New U.S. weapon: Hand-held lie detector

U.S. troops in Afghanistan first to get new device; ‘red’ means you're lying

By Bill Dedman

Investigative reporter

updated 6:00 a.m. ET April 9, 2008

FORT JACKSON, S.C. - The Pentagon will issue hand-held lie detectors this month to U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan, pushing to the battlefront a century-old debate over the accuracy of the polygraph.

The Defense Department says the portable device isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well. “We're not promising perfection — we've been very careful in that,” said Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the midwife for the new device. “What we are promising is that, if it's properly used, it will improve over what they are currently doing.”

But the lead author of a national study of the polygraph says that American military men and women will be put at risk by an untested technology. "I don't understand how anybody could think that this is ready for deployment," said statistics professor Stephen E. Fienberg, who headed a 2003 study by the National Academy of Sciences that found insufficient scientific evidence to support using polygraphs for national security. "Sending these instruments into the field in Iraq and Afghanistan without serious scientific assessment, and for use by untrained personnel, is a mockery of what we advocated in our report."

The new device, known by the acronym PCASS, for Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, uses a commercial TDS Ranger hand-held personal digital assistant with three wires connected to sensors attached to the hand. An interpreter will ask a series of 20 or so questions in Persian, Arabic or Pashto: "Do you intend to answer my questions truthfully?" "Are the lights on in this room" "Are you a member of the Taliban?" The operator will punch in each answer and, after a delay of a minute or so for processing, the screen will display the results: "Green," if it thinks the person has told the truth, "Red" for deception, and "Yellow" if it can't decide.

The PCASS cannot be used on U.S. personnel, according to a memo authorizing its use, signed in October by the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.

The Army has bought 94 of the $7,500 PCASS machines, which are sold by Lafayette Instrument Co. of Lafayette, Ind. The algorithm, or computer program that makes the decisions, was written by the Advanced Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Besides the Army, other branches of the U.S. military have seen the device and may order their own. The total cost of the project so far is about $2.5 million.

Congress has not held any hearings on the PCASS device. Myron Young, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity agency, which sponsored development of PCASS, said it informed congressional committees in a memo in November that the device had been approved for use. But five months later, no hearing has been scheduled. Congress has already scaled back its oversight of the polygraph. Five years ago it eliminated a requirement that the Defense Department produce an annual report on polygraph use.

Less accurate than a polygraph
Polygraphs have sparked a fierce debate for at least a century. While supporters claim the devices are reliable, the National Academy of Sciences allows only that they're "well above chance, though well below perfection." Polygraphs are not allowed as evidence in most U.S. courts, but they're routinely used in police investigations, and the Defense Department relies heavily on them for security screening.

Both the proponents and critics agree on one thing: This new device is likely to be less accurate than a polygraph, because it gathers less physiological information.

Like a polygraph, the PCASS uses two electrodes to attempt to measure stress through changes in electrical conductivity of the skin. It also gauges cardiovascular activity, though with a pulse oximeter clipped to a fingertip, rather than a polygraph's arm cuff, which has the advantage of measuring both pulse rate and blood pressure. Unlike the polygraph, the PCASS does not measure changes in the rate of breathing, and it has no way to detect countermeasures, or efforts to fool the machine, such as by making unusual movements.

The training is different, too. While polygraph examiners for the Defense Department must have four-year college degrees and experience in law enforcement, the PCASS operators are mostly mid-level enlisted personnel and warrant officers, some as young as 20 years old. While polygraph examiners take a 13-week course and a six-month internship, PCASS operators undergo only one week of training, though most have military training as interrogators. The Defense Department says PCASS is simple to operate, because judgment of truthfulness is left to the computer.

Discarding 'inconclusives'
The debate over the device’s usefulness boils down to a disagreement over its accuracy.

The Pentagon, in a PowerPoint presentation released to msnbc.com through a Freedom of Information Act request, says the PCASS is 82 to 90 percent accurate. Those are the only accuracy numbers that were sent up the chain of command at the Pentagon before the device was approved.

But Pentagon studies obtained by msnbc.com show a more complicated picture: In calculating its accuracy, the scientists conducting the tests discarded the yellow screens, or inconclusive readings.

