U.S. agents eye secret prisons in Ethiopia - Africa - MSNBC.com

U.S. agents eye secret prisons in Ethiopia - Africa - MSNBC.com

U.S. agents eye secret prisons in Ethiopia
CIA, FBI agents looking for al-Qaida militants at notorious Ethiopia jails
The Associated Press
Updated: 8:58 p.m. ET April 3, 2007

NAIROBI, Kenya - CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaida militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.

Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.

The detainees include at least one U.S. citizen, and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP.

Some were swept up by Ethiopian troops that drove a radical Islamist government out of neighboring Somalia late last year. Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland.

Ethiopia, which denies holding secret prisoners, is a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.

U.S. government officials contacted by AP acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of terrorism.

The prisoners were never in American custody, said an FBI spokesman, Richard Kolko, who denied the agency would support or be party to illegal arrests. He said U.S. agents were allowed limited access by governments in the Horn of Africa to question prisoners as part of the FBI’s counter-terrorism work.

Western security officials, who insisted on anonymity because the issue related to security matters, told AP that among those held were well-known suspects with strong links to al-Qaida.

An 'outsourced Guantanamo'
But some U.S. allies have expressed consternation at the transfers to the prisons. One Western diplomat in Nairobi, who agreed to speak to AP only if not quoted to avoid angering U.S. officials, said he sees the United States as playing a guiding role in the operation.

John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counter-terrorism, went further. He said in an e-mail that the United States has acted as “ringleader” in what he labeled a “decentralized, outsourced Guantanamo.”

Details of the arrests, transfers and interrogations slowly emerged as AP and human rights groups investigated the disappearances, diplomats tracked their missing citizens and the first detainees to be released told their stories.

One investigator from an international human rights group, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the media, said Ethiopia had secret jails at three locations: Addis Ababa, the capital; an Ethiopian air base 37 miles east of the capital; and the far eastern desert close to the Somali border.

More than 100 arrests in January
More than 100 of the detainees were originally arrested in Kenya in January, after almost all of them fled Somalia because of the intervention by Ethiopian troops accompanied by U.S. special forces advisers, according to Kenyan police reports and U.S. military officials.

Those people were then deported in clandestine pre-dawn flights to Somalia, according to the Kenya Muslim Human Rights Forum and airline documents. At least 19 were women and 15 were children.

In Somalia, they were handed over to Ethiopian intelligence officers and secretly flown to Ethiopia, where they are now in detention, the New York-based Human Rights Watch says.

A further 200 people, also captured in Somalia, were mainly Ethiopian rebels who backed the Somali Islamist movement, according to one rights group and a Somali government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his job. Those prisoners also were taken to Ethiopia, human rights groups say.

Kenya continues to arrest hundreds of people for illegally crossing over from Somalia. But it is not clear if deportations continue.

The Pentagon announced last week that one Kenyan al-Qaida suspect who fled Somalia, Mohamed Abul Malik, was arrested and flown to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ethiopia denying secret prisoners
When contacted by AP, Ethiopian officials denied that they held secret prisoners or that any detainees were questioned by U.S. officials.

“No such kind of secret prisons exist in Ethiopia,” said Bereket Simon, special adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. He declined to comment further.

A former prisoner and the families of current and former captives tell a different story.

“It was a nightmare from start to finish,” Kamilya Mohammedi Tuweni, a 42-year-old mother of three who has a passport from the United Arab Emirates, told AP in her first comments after her release in Addis Ababa on March 24 from what she said was 2½ months in detention without charge.

She is the only released prisoner who has spoken publicly. She was freed a month after being interviewed, fingerprinted and photographed by a U.S. agent, she said. Tuweni, an Arabic-Swahili translator, said she was arrested while on a business trip to Kenya and had never been to Somalia or had any links to that country.

She said she was arrested Jan. 10. Tuweni said she was beaten in Kenya, then forced to sleep on a stone floor while held in Somalia in a single room with 22 other women and children for 10 days before being flown to Ethiopia on a military plane.

Finally, she said, she was taken blindfolded from prison to a private villa in the Ethiopian capital. There, she said, she was interrogated with other women by a male U.S. intelligence agent. He assured her that she would not be harmed but urged her to cooperate, she said.

More families speak out
In a telephone conversation with AP, Tuweni said the man identified himself as a U.S. official, but not from the FBI. A CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Tuesday that the agency had no contact with Tuweni.

“We cried the whole time because we did not know what would happen. The whole thing was very scary,” said Tuweni, who flew back to her family in Dubai a day after her release.

