Later On

Interesting post at Mystified Justice:

I was held at Bagram until February 2003. I saw two people killed there. I was stripped naked, kicked, beaten, and threatened with dogs. Interrogators would hold pictures of my wife and children, and ask me what I thought had happened to them, while a woman screamed near by. By the time I, left I was actually looking forward to going to Guantanamo Bay. It was a 36-hour journey to Guantanamo. I was hooded, shackled, ear-muffed and sedated. I was put into a cell at the maximum security Camp Echo. I remained there most of the time. I was in that cell 24 hours a day, except for 15 minutes out of it twice a week. Guantanamo was more a psychological ordeal. I was released in January 2005.

—Moazzam Begg an Ex-Guantanamo Bay detainee recalled his experience while speaking to Tim Reid of The Times.

Begg, a British citizen, was arrested from Pakistan and was imprisoned for three years without charge or trial. He was picked up by US intelligence officials in Pakistan in January 2002; they accused him of being a member of al-Qaeda, and called him the “Enemy Combatant”. A name that later became the title of his memoir recalling horrendous detail of his 3 years in US detention. Jane Kinninmont, of open democracy, describes him as a devastatingly reasonable, calm, and a highly articulate man. Over the years, Begg has become one of the few who were able to describe, at length, their experiences as a Gitmo detainee. Begg’s memoir discusses grave details about torture, physical and psychological abuse, and (most interestingly) positive words about some of the US guards he met in Guantanamo. However, Begg is  one of the many arrested in Pakistan and sent over to Guantanamo. To be more precise I must quote the infamous disclosure by the Ex-President Musharraf himself in his memoir In the line of Fire:

Many members of al-Qaeda fled Afghanistan and crossed the border into Pakistan. We have played cat and mouse with them . . . We have captured 689 and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars. Those who habitually accuse us of “not doing enough” in the war on terror should simply ask the CIA how much prize money it has paid to the government of Pakistan.

Although in his book Musharraf conveniently dubbed those arrested as ‘Al-Qaeda’ members, …

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Could be useful.

One thing that’s taking down the US is the way that large corporations and industry trade groups have taken control of much of the House and Senate by funneling large amounts of cash to key Representatives and Senators, who then (strangely enough—probably just a coincidence) vote as their masters those companies and lobbyists want, regardless of what is best for the public welfare. Maybe that will stop. Adam Liptak in the NY Times:

The Supreme Court will cut short its summer break in early September to hear a new argument in a momentous case that could transform the way political campaigns are conducted.

The case, which arises from a minor political documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” seemed an oddity when it was first argued in March. Just six months later, it has turned into a juggernaut with the potential to shatter a century-long understanding about the government’s ability to bar corporations from spending money to support political candidates.

The case has also deepened a profound split among liberals, dividing those who view government regulation of political speech as an affront to the First Amendment from those who believe that unlimited corporate campaign spending is a threat to democracy.

At issue is whether the court should overrule a 1990 decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates. Re-arguments in the Supreme Court are rare, and the justices’ decision to call for one here may have been prompted by lingering questions about just how far campaign finance laws, including McCain-Feingold, may go in regulating campaign spending by corporations.

The argument, scheduled for Sept. 9, comes at a crucial historical moment, as corporations today almost certainly have more to gain or fear from government action than at any time since the New Deal.

The court’s order calling for re-argument, issued in June, has generated more than 40 friend-of-the-court briefs. As a group, they depict an array of strange bedfellows and uneasy alliances as they debate whether corporations should be free to spend millions of dollars to support the candidates of their choice…

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Interesting story by Keven Drews in the Seattle Times:

I support President Obama’s health-care reform.

I am a 36-year-old man who has dual citizenship in the United States and Canada. Born in Washington, I wanted to make my life there, but I was forced to move to British Columbia, Canada, after I got sick six years ago.

I was a newspaper reporter at the Peninsula Daily News, located on the North Olympic Peninsula, and was climbing the ladder, but I had no health-care insurance. Coverage began after three month’s employment. I’d been at work just shy of three months.

On April 1, 2003, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer of the plasma cells, in a hospital outside Vancouver, B.C. Free treatment began immediately: medication and radiation. By June, I was admitted to Vancouver General Hospital’s Leukemia Bone Marrow Transplant Program for an expensive stem-cell transplant. (A similar transplant costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in Seattle.) I left the hospital without paying a cent. Follow-up treatment ensued.

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New York magazine:

Despite how persuasive all this science is, somehow it still seems like a huge leap of faith to consider giving back an hour of our children’s lives to slumber. Statistical correlations are fine evidence for scientists, but as parents, we want more—we want control.

Dr. Judith Owens runs a sleep clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, affiliated with Brown. Recently, a father came in with his 15-year-old daughter, who was complaining of severe headaches. Interviewing the patient, Owens quickly learned that her daily routine was a brutal grind; after violin lessons, bassoon lessons, dance classes, and the homework from honors classes, she was able to get only five hours of sleep a night before waking every morning at 4:30 to hustle off to the gym. The father wanted to know if a lack of sleep could be causing her headaches. Owens told him that was probably the case. She recommended his daughter cut back on her schedule.