That practice was criticized in the 2003 National Academy study, which said the "inconclusives" have to be included to measure accuracy. If you take into account the yellow screens, the PCASS accuracy rate in the three Pentagon-funded tests drops to the level of 63 to 79 percent.

Even if you accept the lower accuracy rates, the Pentagon officials say, the device is still better than relying on human intuition.

"Let's take a worst-case scenario here, and let's say PCASS really is 60 percent accurate," said Krapohl, who heads the project for the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment at Fort Jackson, S.C. "So let's get rid of the PCASS because it makes errors, and go back to the approach we're currently using, which has less accuracy? As you can see, that's really quite untenable if we're interested in saving American lives and serving the interests of our commanders overseas.”

Msnbc.com asked Fienberg, a professor of statistics and social sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, to review the unclassified Pentagon studies of the PCASS. He said he was not impressed.

"I, like everyone else I know, want the troops in Iraq, in Afghanistan, elsewhere in the world, to be protected," Fienberg said. "I want terrorists to be detected. I do not want to be living in a threatened world, and I want to give my government the best possible advice.

"They need devices that work. And if they rely on things that really don't work, and act as if they do, we will have a greater disaster on our hands than we already do in the field in Iraq. We simply do not know what a device like this hand-held device will produce in that kind of setting, except for the fact that there's scant evidence that it will produce anything of value."

Only 'a triage device'
Pentagon officials say that the new device will not be used to make final decisions, that the rules forbid it. They say it is intended only to pare down a large group of people to a smaller group that will receive further scrutiny through traditional means, such as interviews or a full polygraph exam.

"The PCASS is envisioned more or less like a triage device," Krapohl said. "That is, it's not used as a standalone technology to make final decisions regarding a person's truthfulness. ... There are locals, there are Iraqis and third-country nationals who apply for access to U.S. military bases to provide support functions. And as you might well imagine, there's not really a good way to do a background investigation of these individuals. And so decisions whether to allow them to come on post and to take these jobs are being based on some pretty imprecise methods, primarily interviews and whatever record checks are available. ... So the idea of adding the PCASS is to incrementally improve the decisions that are made so that we protect our forces."

The term "triage" normally means deciding who gets attention first. But if PCASS is used to pare down a large group to a smaller one, wouldn't a person who's red-lighted be denied access to the military post? Krapohl acknowledges that possibility, saying it's not dissimilar from the ways colleges choose which students to admit.

"Let's say that they have 10 positions that are open, and they have 100 people who apply, which is very realistic,” Krapohl said. “Whatever tools you use to make that assessment, 90 people are not going to get that job anyway. So your role as a decision-maker is to help improve your decision process by making sure that those 10 are flawless, that those individuals have nothing in their background to raise your attention. Therefore a commander might be inclined if he tests or she tests 100 people, and you get 50 green lights, ... to restrict the decisions to just those 50."

No harm in that, Krapohl said. "That's how we make decisions for hiring people everywhere, or making decisions on college applications or so forth. Most people are not going to get in. How do you improve the likelihood that those who do get in are going to be good candidates?”

One floor down from Krapohl's office, the lead instructor for the PCASS project, team chief James Waller, said he's confident that the science behind the device is solid.

"Spent 20 years in the military. If I didn't think it would work, I wouldn't put it in the hands of a soldier, 'cause I was a soldier,” Waller said. “So it's not perfect, but they don't have a device at all over there to do this kind of work."

Testing far from a battlefield
Fueling the debate over the PCASS is the fact that the tests before deployment were all conducted on Americans, in English, far from a battlefield. The Pentagon tested the device on Army recruits at Fort Jackson, S.C., and on civilians in Columbus, Ohio, who answered classified ads. In all, only 226 people were tested in the scientific experiments before the machine was approved for use by soldiers in the field.

Although the device was also tried in the field last year in Iraq and Qatar on allied forces, Iraqi police officers, translators and prison guards, the Defense Department says these were only "field vetting," not scientific tests. The goal was to make sure the device was easy to use and would hold up to battlefront conditions.

"It's virtually impossible to do a validity study in a war zone," Krapohl said.

The desire for a portable lie detector at the war front is described in a memo from Camp Cropper, a U.S. Army detention camp on the outskirts of Baghdad. The unclassified memo from April of last year was written by David Thompson, the team leader of the counterintelligence human intelligence support team at Cropper. In screening Iraqis to work as corrections officers and interpreters, Thompson said, the HUMINT collectors (or human intelligence interrogators) are trying to discover who might be involved in militia or insurgent activities, or who might break the rules by passing information from prisoners to people outside the base.