Tuweni’s version of her transfer out of Kenya is corroborated by the manifest of the African Express Airways flight 5Y AXF. It shows she was taken to Mogadishu, Somalia, with 31 other people on an unscheduled flight chartered by the Kenyan government.

The family of a Swedish detainee, 17-year-old Safia Benaouda, said she was freed from Ethiopia on March 27 and arrived home the following day. Benaouda had traveled to Somalia with her fiancé but fled to Kenya during the Ethiopian military intervention, her mother said.

“She is exhausted, her face is yellow and she’s lost about 10 kilograms (22 pounds),” her mother, Helena Benaouda, a 47-year-old Muslim convert who heads the Swedish Muslim Council, wrote on a Web site she set up to help secure her daughter’s release. “She was beaten with a stick when she demanded to go to the toilet.”

The mother spoke briefly by telephone with AP, saying any information she had was being posted on the Web site. She declined to make her daughter available for an interview.

According to the Web site, an American specialist visited the location where Benaouda was being held and took DNA samples and fingerprints of detainees. It said the teenager was never charged or allowed access to lawyers. The teen was also concerned about a 7-month-old baby that was in detention with her, the Web site said.

One American among detainees
The transfer from Kenya to Somalia, and eventually to Ethiopia, of a 24-year-old U.S. citizen, Amir Mohamed Meshal, raised disquiet among FBI officers and the State Department. He is the only American known to be among the detainees in Ethiopia.

U.S. diplomats on Feb. 27 formally protested to Kenyan authorities about Meshal’s transfer and then spent three weeks trying to gain access to him in Ethiopia, said Tom Casey, deputy spokesman for the State Department.

He confirmed Meshal was still in Ethiopian custody pending a hearing on his status.

An FBI memo read to AP by a U.S. official in Washington, who insisted on anonymity, quoted an agent who interrogated Meshal as saying the agent was “disgusted” by Meshal’s deportation to Somalia by Kenya. The unidentified agent said he was told by U.S. consular staff that the deportation was illegal.

“My personal opinion was that he may have been a jihadi a-hole, but the precedent of ’deporting’ U.S. citizens to dangerous situations when there is no reason to do so was a bad one,” the official quoted the memo as saying.

Like Benaouda, Meshal was arrested fleeing Somalia. A Kenyan police report of Meshal’s arrest obtained by AP says he was carrying an assault rifle and had crossed into Kenyan with armed Arab men who were trying to avoid capture.

Meshal’s parents insist he is innocent and called on the U.S. government to win his release.

“My son’s only crime is that he’s a Muslim, an American Muslim,” his father, Mohamed Meshal, said from the family’s two-story home on a cul-de-sac in Tinton Falls, N.J., where he lives with his wife, Fifi.

“Clearly the U.S. government interrogated him, and threatened him with torture according to the accounts that we’ve seen,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law who has been assisting the family.

Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday to demand Meshal’s immediate release. “Our government cannot allow an American citizen to continue to be held by the Ethiopian government in violation of international law and our own due process,” he said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the guardian of the Geneva Conventions that protect victims of war, is seeking access to the Ethiopian detainees, said a diplomat from a country whose citizens are being held. He insisted on speaking anonymously because he is working for their release.

U.S. officials, who agreed to discuss the detentions only if not quoted by name because of the information’s sensitivity, said Ethiopia had allowed access to U.S. agencies, including the CIA and FBI, but the agencies played no role in arrests, transport or deportation.

One official said it would have been irresponsible to pass up an opportunity to learn more about terrorist operations.

Kolko, the FBI spokesman, also said the detainees were never in FBI or U.S. government custody.

“While in custody of the foreign government, the FBI was granted limited access to interview certain individuals of interest,” he told AP. “We do not support or participate in any system that illegally detains foreign fighters or terror suspects, including women and children.”

Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, declined to discuss details of any such interviews. He said, however: “To fight terror, CIA acts boldly and lawfully, alone and with partners, just as the American people expect us to.”

One of the U.S. officials said the FBI has had access in Ethiopia to several dozen individuals — fewer than 100 — as part of its investigations.

1998 bombings a focal point
The official said the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds are a major focus of the agents’ work. Law enforcement officials have long believed the bombings were carried out by members of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network who were later given safe haven in Somalia.

The official said FBI agents would not be witness or party to any questioning that involved abuse.

It wasn’t clear how many people the CIA interviewed or whether the agency’s officers were working jointly with the FBI.

The CIA began an aggressive program in 2002 to interrogate suspected terrorists at an unknown number of secret locations from Southeast Asia to Europe. Prisoners were frequently picked up in one country and transferred to a prison in another, where they were held incommunicado by a cooperative intelligence service. But President Bush announced in September that all the detainees had been moved to military custody at Guantanamo Bay.

