors committee in England told the conference: “Homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a disgrace that nestling between the National Hospital for Neurology and Great Ormond Street [in London] there is a National Hospital for Homeopathy which is paid for by the NHS”.

The alternative medicine, devised in the 18th century by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann, is based on a theory that substances which cause symptoms in a healthy person can, when vastly diluted, cure the same problems in a sick person.

Proponents say the resulting remedy retains a “memory” of the original ingredient – a concept dismissed by scientists.

Latest figures show 54,000 patients are treated each year at four NHS homeopathic hospitals in London, Glasgow, Bristol and Liverpool, at an estimated cost of £4 million.

A fifth hospital in Tunbridge Wells in Kent was forced to close last year when local NHS funders stopped paying for treatments.

Gordon Lehany, chairman of the BMA’s junior doctors committee in Scotland said it was wrong that some junior doctors were spending part of their training rotations in homeopathic hospitals, learning principles which had no place in science.

He told the conference in London last weekend: “At a time when the NHS is struggling for cash we should be focusing on treatments that have proven benefit. If people wish to pay for homoeopathy that’s their choice but it shouldn’t be paid for on the NHS until there is evidence that it works.”

The motion was supported by BMA Chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum, though it will only become official policy of the whole organisation if it is agreed by their full conference next month.

In February a report by MPs said the alternative medicine should not receive state funding.

The Commons science and technology committee also said vials of the remedies should not be allowed to use phrases like “used to treat” in their marketing, as consumers might think there is clinical evidence that they work.

In evidence to the committee, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain said there was no possible reason why such treatments, marketed by an industry worth £40 million in this country, could be effective scientifically.

Advocates of homoeopathy say even if the effect of the remedies is to work as a placebo, they are chosen by thousands of people, and do not carry the risks and side effects of many mainstream medicines.

A survey carried out at England’s NHS homeopathic hospitals found 70 per cent of patients said they felt some improvement after undergoing treatment.

Crystal Sumner, chief executive of the British Homeopathic Association (BHA), said attempts to stop the NHS funding alternative medicines ignored the views of the public, especially patients with chronic conditions.

She said: ” Homeopathy helps thousands of people who are not helped by conventional care. We don’t want it to be a substitute for mainstream care, but when people are thinking about making cuts to funding, I think they need to consider public satisfaction, and see that homoeopathy has a place in medicine.”

She said junior doctors’ calls for an end to any training placements based in homeopathic hospitals ignored the lessons alternative medicine could provide, in terms of how to diagnose patients.

Estimates on how much the NHS spends on homoeopathy vary. The BHA says the NHS spends about £4 million a year on homeopathic services, although the Department of Health says spending on the medicines themselves is just £152,000 a year.

Two weeks ago, a charity founded by the Prince of Wales to promotes alternative medicines announced plans to shut down, days after a former senior official was arrested on suspicion of fraud and money laundering.

The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health said its plans to close had been brought forward as a result of a fraud investigation at the charity.

George Gray, a former chief executive of the organisation, and his wife Gillian were arrested by Scotland Yard officers last month in an early-morning raid on their home in North London.

Source: Telegraph UK

Indian Homeopath Responds

When her baby died soon after delivery, Gulbahor Zavidova, 28, a poor farmer’s wife, longed to be pregnant again. After months of trying she and her husband visited a doctor who told her she could never have another child because she had been sterilised.

The procedure had been performed immediately after she gave birth, by doctors who did not ask her consent. On learning she could not bear children, her husband left her.

“Not a day passes without me crying,” she said. “I was outraged when I found out what they had done. How could they do such a horrible thing without asking me?”

According to human rights groups, tens of thousands of young women like Zavidova have been sterilised without their consent in the authoritarian former Soviet state of Uzbekistan.

Uzbek sources say the measure was ordered by Islam Karimov, the president, who has ruled with an iron fist for 20 years. The policy is aimed at keeping down the country’s poor population — with 28m people, it is Central Asia’s most densely populated state.

Activists say mass sterilisation began in 2003, but was eased after two years following an outcry. It is said to have restarted in February this year, when the health ministry ordered doctors to recommend sterilisation as an “effective contraceptive”. Critics claim every doctor was told to persuade “at least two women” a month to have the procedure. Doctors who failed faced reprisals and fines.

“We estimate that since February, about 5,000 women have been sterilised without consent,” said a local human rights campaigner who fears detention if she is named.

In many cases, doctors opt for delivery by caesarean section and then perform a sterilisation without telling the woman. Widespread rumours of the practice have resulted in women opting for home births to avoid the risk.

Doctors visited Hidojat Muminova, a 26-year-old cotton picker, at home several months ago. They told the mother of two she should visit a local hospital for a check-up, at which she was diagnosed with a potentially fatal cyst in her fallopian tubes.

“They scared me into believing I needed an urgent operation,” she said. “I was surprised as I’d never had any pain but I was worried and agreed to the surgery. When it was over they told me they’d performed a sterilisation. I could not stop crying. They tricked me and treated me like an animal.”

Another victim, Mahmuda Usupova, 30, said doctors had sterilised her after she gave birth to her third child by caesarean several months ago. She learnt she could no longer have children during a visit to her gynaecologist.

Uzbek authorities deny that sterilisations are carried out without consent, but a report by the United Nations Committee Against Torture reported a “large number” of cases three years ago. According to the UN, Uzbekistan’s fertility rate has fallen from 4.4 babies per woman to 2.5 since Karimov came to power.