To make these decisions, Thompson wrote, the interrogators often have little more than gut instinct to go on.

"The ability of the collector to filter truth from fiction is highly dependent on the individual collectors training and real world experience," Thompson wrote. "As the demand for HUMINT personnel has risen, the standards we use to select applicants to the HUMINT field has dropped, yielding a higher percentage of young and inexperienced personnel."

So what's needed, Thompson explains, is a machine.

"While not a perfect technological solution that would completely remove the 'human factor,' it appears to be an invaluable tool," Thompson writes. "PCASS is not a system that will remove the need for experienced collectors but rather will enhance their capabilities. ... If the PCASS system gives a 'red' reading to one of these questions, the collector can focus his efforts on exploitation, and use the traditional skills of a collector to uncover deception or information."

'What's new here?'
Lie detectors sometimes work because people believe they work, deterring the wrong people from applying for jobs in the first place, or prompting admissions of guilt during interrogations. Thompson explains that may be the most important use of PCASS. "Once this capability is introduced and word spreads of its use, militia or insurgent related individuals will be less likely to attempt to gain admittance" as correctional officers.

Fienberg, the leader of the National Academy of Sciences study, said this memo demonstrates one of his concerns, because the interrogator shifts all of his attention to those who got a red light. The professor said the danger to soldiers doesn't come from the false positive, the person who fails the lie detector test with a red light despite being truthful. Those people just get further scrutiny, or barred from base. The danger, he said, lies in the false negative, the liar who tests "green" and escapes further scrutiny.

"They've been testing polygraph-like devices for a long long time, and this one doesn't look like it works as well as other ones that were discredited," Fienberg said. "I believe we need a different way to think about interrogation and information gathering, instead of using the polygraph as a magic bullet."

The designers of the PCASS said they attempted to make it lean toward detecting deceptive people, because of the disproportionate consequences of green-lighting a liar in a war zone. The Johns Hopkins researchers said they tweaked the algorithm so it takes only a little evidence of deception to turn the lights red. They also tried to minimize the yellow lights, at the Pentagon's request.

But they acknowledged that this was no easy task. They use the word "non-trivial," which in scientific lexicon means a problem is difficult, even unsolvable.

"Determining these decision rules," the researchers wrote, "is both non-trivial and subjective."

Fienberg, the professor of statistics, said the Pentagon's pre-deployment studies have several weaknesses: They're conducted and paid for by the same people promoting the device. They're small studies, involving few people. The mock crime scenarios don't match the stresses of a war. And no allowance was made for differences in language and culture. Finally, they assume that about half the population is telling the truth, and half are lying; in the real world, where the number of liars may be very small, the number of false positives (truthtellers who get a red light) can overwhelm the resources of investigators.

"Ask the question, what's new here?" Fienberg said of the PCASS. "They went to a group that developed a computer-based algorithm that produces green, yellow and red lights. That's the new technology. It's still based on the same noisy psycho-physiological channels for detecting deception. So we have no new way to detect deception. What we've got is a streamlined version of the polygraph. Therefore you would expect this not to be as accurate as the polygraph.

"Almost everything that has gone on since our report was published is obfuscation," Fienberg said, "including the use of the euphemism 'credibility assessment' to describe the DoD activities."

Krapohl and the Defense Department say they hope to develop better tools for detecting deception. Meanwhile, by being portable and better than human intuition, PCASS fills a niche in a war zone.

"That's the best that we can do right now," Krapohl said. "But if you come back next year or in five years, I might have a different answer for you."

The PCASS is being developed only for military use. Krapohl said he doesn't foresee it being sold at the pharmacy for use by parents of teenagers, or by the local police.

"I don't want to see a state trooper with one in the back seat asking you what you have in the trunk."

© 2008 MSNBC Interactive

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23926278/

Conservative bias alleged in textbook

Publisher now says it will review the book, as will College Board

The Associated Press

updated 7:04 p.m. ET April 8, 2008

WASHINGTON - Talk about a civics lesson: A high-school senior has raised questions about political bias in a popular textbook on U.S. government, and legal scholars and top scientists say the teen's criticism is well-founded.