One Western diplomat, who refused to be quoted by name for fear of hurting relations with the countries involved, would not rule out that additional suspects in Ethiopia could be sent to Guantanamo.

Kenyan government spokesman Alfred Mutua insisted no laws were broken and said his government was not aware that anyone would be transferred from Somalia to Ethiopia.

Lawyers and human rights groups argue the covert transfers to Ethiopia violated international law.

“Each of these governments has played a shameful role in mistreating people fleeing a war zone,” said Georgette Gagnon, deputy Africa director of Human Rights Watch. “Kenya has secretly expelled people, the Ethiopians have caused dozens to disappear, and U.S. security agents have routinely interrogated people held incommunicado.”
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17935971/

How I know Blair faked Iran map

ukdaily
Like most senior Royal Navy officers, Commodore Nick Lambert has great reserves of professional expertise and common sense. The Coalition task force commander was aboard HMS Cornwall when 15 Royal Navy personnel serving on the frigate were seized at gunpoint by Iranian forces on March 23


The Navy states the 14 men and one woman were on a routine patrol in rigid inflatables off Iraqi shores - Iran insists they were in its waters illegally.
-read Craig Murray's Blog
A few hours after the 15 were seized, Cdre Lambert said: 'There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they were in Iraqi territorial waters. Equally, the Iranians may well claim that they were in their territorial waters. The extent and definition of territorial waters in this part of the world is very complicated.'

• Another day, another chance for Iran to heap on the humiliation
• Iran crisis is Blair's true legacy
• Family relieved by Iran footage
And his predecessor in command of the task force, Commodore Peter Lockwood of the Royal Australian Navy, said last October: 'No maritime border has been agreed upon by the countries.'

Both officers told the truth. It is the burial of this truth by No 10 spin doctors, and Tony Blair's remark that he is 'utterly certain' the incident took place within Iraqi territorial limits, that has escalated this from an incident to a crisis. Blair is being fatuous.

How can you be certain which side of a boundary you are when that boundary has never been drawn?

I am best known as the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, but from 1989 to 1992 I headed the Foreign Office's maritime section. This included responsibility for territorial sea claims and for negotiating our own maritime boundaries. The expertise of the Royal Navy was invaluable.

For eight months I also worked with Royal Naval and Defence Intelligence Service personnel in the Embargo Surveillance Centre, a secret unit operating 24 hours a day from an underground command centre in Central London to prevent Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement.

We analysed information from intelligence and other sources, and could instruct Royal Naval craft in the Gulf to board and inspect individual ships. I was responsible for getting the political clearance for operations just like the one now in question, in this exact location. So I know what I'm talking about.

There is no agreed boundary in the Northern Gulf, either between Iran and Iraq or between Iraq and Kuwait. The Iran-Iraq border has been agreed inside the Shatt al-Arab waterway, because there it is also the land border. But that agreement does not extend beyond the low tide line of the coast.

Even that very limited agreement is arguably no longer in force. Since it was reached in 1975, a war has been fought over it, and ten-year reviews - necessary because waters and sandbanks in this region move about dramatically - have never been carried out.

But what about the map the Ministry of Defence produced on Tuesday, with territorial boundaries set out by a clear red line, and the co-ordinates of the incident marked in relation to it?

I have news for you. Those boundaries are fake. They were drawn up by the MoD. They are not agreed or recognised by any international authority.

To put it at its most charitable, they are a potential boundary. It is accepted practice, where no boundary exists, to work by a rule-of-thumb idea of where a boundary, based on a median line between the two coasts, might be.

But to elevate that to a hard and fast boundary, and then base a major international incident on being a few hundred yards one side or the other, is out of order.

Negotiating a maritime boundary is horribly complicated. To set a median line you agree a series of triangulation points on both coastlines and do a geometric triangulation exercise to find a line running out from the coast.

Of course, both sides will argue about which triangulation points on the coast to use. You are allowed, for example, to draw a line across a bay entrance and use that as the coast, but there is plenty of room for the other side to argue over where that line is drawn.

That is only the start. For territorial seas you start at the low tide mark and uninhabited rocks and sandbanks count.

There is huge room for argument - ownership of a useless sandbank is not necessarily a settled thing. Then it really gets complex. What if the sandbank appears only at low tide or moves? In this area of the Gulf, sands shift endlessly.

It is, in short, impossible to say where a real, negotiated or adjudicated Iran-Iraq boundary might eventually lie. It is also why the instinct of both the Foreign Office and MoD was to play this quietly and negotiate our people back.

But the No10 spin doctors stepped in, seeing a propaganda opportunity to portray Blair as fighting evil Iranians.