Under the 72-year-old Karimov, Uzbekistan has become highly repressive. Opponents have been jailed, tortured and killed. Two critics of the regime, who were accused of being Islamic militants, were scalded to death after boiling water was poured over them.

Hundreds of civilians died when the police and army fired indiscriminately into a large crowd of protesters in Andijan in 2005. The Sunday Times has been denied entry to Uzbekistan ever since because its coverage is considered “unfriendly”.

The sterilisation programme has been relaunched despite efforts by Karimov’s two daughters to improve the lives of Uzbek women and children. Lola, 31, the president’s younger daughter, is a Unesco ambassador and head of a children’s charity.

Her sister Gulnara, 38, who was recently appointed ambassador to Spain, supports a number of charities. Known as “the princess of Uzbeks”, she is a Harvard graduate, martial arts expert and jewellery designer.

Under the name GooGoosha — apparently her father’s pet name for her — she has released pop videos. Her parties in Moscow, where she lived until recently, attracted members of the elite.

The women’s health days advertised on her website provide free access to medical specialists from Israel for women suffering “diseases related to reproductive functions”.

The Uzbek embassy in Moscow insisted that all sterilisations were carried out at the patient’s request and after the woman’s husband had been told of the consequences.

Some names have been changed. Additional reporting: Marina Ivanova, Tashkent

Source: Times Online

The NHS should stop funding homeopathy, MPs say.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said using public money on the highly-diluted remedies could not be justified.

The cross-party group said there was no evidence beyond a placebo effect, when a patient gets better because of their belief that the treatment works.

But manufacturers and supporters of homeopathy disputed the report, saying the MPs had ignored important evidence.

It is thought about £4m a year is spent on homeopathy by the NHS, helping to fund four homeopathic hospitals in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow and numerous prescriptions.

Homeopathy is a 200-year-old system of treatment that uses highly diluted substances – sometimes so none of the original product is left – that are given orally in the belief that it will stimulate the body’s self-healing mechanism.

Read More At: NHS money ‘wasted’ on homeopathy (BBC)

In January 1951, Mrs. Lacks was found to have cervical cancer. She agreed to treatment with radium at Johns Hopkins.  There was no stopping her cancer.  Her doctor had never seen anything like it. Within months, her  body was full of tumors. She died in excruciating pain that October.  She was 31 and the devoted mother to her five children, the youngest just a year old. Without their mother the children suffered terribly.

Neither Mrs. Lacks nor any of her relatives knew that doctors had given a sample of her tumor to Dr. George Gey, a Hopkins researcher who was trying to find cells that would live indefinitely in culture so researchers could experiment on them.  Before she came along, his efforts had failed.  Her cells changed everything: they multiplied like crazy and never died.

A cell line called HeLa (for Henrietta Lacks) was born.  Those immortal cells soon became the workhorse of laboratories everywhere.  HeLa cells were used to develop the first polio vaccine, they were launched into space for experiments in zero gravity and they helped produce drugs for numerous diseases, including Parkinson’s, leukemia and the flu. By now, literally tons of them have been produced.

Dr. Gey did not make money from the cells, but they were commercialized. Now they are bought and sold every day the world over, and they have generated millions in profits.

A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift (NY Times)

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” at Amazon.com

The British Homeopathic Association has been accused of misrepresenting scientific evidence on alternative medicine in documents it gave to a parliamentary inquiry.

The organisation claimed several scientific reviews offered support for homeopathy in material submitted to the cross-party science and technology select committee, which is holding an investigation into the products. Robert Mathie, a researcher at the BHA, said the reviews found evidence for a difference between homeopathic remedies and sugar pills, which contain no active ingredients.

But the claim has dismayed some of the scientists who wrote the reviews and angered MPs on the committee who are in the final stages of writing their report.

One review cited was written by Edzard Ernst, a scientist who investigates complementary medicine at the Penisula Medical School in Exeter. He said the BHA’s interpretation of his study was “grossly misleading” because they failed to mention important caveats published in the study. Another review, by Jean-Pierre Boissel at the Hospitals of Lyon and University Claude Bernard in France, was quoted as evidence that homeopathic treatments differ to placebos. Boissel said his conclusion was that homeopathy tended to fare worse in the best-designed studies.

Read more at: Homeopathic society ‘misled’ MPs in inquiry (Guardian UK)

James Randi Makes Homeopathy Harder to Swallow

Newborn babies in the United States are routinely screened for a panel of genetic diseases. Since the testing is mandated by the government, it’s often done without the parents’ consent.

In many states, such as Florida, babies’ DNA is stored indefinitely.

Most parents don’t realize their baby’s DNA is being stored in a government lab, but sometimes when they find out they take action. Parents in Texas, and Minnesota have filed lawsuits, and these parents’ concerns are sparking a new debate about whether it’s appropriate for a baby’s genetic blueprint to be in the government’s possession.

The government has your baby’s DNA (CNN)

Diana Waletzko at the Citizens’ Council on Health Care Press Conference on Protecting Baby DNA.

*UPDATE Suit possible over baby DNA sent to military lab for national database (Austin Statesman)

The Indian government has produced a number of ads that are now running on TV in the worlds second most populous nation. I guess it is cheaper to convince citizens that placebos are effective than it is to provide healthcare for the people. Watch as Indian tax payers money goes out the window!

Killing of Infants by Government? (Scientific Indians)

Dara O’Briain on Homeopathy (and other nonsense)