They say "American Government" by conservatives James Wilson and John Dilulio presents a skewed view of topics from global warming to separation of church and state. The publisher now says it will review the book, as will the College Board, which oversees college-level Advanced Placement courses used in high schools.

Matthew LaClair of Kearny, N.J., recently brought his concerns to the attention of the Center for Inquiry, an Amherst, N.Y., think tank that promotes science and has issued a scathing report about the textbook.

"I just realized from my own knowledge that some of this stuff in the book is just plain wrong," said LaClair, who is using the book as part of an AP government class at Kearny High School.

Textbook is widely used
The textbook is designed for a college audience, but also is widely used in AP American government courses, said Richard Blake, a spokesman for the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Co. Blake said the company "will be working with the authors to evaluate in detail the criticisms of the Center for Inquiry." Blake said some disputed passages already have been excised from the newest edition of the book.

Both authors are considered conservative. Dilulio, a University of Pennsylvania professor, formerly worked for the Bush administration as director of faith-based initiatives. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. Neither responded immediately to calls seeking comment.

LaClair said he was particularly upset about the book's treatment of global warming. James Hansen, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, recently heard about LaClair's concerns and has lent him some support.

Hansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book's discussion on global warming contained "a large number of clearly erroneous statements" that give students "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain."

The edition of the textbook published in 2005, which is in high school classrooms now, states that "science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all."

A newer edition published late last year was changed to say, "Science doesn't know how bad the greenhouse effect is."

Controversy over climate change
The authors kept a phrase stating that global warming is "enmeshed in scientific uncertainty."

While there are still some scientists who downplay global warming and the role of burning fossil fuels, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and peer-reviewed scientific research say human activity is causing climate change. Last year an international collection of hundreds of scientists and government officials unanimously approved wording that said the scientific community had "very high confidence," meaning more than 90 percent likelihood, that global warming is caused by humans.

LaClair also was concerned about the textbook's treatment of U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding prayer in school. The book shows a picture of kids praying in front of a Virginia high school and states, "The Supreme Court will not let this happen inside a public school." Blake said the photo was cut out of the most recent edition.

The textbook goes on to state that the court has ruled as "unconstitutional every effort to have any form of prayer in public schools, even if it is nonsectarian, voluntary or limited to reading a passage of the Bible."

Those examples are not correct, says Charles Haynes, a religious liberties expert at the First Amendment Center in Washington.

"Students can pray inside a public school in many different ways," Haynes said, adding they can pray alone or in groups before lunch or in religious clubs, for example.

Haynes said students can't disrupt the school or interfere with the rights of others. The court has said the prayer can't be state-sponsored, so a teacher can't lead a prayer and a school can't require it, Haynes said.

Another part of the book that the report criticizes deals with a Supreme Court decision overturning a Texas law banning sexual contact between people of the same sex.

The authors wrote that the Supreme Court decision had a "benefit" and a "cost." The benefit, it said, was to strike down a rarely enforced law that could probably not be passed today, while the cost was to "create the possibility that the court, and not Congress or state legislatures, might decide whether same-sex marriages were legal."

Derek Araujo, the report's author, said that's a matter of opinion and that gay-rights activists, for example, see it differently. "The major problem with this is they describe the costs and benefits of the system in a very political way," he said.

'Trying to lead the reader'
LaClair added that he perceived a bias in the book too.

"All the statements for the most part were trying to lead the reader in one direction and not giving a fair account of everything," he said.

It's not the first time LaClair has raised alarm bells over teaching at his school. A few years ago, he tape recorded a teacher making religious remarks to his students. Many people at the school were upset with LaClair for raising the issue.

"I'm not looking to cause a huge controversy, but I want the students to be taught correct information," LaClair said.

His mother, Debra, says she thinks her son is giving his peers another kind of civics lesson.

"When he sees something that is incorrect, he wants to fix it," she said. "That's him. That's what he does."

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24018762/

Gorbachev Worries About Missile Plan

29/11/2007 | Moscow News № 47 2007

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said Wednesday that he viewed a U.S. plan to deploy a missile defense shield in Central Europe as targeting Russia, not Iran.