Navy and Foreign Office experts were horrified at the notion of publishing that map.

In doing so we entrenched Blair's ridiculous boast that our 15 Navy personnel were definitely in Iraqi territorial seas, and claimed the right to dictate Iran's boundary.

It's not surprising Iraq backed British claims - the map is favourable to them. But it makes compromise on the captives very difficult.

Of course, the Iranians equally cannot say unilaterally that these are their territorial waters, and act as if they owned them.

In disputed waters it behoves everyone to act with caution and respect. Plainly the Iranians are not doing that.

None of this vindicates Iran's aggressive behaviour in holding the captives or the so-called confessions.

For Iran to detain the British sailors in these circumstances was provocative and bellicose.

To hold them for a few hours could have been taken as a legitimate, if over forceful way, of indicating their claim to the disputed waters in which the British personnel boarded a neutral vessel.

But Iranian behaviour in the past few days has tipped over into the plain illegal and indefensible.

However I have no doubt Blair is delighted at last to have a Middle East issue with popular support before May's elections.

Yes, Iran has a bad government that is behaving stupidly. But perhaps it is not alone. Both sides have to climb down. We have to state that no agreed border exists and that we had no intention of straying into Iranian waters.

The Iranian government should let our people go immediately. That is the way out of this mess for both sides.

Supreme Court Denies Guantánamo Appeal - New York Times

Supreme Court Denies Guantánamo Appeal - New York Times

April 3, 2007
Supreme Court Denies Guantánamo Appeal
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, April 2 — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear urgent appeals from two groups of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The 45 men sought to challenge the constitutionality of a new law stripping federal judges of the authority to hear challenges to the open-ended confinement of foreign citizens held at the American naval base in Cuba and designated as enemy combatants.

The court’s action leaves standing a ruling six weeks ago by the federal appeals court here that upheld the jurisdiction-stripping provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The justices’ refusal to hear the case at this point, before any of the detainees have availed themselves of alternative appeal procedures that their lawyers argue are unconstitutionally truncated, does not foreclose eventual consideration by the court after those appeals have run their course.

The men have all been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years, and none has been charged with a crime. They filed petitions for habeas corpus, challenging their continued confinement, before Congress ordered in the 2006 law that all such petitions must be dismissed and no new ones could be accepted for filing.

Ordinarily, the Supreme Court makes no comment when it turns down an appeal. In this instance, the court offered an unusual degree of transparency, with two separate opinions accompanying the one-sentence order denying the two petitions.

One was a dissenting opinion from three justices, Stephen G. Breyer, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who voted to hear the cases as “significant ones warranting our review,” as Justice Breyer said in an opinion that spoke for the three.

The separate opinion was a statement “respecting the denial,” signed jointly by Justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy. They explained why they voted against hearing the cases. They said the court should follow its usual practice for ordinary prison inmates and require “the exhaustion of available remedies as a precondition to accepting jurisdiction over applications for the writ of habeas corpus.”

Despite the apparent transparency, the real story was probably one that no justice acknowledged: the inability of the court’s four most liberal members, Justices Stevens, Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg, to count on Justice Kennedy’s eventual vote.

While four votes are sufficient to grant a case under the court’s rules, five are of course necessary to win it. The liberal justices, or at least their leader, Justice Stevens, may well have decided that refraining at this point was the wiser course, given the risk that the case might come out the “wrong” way, from their point of view, with an affirmation of the appeals court’s decision that would then become a hard and fast Supreme Court precedent.

Justice Stevens is the author of the court’s two decisions rejecting the Bush administration’s legal analysis of the status of the Guantánamo detainees, Rasul v. Bush in 2004 and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld last June. He almost certainly agreed on Monday with the assessment in Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion that the men bringing the new appeals “plausibly argue that the lower court’s reasoning is contrary to this court’s precedent” as expressed in the earlier opinions.

But Justice Stevens, who will turn 87 later this month, is also a strategic and canny inside player who knew that providing a fourth vote to hear the cases without assurance of Justice Kennedy’s position risked putting them on track to the wrong destination.

Furthermore, Justice Ginsburg evidently did not agree with Justices Stevens and Souter that the court should not only grant the appeals, but also should schedule argument on an expedited basis in order to decide them in June. She declined to sign the part of Justice Breyer’s opinion that called for expedited review.

That meant that even if the court did vote to hear the cases, the argument would be deferred until next fall and a decision might well be a year or more away. Now that the appeals have been denied, the detainees’ lawyers will undoubtedly explore other options for moving the cases along, perhaps even more quickly.