The word probably made this father hesitant. He would let her cut back, but only if Owens could prove, in advance, that sacrificing an activity would stop the headaches. Sure, he knew that sleep was important, but was it more important than honors French? Was it more important than getting into a great college?

Owens tried her standard argument. “Would you let your daughter ride in a car without a seat belt? You have to think of sleep the same way.” But in the father’s mind, he saw the transaction the other way around: Cutting back was putting his daughter at risk. What if the headaches didn’t stop and she gave up one of her great passions, like dance, for no reason?

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Interesting and useful. Check it out. Here’s just one example:

For your kids or yourself.

Jeremy Scahill in The Nation:

Blackwater, the private mercenary company owned by Erik Prince, has been thrust back into the spotlight by a series of stunning revelations about its role in covert US programs. Since at least 2002, Blackwater has worked for the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan on "black" contracts. On August 19, the New York Times revealed that the company was, in fact, a central part of a secret CIA assassination program that Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. The paper then reported that Blackwater remains a key player in the widening air war in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it arms drone aircraft. These disclosures follow allegations–made under oath by former Blackwater employees–that Prince murdered or facilitated the murder of potential government informants and that he "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe."

In addition, Blackwater is being investigated by the Justice Department for possible crimes ranging from weapons smuggling to manslaughter and by the IRS for possible tax evasion. It is being sued in federal courts by scores of Iraqi civilians for alleged war crimes and extrajudicial killings. Two of its men have pleaded guilty to weapons-smuggling charges; another pleaded guilty to the unprovoked manslaughter of an Iraqi civilian, and five others have been indicted on similar counts. The US military is investigating Blackwater’s killing of civilians in Afghanistan in May, and reports are emerging that the company may be implicated in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program.

And yet, despite these black marks, the Obama administration continues to keep Blackwater on the government’s payroll. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, Blackwater still works for the CIA, the State Department and the Defense Department to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and its continuing presence is an indicator of just how entrenched private corporations are in the US war machinery. The United States now deploys more private forces (74,000) than uniformed soldiers (57,000) in Afghanistan. While the majority of these contractors are not armed, a sizable number carry weapons, and their ranks are swelling. A recent Defense Department census reports that as of June 30, armed DoD contractors in Afghanistan had increased by 20 percent from the first quarter of 2009.

With the exception of a few legislators, notably Representatives Henry Waxman and Jan Schakowsky, Congress has left the use of private military contractors largely unmonitored. But the recent disclosures of Blackwater’s covert activities may finally force Congress to take action…

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Gethin Chamberlain in the Guardian’s The Observer:

Their heads are too large or too small, their limbs too short or too bent. For some, their brains never grew, speech never came and their lives are likely to be cut short: these are the children it appears that India would rather the world did not see, the victims of a scandal with potential implications far beyond the country’s borders.

Some sit mutely, staring into space, lost in a world of their own; others cry out, rocking backwards and forwards. Few have any real control over their own bodies. Their anxious parents fret over them, murmuring soft words of encouragement, hoping for some sort of miracle that will free them from a nightmare.

Health workers in the Punjabi cities of Bathinda and Faridkot knew something was terribly wrong when they saw a sharp increase in the number of birth defects, physical and mental abnormalities, and cancers. They suspected that children were being slowly poisoned.

But it was only when a visiting scientist arranged for tests to be carried out at a German laboratory that the true nature of their plight became clear. The results were unequivocal. The children had massive levels of uranium in their bodies, in one case more than 60 times the maximum safe limit.

The results were both momentous and mysterious. Uranium occurs naturally throughout the world, but is normally only present in low background levels which pose no threat to human health. There was no obvious source in the Punjab that could account for such high levels of contamination.

And if a few hundred children – spread over a large area – were contaminated, how many thousands more might also be affected? Those are questions the Indian authorities appear determined not to answer. Staff at the clinics say they were visited and threatened with closure if they spoke out. The South African scientist whose curiosity exposed the scandal says she has been warned by the authorities that she may not be allowed back into the country.

But an Observer investigation has now uncovered disturbing evidence to suggest a link between the contamination and the region’s coal-fired power stations. It is already known that the fine fly ash produced when coal is burned contains concentrated levels of uranium and a new report published by Russia’s leading nuclear research institution warns of an increased radiation hazard to people living near coal-fired thermal power stations.

The test results for children born and living in areas around the state’s power stations show …

Continue reading. Here you see a government embracing evil. And the US government is cooperating. From later in the article:

India’s reluctance to acknowledge the problem is hardly unexpected: the country is heavily committed to an expansion of thermal plants in Punjab and other states. Neither was it any surprise when a team of scientists from the Department of Atomic Energy visited the area and concluded that while the concentration of uranium in drinking water was “slightly high”, there was “nothing to worry” about. Yet some tests recorded levels of uranium in the ground water as high as 224mcg/l (micrograms per litre) – 15 times higher than the safe level of 15mcg/l recommended by the WHO. (The US Environmental Protection Agency sets a maximum safe level of 20mcg/l.)