"(On Tuesday) Milos Zeman, the former Czech prime minister, said, ‘What kind of Iran threat do you see? This is a system that is being created against Russia,'" Gorbachev said. "I don't think Zeman is alone in seeing this. We see this as well as he sees it."

The United States wants to place a radar station in the Czech Republic and intercepter missiles in Poland, saying the components would defend European allies against a possible Iranian strike.

Gorbachev, 76, whose policies of glasnost and perestroika - openness and restructuring - helped end communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites, criticized the high level of military spending by the United States.

"Does America intend to fight the rest of the world, does America need to build a new empire? They will not succeed," Gorbachev said at the close of a meeting of the World Political Forum, a group he founded in 2003 that includes many former high-ranking politicians.

Gorbachev, who won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, said negotiations with Iran needed to continue with the involvement of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, to ensure Iran did not produce nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev said he hoped the United States would not attack Iran during the remainder of the term of U.S. President George W. Bush.

"There still one year that President Bush has on his hands. Let's hope that he will not take the risk... of military action against Iran," Gorbachev said, adding that such an attack "at the very least" could provoke increased terrorist attacks, an energy crisis and "even result in a big war."

Asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin, Gorbachev said that, while he initially had doubts about Putin being able to lead Russia, he now supported him.

"Putin is a very capable person, a wise person, a man of strong character, of few words but with good management skills," Gorbachev said. "Now he is more than just a manager, he has become a credible political leader."

Gorbachev added that he supported the Russian president because Putin's policies were consistent with his own social-democratic positions,

"Putin is pursuing policies that benefit the majority of the Russian people," Gorbachev said.

IMF: Mortgage Crisis May Cost $945 Billion

Veronica Smith
AFP
April 8, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The International Monetary Fund said Tuesday the worldwide losses stemming from the US subprime mortgage crisis could hit 945 billion dollars as the impact spreads in the global economy.

The IMF, in a particularly stark biannual report, said that falling US housing prices and rising delinquencies on the residential mortgage market could lead to losses of 565 billion dollars.

Combined with other categories of loans originated and securities issued in the United States related to commercial real estate, the consumer credit market, and corporations “increases aggregate potential losses to about 945 billion dollars,” it said.

“The crisis is spreading beyond the US subprime market — namely to the prime residential and commercial real estate markets, consumer credit, and the low- to high grade corporate credit markets,” the IMF said in releasing its Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR).

Read entire article

FBI Has Spy Program Tracking IM, Emails, and Cell Phones

John Byrne
Raw Story
April 8, 2008

FBI also spies on home soil for military, documents show; Much information acquired without court order

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been routinely monitoring the e-mails, instant messages and cell phone calls of suspects across the United States — and has done so, in many cases, without the approval of a court.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and given to the Washington Post — which stuck the story on page three — show that the FBI’s massive dragnet, connected to the backends of telecommunications carriers, "allows authorized FBI agents and analysts, with point-and-click ease, to receive e-mails, instant messages, cellphone calls and other communications that tell them not only what a suspect is saying, but where he is and where he has been, depending on the wording of a court order or a government directive," the Post says.

But agents don’t need a court order to track to track the senders and recipients names, or how long calls or email exchanges lasted. These can be obtained simply by showing it’s "relevant" to a probe.

RAW STORY has placed a request to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the new documents, and will post them upon receipt.

Some transactional data is obtained using National Security Letters. The Justice Department says use of these letters has risen from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005, according to the Post.

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union released letters showing that the Pentagon is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance.

Documents show the FBI has obtained the private records of Americans’ Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, for the military, according to more than 1,000 Pentagon documents reviewed by the ACLU — also using National Security Letters, without a court order.

The new revelations show definitively that telecommunications companies can transfer "with the click of a mouse, instantly transfer key data along a computer circuit to an FBI technology office in Quantico" upon request.

A telecom whistleblower, in an affidavit, has said he help maintain a high-speed DS-3 digital line referred to in house as the "Quantico circuit," which allowed an outside organization "unfettered" access to the the carrier’s wireless network.

The network he’s speaking of? Verizon.

Verizon denies the allegations vaguely, saying "no government agency has open access to the company’s networks through electronic circuits."

The Justice Department downplayed the new documents.

A spokesman told the Post that the US is asking only for "information at the beginning and end of a communication, and for information "reasonably available" by the network.