Justices Stevens and Kennedy said pointedly that if it turns out that “the government has unreasonably delayed proceedings” or subjects the detainees to “some other and ongoing injury,” the Supreme Court would be open to a renewed appeal.

At issue at this point are challenges to proceedings known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals that decide whether a detainee should be labeled an enemy combatant. Under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has sole jurisdiction to hear appeals from the tribunal’s determination.

The detainees’ lawyers argue that both the tribunals and the limited form of review in the appeals court are fatally flawed.

The cases were Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195, and Al Odah v. United States, No. 06-1196.

Autism a lifelong burden, study shows

Because few adults with the disorder can work, the economic costs continue
globe and mail
ach child diagnosed with autism will accrue about $3.2-million (U.S.) in medical and non-medical costs over his or her lifetime, according to a new study.

The most expensive components are lost productivity and adult care, not medical costs and behavioural therapies that so many parents crave for their children, the research shows.

"Although autism is typically thought of as a disorder of childhood, its costs can be felt well into adulthood," said Michael Ganz, an adjunct professor in the department of society, human development and health at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and the lead author.

Earlier research estimated that autism costs the U.S. economy about $35-billion annually, and the Canadian economy $3.5-billion.

The new study, published in today's edition of the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, takes the analysis further, examining how these costs are incurred throughout the lifetime of a person with autism.

The study showed that direct medical costs were high in the first five years of life, at about $35,000 annually. That is when most behavioural therapies are offered. The indirect costs to parents, in large part due to lost income, are also quite high in the childhood and adolescent years, averaging $43,000 annually.

But, as a person with autism ages, the costs of non-medical care soars, and so do productivity losses.

Because there are programs for autistic adults, these are paid out-of-pocket, with costs averaging $27,500 a year. Many people with the disorder do not work and their parents still need to provide care, factors that translate into economic losses averaging $52,000 annually, according to the research.

Susan Bryson, who holds the Jack and Joan Craig Chair in Autism Research at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said the research is important because it draws attention to adults with autism.

"The data we have tell us that only about 5 per cent of adults with autism are self-supporting," she said. Yet there is a paucity of adult programs, and this creates a life-long burden for families."

Dr. Bryson said it is not clear if investing in behavioural therapy like ABA/IBI in childhood will ultimately result in adult autistics who are more able to be independent and to work.

"But we need to ask the question: Does investment early on have significant economic benefits later?" Dr. Bryson said.

Dr. Ganz said recognizing that a child diagnosed with autism today may become an adult who is unable to work and who requires specialized adult care should awaken parents to the need for financial planning.

"Parents of children with autism should seek financial counselling to help plan the transition into adulthood," he said.

To conduct the research, Dr. Ganz looked across the lifetime of a hypothetical group of individuals born in 2000 and diagnosed with autism in 2003.

Only costs directly related to autism were included, with no medical or non-medical costs incurred by individuals with or without autism included.

Autism and related conditions are development disabilities known under the catch-all term autism spectrum disorders.

They have become increasingly common in recent years.

The soaring numbers are due to a combination of factors, including greater awareness, changes in diagnostic criteria and, perhaps, more children being born with the disorder.

The Autism Society of Canada estimates the incidence rate in this country is one in every 286 births. The condition is about four times more likely in boys than girls.

It is not clear what causes autism spectrum disorders, but there are many theories, including exposure to environmental toxins, diet, a malfunctioning immune system and paternal age.

(There are those who also believe that autism can be caused by a mercury derivative that used to be found in childhood vaccines, but that theory has repeatedly been debunked.)

Did Google airbrush Katrina history? - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

Did Google airbrush Katrina history? - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

Did Google airbrush Katrina history?
Company replaced aerial images showing damage with pre-hurricane shots
The Associated Press
Updated: 11:43 p.m. ET March 30, 2007
NEW ORLEANS - A congressional subcommittee accused Google on Friday of “airbrushing history” by replacing post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery on its popular map portal with images of the region taken before the storm’s devastation.

Citing an Associated Press report from Thursday, the House Committee on Science and Technology’s subcommittee on investigations and oversight asked Google Inc. Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt to explain why his company is using the outdated imagery.

“Google’s use of old imagery appears to be doing the victims of Hurricane Katrina a great injustice by airbrushing history,” subcommittee chairman Brad Miller, D-N.C., wrote Friday in a letter to Schmidt.

Swapping the post-Katrina images and the ruin they revealed for others showing an idyllic city dumbfounded many locals and even sparked suspicions that the company and civic leaders were conspiring to portray the area’s recovery progressing better than it is.

Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesman, said the company had received the letter but Schmidt had no immediate response.