Ryan Singel in Wired:

Access to the nation’s federal law proceedings just got a public interest hack, thanks to programmers from Princeton, Harvard and the Internet Archive, who released a Firefox plug-in designed to make millions of pages of legal documents free.

Free as in beer and free as in speech.

The Problem: Federal courts use an archaic, document-tracking system known as PACER as their official repository for complaints, court motions, case scheduling and decisions. The system design resembles a DMV computer system, circa 1988 — and lacks even the most basic functionality, such as notifications when a case gets a new filing. But what’s worse is that PACER charges 8 cents per page (capped at $2.40 per doc) and even charges for searches — an embarrassing limitation on public access to information, especially when the documents are copyright-free.

The Solution: RECAP, a Firefox-only plugin, that rides along as one usually uses PACER — but it automatically checks if the document you want is already in its own database. The plug-in’s tagline, ‘Turning PACER around,’ alludes to the fact that its name comes from spelling PACER backwards. RECAP’s database is being seeded with millions of bankruptcy and Federal District Court documents, which have been donated, bought or gotten for free by open-government advocate Carl Malamud and fellow travelers such as Justia.

And if the document you request isn’t already in the public archive, then RECAP adds the ones you purchase to the public repository.

The plug-in was released by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, coded by Harlan Yu and Tim Lee, under the direction of noted computer science professor Ed Felten.

That’s a pretty good hack, but it’s still just a stop-gap measure until …

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Sometimes when a person enters the US with a laptop, the laptop is seized and the hard-drive thoroughly searched. Obviously, crossing a border is not probable cause for such a search: the 4th Amendment in the Bill of Rights states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Obviously, the border searches (and occasional seizures) of computers, smartphones, and the like are unconstitutional in the absence of probable cause.

Nevertheless, the policy of searching computers on a whim, like that of being forced to remove your shoes as part of pre-flight check-in (US only), is likely to remain with us until such time as a majority of Representatives and Senators grow a spine and become courageous—that is, forever.

And it’s pointless: one could easily upload whatever is suspicious to some site like MediaFire before setting out for the US, then once inside, just download the files. But the TSA is all about security theater, not security.

At any rate, the TSA is trying to clarify its policies:

CBP Border Search of Electronic Devices Containing Information (PDF, 10 pages – 4.87 MB)
ICE Border Searches of Electronic Media (PDF, 10 pages – 453 KB)
Privacy Impact Assessment: Border Searches of Electronic Information (PDF, 51 pages – 6 MB)

Those links come from this press release.

Interesting article by Steve Vogel in the Washington Post:

Intellipedia, the intelligence community’s version of Wikipedia, hummed in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election in June, with personnel at myriad government agencies updating a page dedicated to tracking the disputed results.

Similarly, a page established in November immediately after the terrorist attack in Mumbai provided intelligence analysts with a better understandings of the scope of the incident, as well as a forum to speculate on possible perpetrators.

"There were a number of things posted that were ahead of what was being reported in the press," said Sean Dennehy, a CIA officer who helped establish the site.

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The American Library Association lists great Web sites for kids. Just added to that list:

• ABC Fast Phonics  – http://www.abcfastphonics.com/
• Build Your Wild Self – http://www.buildyourwildself.com/
• Children’s Literature Network  – http://www.childrensliteraturenetwork.org/
• Click Magazine for Kids – http:// www.clickmagkids.com
• EPA Environmental Kids Club – http://www.epa.gov/kids/
• Funology – http:// www.funology.com
• InsideStory Flashcards – http://insidestoryflashcards.com/
• Meet Me at the Corner – http://www.meetmeatthecorner.org/
• NeoK12: Educational Videos and Lessons for K-12 School Kids – http://www.neok12.com/
• Online Spelling Program – http://www.spellingcity.com/
• Online Sunshine for Kids – http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Kids/
• Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out – http://www.ourwhitehouse.org/
• Read Print – http://www.readprint.com/
• South Carolina Aquarium: Just 4 Kids – http://scaquarium.org/Kids/default.html
• Space Weather Center – http://www.spaceweathercenter.org/
• Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child – http://wrsi.com/pages/3312919.php
• Starchild: A Learning Center for Young Astronomers – http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov
• WayBack: US History for Kids – http://pbskids.org/wayback/summer/index.html
• Welcome to the Wonderful World of Joan Aiken – http://www.joanaiken.com/
• Windows to the Universe – http://www.windows.ucar.edu/windows.html
• Women’s History Month (Library of Congress) – http://womenshistorymonth.gov/

From MakeUseOf.com:

From the “useful knowledge” page, here are some back-to-school links:

Resources for students — links to software, sites, advice, etc.
The Cornell note-taking system — excellent way to take lecture notes
For the autodidact — resources for the self-directed learner
Free electronic flashcards — many sets already created, or create your own
R. Graves on writing well — how to write well, with a collection of exercises
Writing with verbs — vigorous writing makes reading easy
50 writing tips — a collection of tips, some of which might help you
4-sentence outline — how to write solid papers
Collaborative writing tip — useful info for when you must collaborate
Italic handwriting — how to have beautiful handwriting
College journal — keeping a journal of your college years: outline and ideas

I was going to blog only that last one, but the others looked possibly useful as ell.