The FBI’s budget for says the collection system increased from $30 million in 2007 to $40 million in 2008, the paper said.

Human-to-Human Transmission of Bird Flu Confirmed in China

By Anna Boyd
13:29, April 8th 2008
EFLUX MEDIA

Chinese health officials confirmed the first case of human-to-human transmission of bird flu.

According to Beijing’s Chinese Center for Disease Control, a 24-year-old man spread the disease to his 52-year-old father in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu. The health agency conducted field and laboratory tests on both men, as well as 91 people who had had close contact with them.

The report concluded that the 24-year-old son was exposed to H5N1 virus while visiting a poultry market six days before he fell ill. His father, who survived, had had substantial contact with him while caring for him in the hospital. The father was not exposed to birds or other sick individuals.

The report found that the two men were infected with almost genetically identical strains of the H5N1 virus. It also found that 91 people who had come into close contact with the men had not been infected with the virus.

“Limited, non-sustained person to person transmission of H5N1 virus probably occurred in this family cluster,” wrote researchers at Beijing’s Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the medical journal The Lancet.

“There is no indication from this data that we are any nearer to a pandemic,” said Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading, according to the Associated Press.

A genetic analysis of the Chinese case found no evidence to suggest the H5N1 virus had gained the ability to transmit itself from human to human. However, the report raises concern amid health experts who have long said that the H5N1 could mutate into a form that is more easily spread. So far, that has not happened. If the H5N1 bird flu virus does manage to mutate, a pandemic could take place, killing millions of people worldwide, experts fear.

“Whatever the underlying determinants, if we continue to experience widespread, uncontrolled outbreaks of H5N1 in poultry, the appearance of strains well adapted to human beings might just be matter of time,” Dr. Jeremy Farrar of Vietnam’s Hospital for Tropical Diseases said in The Lancet.

According to the World Health Organization, at least 238 people worldwide have died from bird flu since 2003. Indonesia alone has 107 deaths from the bird flu.

Pending home sales index off 1.9% in February: NAR

By Ruth Mantell, MarketWatch

Last update: 10:41 a.m. EDT April 8, 2008

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- In a sign that the U.S. housing market may weaken further, an index of sales contracts on previously owned homes fell 1.9% in February from the prior month, the National Association of Realtors reported Tuesday.

The index, considered a leading indicator of existing home sales, was down 21.4% from the February 2007 level.

"The slip in pending home sales implies we're not out of the woods yet, though an era of successive deep sales declines appears to be over," said Lawrence Yun, NAR's chief economist, in a statement.

January's level was revised slightly higher.

By region, February's pending home sales index fell 9.8% in the West, while the South registered a 5.5% drop and the Midwest experienced a 3.7% decline. In the Northeast, the index rose 3.2%.

Mike Larson, a real-estate analyst at Weiss Research, wrote that there appears to be some signs of bottom fishing in the market emerging.

"But we'll have to see if these pending transactions can actually close," Larson wrote. "My concern is that stingier lending standards are leading to more deals falling apart."

The dip in the national index isn't large enough to signal "a further downward lurch," wrote said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics.

"At this level, pending sales are consistent with broadly stable existing home sales," Shepherdson wrote. "We still think the next move in the index will be a further decline, as it becomes clear that the accelerating drop in prices means bargain-hunting is seriously premature."

NAR expects the aggregate existing-home price to "ease" by 1.4% this year, to a median of $215,800.

"Exceptionally weak home sales related to jumbo loans' problems will depress home prices in the first half of the year, but steady liquidity improvements in the conforming jumbo-loan market will help prices recover in the second half," Yun said.

The trade group also sees existing-home sales rising to an annual pace of 5.9 million in the fourth quarter from 4.9 million in the first quarter. Existing-home sales this year are forecast at 5.39 million.

Russia demands permanent access to shield sites

By Oleg Shchedrov and Christian Lowe

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian concerns over Washington's plan for a missile shield in Europe will only be eased if Russian officers have permanent access to the shield facilities, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.

Russia says the planned shield is a threat to its own security and the row over the issue has helped to drive diplomatic relations with the United States to their lowest point since the Cold War.

Moscow has, however, agreed to consider a set of confidence-building measures proposed by Washington to allay Moscow's concerns.