After Katrina, Google’s satellite images were in high demand among exiles and hurricane victims anxious to see whether their homes were damaged.

Virtual trip through pristine city
Now, though, a virtual trip through New Orleans is a surreal experience of scrolling across a landscape of packed parking lots and marinas full of boats.

Reality, of course, is very different: Entire neighborhoods are now slab mosaics where houses once stood and shopping malls, churches and marinas are empty of life, many gone altogether.

John Hanke, Google’s director for maps and satellite imagery, said “a combination of factors including imagery date, resolution, and clarity” go into deciding what imagery to provide.

“The latest update from one of our information providers substantially improved the imagery detail of the New Orleans area,” Hanke said in a news release about the switch.

Kovacs said efforts are under way to use more current imagery.

It was not clear when the current images replaced views of the city taken after Katrina struck Aug. 29, 2005, flooding an estimated 80 percent of New Orleans.

Quest for answers
Miller asked Google to brief his staff by April 6 on who made the decision to replace the imagery with pre-Katrina images, and to disclose if Google was contacted by the city, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey or any other government entity about changing the imagery.

“To use older, pre-Katrina imagery when more recent images are available without some explanation as to why appears to be fundamentally dishonest,” Miller said.

Edith Holleman, staff counsel for the House subcommittee, said it would be useful to understand how Google acquires and manages its imagery because “people see Google and other Internet engines and it’s almost like the official word.”

Google does provide imagery of New Orleans and the region following Katrina through its more specialized service called Google Earth.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17880969/

WTO protesters to get $1 million - Crime & Punishment - MSNBC.com

WTO protesters to get $1 million - Crime & Punishment - MSNBC.com

WTO protesters to get $1 million
Insurer to pay about 175 arrested at peaceful demonstration in Seattle
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:45 a.m. ET April 3, 2007
SEATTLE - The city's insurance company has agreed to pay $1 million to settle claims from about 175 people who were wrongly arrested during a peaceful World Trade Organization protest in 1999.

The case went to trial in January, and a federal jury found Seattle liable for violating the protesters' constitutional rights by arresting them without probable cause. The settlement, announced Monday, avoids a damages phase to determine how much the city owed, and it resolves the last outstanding claims against the city from the protests.

"The police can respect the constitutional rights of protesters and at the same time protect the public safety," said Mike Withey of Washington, D.C.-based Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, which brought the lawsuit.

As part of the settlement, which a federal judge must approve, the city will seal the arrest records and ask any law enforcement agencies that received copies to expunge them, Withey said. Each protester will be eligible to receive $3,000 to $10,000, and some of the settlement will be used to pay legal fees.

City Attorney Tom Carr said the city believes it would have won an appeal.

"However, the city's insurance company decided to settle the case rather than to continue to fund the appellate litigation," Carr said in a news release.

The insurance company is National Union, said Carr's assistant, Ruth Bowman. The company did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Protesters were singing anthems
The trial stemmed from the mass arrest of protesters at a downtown park, where they were sitting and singing patriotic anthems. That week, 50,000 demonstrators had swarmed Seattle, overwhelming police and closing down parts of the WTO meeting.

The park was in a "no-protest" zone established by the mayor, but officers made no effort to determine whether the protesters had other legitimate reasons to be there before making the arrests, the jury decided.

In a pretrial ruling, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman ruled the city had made the arrests without probable cause. Arrest reports were not filled out properly, she noted.

The city agreed in the settlement to issue copies of Pechman's rulings in the case to police cadets and officers to help prevent unlawful mass arrests, Withey said.

Lead plaintiff Ken Hankin, a Boeing worker, said he was pleased the settlement had been reached but added that getting a few thousand dollars seemed paltry compared to the violation of his rights. He spent three days in police custody and wasn't released until the WTO meetings had ended.

"I lost my right to protest the WTO," he said. "That's something I feel very upset about."

Seattle previously paid about $800,000 in more than a dozen WTO lawsuits and claims.


© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17921582/

WP: How phony letter drove Iraq war - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com

WP: How phony letter drove Iraq war - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com

WP: How phony letter drove Iraq war
Intelligence failures surrounded inquiry on Iraq-Niger uranium claim
By Peter Eisner
The Washington Post
Updated: 7:43 a.m. ET April 3, 2007
It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. But when she came to the 16 words, she recalled, she got a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She wondered: How could the American president have mentioned a uranium sale from Africa?

Burba felt uneasy because more than three months earlier, she had turned over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome documents about an alleged uranium sale by the central African nation of Niger. And she knew now that the documents were fraudulent and the 16 words wrong.

Nonetheless, the uranium claim would become a crucial justification for the invasion of Iraq that began less than two months later. When occupying troops found no nuclear program, the 16 words and how they came to be in the speech became a focus for critics in Washington and foreign capitals to press the case that the White House manipulated facts to take the United States to war.

Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available to them at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.

In February 2002, the CIA received the verbatim text of one of the documents, filled with errors easily identifiable through a simple Internet search, the interviews show. Many low- and mid-level intelligence officials were already skeptical that Iraq was in pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The interviews also showed that France, berated by the Bush administration for opposing the Iraq war, honored a U.S. intelligence request to investigate the uranium claim. It determined that its former colony had not sold uranium to Iraq.

Burba, who had no special expertise in Africa or nuclear technology, was able to quickly unravel the fraud. Yet the claims clung to life within the Bush administration for months, eventually finding their way into the State of the Union address.

As a result of the CIA's failure to firmly discredit the document text it received in February 2002, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was called in to investigate the claim. That decision eventually led to the special counsel's investigation that exposed inner workings of the White House and ended with the criminal conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was forced to resign as chief of staff to Vice President Cheney.

"You know I feel bad about it," Burba said later, discussing her frustrations about her role in giving the dossier to the Americans. "You know the fact is that my documents, with the documents I brought to them, they justified the war."

The tip
In early October of 2002, a man mysteriously contacted Elisabetta Burba at her Milan office.

"Do you remember me?" the deep voice said, without identifying himself outright. It was Rocco Martino, an old source who had proved reliable in the past. He was once again trying to sell her information.

Martino said he had some very interesting documents to show her, and asked whether she could fly down to Rome right away.

They met at a restaurant in Rome on Oct. 7, where Martino showed Burba a folder filled with documents, most of them in French. One of the documents was purportedly sent by the president of Niger to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, confirming a deal to sell 500 tons of uranium to Iraq annually. This was the smoking gun in the package, claiming to show the formal approval of Niger's president to supply Iraq with a commodity that would in all likelihood only be used for a nuclear weapons program: Iraq had no nuclear power plants.

Though the document was in French it would later come to be known as "The Italian Letter." It was written in all capital letters, in the form of an old telex, and bore the letterhead of the Republic of Niger. The letter was dated July 27, 2000, and included an odd shield on the top, a shining sun surrounded by a horned animal head, a star and a bird. The letter was stamped Confidential and Urgent.

The letter said that "500 tons of pure uranium per year will be delivered in two phases." A seal at the bottom of the page read "The Office of the President of the Republic of Niger." Superimposed over the seal was a barely legible signature bearing the name of the president of Niger, Mamadou Tandja.

Burba listened without saying much as she took a first look at the documents. She recognized right away that the material was hot, if authentic. But confirming the origin would be difficult, she recalled thinking at the time. She didn't want to fall into a trap.

Burba and Martino made an agreement; she would take the documents, and if they checked out as authentic, then they could talk about money.


'Let's go to the Americans'
Back in her magazine's Milan newsroom, Burba told her editors she thought it would make sense to fly to Niger and check around for confirmation. The editor of the magazine, Carlo Rossella, agreed. He then suggested they simultaneously pursue another tack.

"Let's go to the Americans," Rossella said, "because they are focused on looking for weapons of mass destruction more than anyone else. Let's see if they can authenticate the documents." Rossella called the U.S. Embassy in Rome and alerted officials to expect a visit from Burba.

On Wednesday morning, Oct. 9, Burba returned to Rome and took a cab to the U.S. Embassy, which is housed at the old Palazzo Margherita.

Burba came to a security gate and walked through a magnetometer, where an Italian employee of the embassy press department came down to meet her.

After a few formalities, an Italian aide introduced her to Ian Kelly, the embassy press spokesman. Kelly and Burba walked across the embassy's walled grounds and sat down for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria.

Burba told Kelly that she had some documents about Iraq and uranium shipments and needed help in confirming their authenticity and accuracy.

Kelly interrupted her, realizing he needed help. He made a phone call summoning someone else from his staff as well as a political officer. Burba recalled a third person being invited, possibly a U.S. military attache. She didn't get their names.

"Let's go to my office," Kelly said. They walked past antiquities, a tranquil fountain, steps and pieces of marble, all set in a tree-lined patio garden.

The Italian journalist's chat with Kelly and his colleagues was brief. She handed over the papers; Kelly told her the embassy would look into the matter. But Kelly had not been briefed on what others in the embassy knew.


CIA role
One person who refused to meet with Burba was the CIA chief of station. A few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, Sismi, the Italian intelligence agency, had sent along information about the alleged sale of uranium to Iraq. The station chief asked for more information and would later consider it far-fetched.