"In all these many proposals we are interested only in two things: the permanent presence of our officers and reliable technological means of monitoring (activity at the sites)," Lavrov said in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio station.

"For us it is important that we should see second-by-second where that radar is looking, and what is happening at the interceptor (missile) base in the Czech Republic."

STICKING POINT

He said this demand was a sticking point in negotiations with Washington over the shield.

"In the proposals which we have received (from U.S. negotiators) ... there is no mention of a permanent presence, it says that officers can be posted to the Russian embassies in Poland and the Czech Republic and work at these sites on the basis of reciprocity," Lavrov said.

He said without permanent access to the sites, "this whole scheme of providing these measures for improving confidence is rendered worthless."

The United States plans to deploy a radar in Poland and interceptor missiles in the Czech Republic.

Washington says the missile shield in Europe is needed to protect from missile strikes by what it calls "rogue states," specifically Iran.

Moscow says it believes the radar will be used to monitor its territory and has called the U.S. plan a threat to the fragile balance of forces in Europe.

An informal summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush on Sunday failed to bridge the main differences on the shield.

But Putin said after the meeting he felt Washington had heard Moscow's concerns and expressed hope that adequate confidence-building measures would help allay them.

Iran Expands Uranium Enrichment Program, Begins Installing 6,000 New Centrifuges

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran has begun installing 6,000 new centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, state television quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying Tuesday.

The U.S. immediately criticized the announcement as an example of Iran's continued defiance of international demands that it suspend uranium enrichment, which can produce fuel for a nuclear reactor or fissile material for a weapon.

"Today's announcement reflects the Iranian leadership's continuing violation of international obligations and refusal to address international concerns," said Gregory Schulte, the U.S. representative to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran already has about 3,000 centrifuges operating at its underground nuclear facility in Natanz, and the U.N. has passed three sets of sanctions against Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. Tehran insists its nuclear program is focused on the peaceful production of energy, not the development of weapons as claimed by the U.S. and many of its allies.

"Iran has not only failed to suspend enrichment, but has chosen to ignore the will of the international community by announcing the installation of new centrifuges," said a spokesman for Britain's Foreign Office on condition of anonymity in line with policy.

"This is despite the fact that Iran's enrichment program has no apparent civilian purpose, and shows that Iran is making no effort to restore international confidence in its intentions," he said.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Iran's uranium enrichment effort is "dangerous" and continued sanctions may be necessary against Tehran.

Ahmadinejad made Tuesday's announcement as he toured the Natanz facility in central Iran.

"The president announced the start of the phase of installing 6,000 new centrifuges in Natanz," state television reported.

State television also quoted Ahmadinejad as saying that "we have reached new achievements" in Natanz that he would announce later Tuesday.

The president's trip was scheduled to coincide with Iran's National Day of Nuclear Technology, marking the second anniversary of Iran's first enrichment of uranium.

Ahmadinejad is widely expected to confirm for the first time Tuesday that Iran has installed hundreds of more sophisticated centrifuges that can enrich uranium faster.

The workhorse of Iran's enrichment program is the P-1 centrifuge, which is run in cascades of 164 machines. But Iranian officials confirmed in February that they had started using the IR-2 centrifuge that can churn out enriched uranium at more than double the rate.

Diplomats in Vienna told The Associated Press on Thursday that Iran has assembled hundreds of advanced centrifuges at Natanz.

One diplomat said more than 300 of the centrifuges have been linked up in two separate units in Iran's underground enrichment plant and a third was being assembled. He said the machines apparently are more advanced than the thousands already running underground.

But a senior diplomat said that while the new work appeared to include advanced centrifuges, they were not IR-2s.

Both diplomats are linked to the IAEA and asked for anonymity because their information was confidential.

A total of 3,000 centrifuges is the commonly accepted figure for a nuclear enrichment program that is past the experimental stage and can be used as a platform for a full industrial-scale program that could churn out enough enriched material for dozens of nuclear weapons.

Iran says it plans to move toward large-scale uranium enrichment that ultimately will involve 54,000 centrifuges.

----

Gov't says gas prices could hit $4

By JOHN WILEN
AP Business Writer
Apr 8, 11:15 AM EDT

NEW YORK (AP) -- Retail gas prices could climb as high as $4 a gallon this summer, but prices at such lofty levels will make many Americans think twice about hitting the road this summer, the Energy Department said Tuesday.