On Oct. 15, 2001, the CIA reports officer at the embassy wrote a brief summary based on the Sismi intelligence, signed and dated it, and routed it to CIA's Operations Directorate in Langley, with copies going to the clandestine service's European and Near East divisions. The reports officer had limited its distribution because the intelligence was uncorroborated; she was aware of Sismi's questionable track record and did not believe the report merited wider dissemination.

The Operations Directorate then passed the raw intelligence to the CIA's Intelligence Directorate and to sister agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency. A more polished document, called a Senior Executive Intelligence Brief, was written at Langley three days later in which the CIA mentioned the new intelligence but added important caveats. The classified document, whose distribution was limited to senior policymakers and the congressional intelligence committees, said there was no corroboration and noted that Iraq had "no known facilities for processing or enriching the material."

Pushing the Africa claim
Almost four months later, on Feb. 5, 2002, the CIA received more information from Sismi, including the verbatim text of one of the documents. The CIA failed to recognize that it was riddled with errors, including misspellings and the wrong names for key officials. But it was a separate DIA report about the claims that would lead Cheney to demand further investigation. In response, the CIA dispatched Wilson to Niger.

Martino's approach to Burba eight months later with the Italian letter coincided with accelerating U.S. preparations for war. On Oct. 7, 2002, the same day Martino gave Burba the dossier, President Bush launched a new hard-line PR campaign on Iraq. In a speech in Cincinnati, he declared that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a "grave threat" to U.S. national security.

"It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons," the president warned.

CIA Director George J. Tenet had vetted the text of Bush's speech and was able to persuade the White House to drop one questionable claim: that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. The information was too fishy, Tenet explained to the National Security Council and Bush's speechwriters.

Bush dropped the shopping-for-uranium claim, but ratcheted up the bomb threat. He said in Cincinnati that if Hussein obtained bomb-grade uranium the size of a softball, he would have a nuclear bomb within a year. This particular doomsday scenario had first been unveiled several weeks earlier, on Aug. 26, by Cheney. In a speech in Nashville to the 103rd national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he declared with no equivocation that Hussein had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons."

On Oct. 16, Burba sat on a plane on her way to Niger, while in Washington, copies of the Italian letter and the accompanying dossier were placed on the table at an interagency nuclear proliferation meeting hosted by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

At this point, State Department analysts had determined the documents were phony, and had produced by far the most accurate assessment of Iraq's weapons program of the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community. But the department's small intelligence unit operated in a bubble. Few administration officials -- not even Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- paid much attention to its analytical product, much of which clashed with the White House's assumptions.

The State Department bureau, nevertheless, shared the bogus documents with those intelligence officials attending the meeting, including representatives of the Energy Department, National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency. Four CIA officials attended, but only one, a clandestine service officer, bothered to take a copy of the Italian letter.

He returned to his office, filed the material in a safe and forgot about it.

The Niger uranium matter was not uppermost in the minds of the CIA analysts. Some of them had to deal with the issue in any case, largely because Cheney, his aide Libby and some aides at the National Security Council had repeatedly demanded more information and more analysis.


A fraud unravels
Burba arrived in Niamey, Niger's capital, on Oct. 17 and began tracking down leads on the Italian letter. Burba's investigation followed a series of similar inquiries by Wilson, the former ambassador, who investigated on behalf of the CIA eight months earlier. It became clear that Niger was not capable of secretly shipping yellowcake uranium to Iraq or anywhere else.

Burba found that a French company controlled the uranium trade, and any shipment of uranium would have been noticed. If a uranium sale had taken place, the logistics would have been daunting. "They would have needed hundreds of trucks," she said -- a large percentage of all the trucks in Niger. It would have been impossible to conceal.

Burba returned to Milan and reported her findings to her bosses in detail. She didn't believe the evidence provided by Martino; it was impossible. Her editors agreed. There was no story.

Five months later, on March 7, 2003, as preparations for the Iraq invasion were in their final stages, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the U.N. Security Council that the report that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Niger was based on forged documents. The agency had received the document from the United States a few weeks earlier.

Not long after the invasion, other news media in Italy, elsewhere in Europe and then in the United States reported that the source of the information about a Niger yellowcake uranium deal had been a batch of bogus letters and other documents passed along several months earlier to an unnamed Italian reporter, who in turn handed the information over to the United States.

Although Burba knew that the Bush administration had also received information about the forged documents from Italian intelligence, she wished she could have acted earlier to reveal the fraud.

It remains unclear who fabricated the documents. Intelligence officials say most likely it was rogue elements in Sismi who wanted to make money selling them.

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URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17902403/