High prices and a weak economy are expected to cut demand for gasoline by about 0.4 percent during the peak summer driving season, the department's Energy Information Administration said in a monthly report on petroleum supplies and demand. Overall consumption of petroleum products will drop by 90,000 barrels a day this year. Previously, the EIA had projected petroleum consumption would rise by 40,000 barrels a day.

Average monthly gas prices will peak around $3.60 a gallon in June, the EIA said. However, prices could rise much higher than that at times.

"It is important to note ... that even if the national average monthly gasoline price peaks around $3.60 per gallon this summer, it is possible that prices at some point will cross the $4 per gallon threshold," the EIA said.

The government had previously estimated that average monthly prices would peak near $3.50 a gallon. Many analysts predict prices will peak close to $4 a gallon.

On Tuesday, gas prices slipped slightly to a national average of $3.331 a gallon from Monday's record of $3.339, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Prices are 55 cents higher than a year ago.

Diesel prices, which are already averaging more than $4 a gallon nationwide, will average $3.62 a gallon this year, up 74 cents from 2007, the EIA said. Diesel fuel is used to transport the vast majority of the world's food, consumer and industrial products. High diesel prices are one of the reasons food prices are soaring.

Crude oil prices are the biggest reason gas and diesel prices are rising, the EIA said. Oil is now expected to average $101 a barrel this year, up from the EIA's previous projection of $94. Next year, the EIA expects oil to average $92.50 a barrel, up from a previous projection of $86.

On Tuesday, light, sweet crude for May delivery fell 13 cents to $108.96 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. But prices fluctuated as investors kept an eye on the dollar and on Iran, which announced plans to expand its uranium enrichment program. Prices rose to a trading record of $111.80 a barrel last month.

While high prices are damping demand in the U.S., petroleum consumption remains strong in China, India, Russia and the Middle East, the EIA said.

"The combination of rising world oil consumption and low surplus production capacity is putting upward pressure on oil prices," the EIA report said. "The flow of investment money into commodities has contributed to crude oil price volatility."

Indeed, the EIA acknowledged "significant uncertainty" in its oil price projections, noting that unexpected supply disruptions due to conflict in oil-producing nations, unusual weather or refinery outages could send prices spiraling sharply higher.

"Prices can fall as rapidly under a different set of circumstances, such as easing of geopolitical tensions or further weakening of U.S. and world economic growth," the EIA's report said.

The EIA report underscored the difficulties refiners are facing, despite high gas prices. Refiners have to buy the crude they process into fuel. But falling demand for gasoline prevents refiners from raising gas prices enough to keep up with the soaring price of crude.

"These projections indicate a narrowing of the difference between the gasoline retail price and the average cost of crude oil," EIA said.

The EIA also projected that OPEC oil production will average 32.3 million barrels a day this year, up about 100,000 barrels a day from previous forecasts.

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Absolut vodka pulls ad showing California in Mexico

Mon Apr 7, 9:36 PM ET

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The distillers of Sweden's Absolut vodka have withdrawn an advertisement run in Mexico that angered many U.S. citizens by idealizing an early 19th century map showing chunks of the United States as Mexican.

The billboard ad has the slogan "In an Absolut World" slapped over a pre-1848 map showing California, Arizona and other U.S. states as Mexican territory. Those states were carved out of what had been Mexican lands until that year.

Although it was not shown in the United States, U.S. media outlets picked up on the ad, and after a barrage of complaints, Absolut's maker said on Sunday the ad campaign would cease.

Defending the campaign last week, Absolut maker Vin & Spirit said the ad was created "with a Mexican sensibility" and was not meant for the U.S. market.

"In no way was this meant to offend or disparage, nor does it advocate an altering of borders, nor does it lend support to any anti-American sentiment, nor does it reflect immigration issues," a spokeswoman wrote on Absolut's Web site.

"Instead, it hearkens to a time which the population of Mexico may feel was more ideal," she wrote.

Absolut's blog cite has received more than a thousand comments since the ad campaign was launched a few weeks ago, with many calling for boycotts of the Swedish company.

"I have poured the remainder of my Absolut bottles down the sink," one blogger wrote.

A war between Mexico and the United States from 1846 to 1848 started with Mexico's refusal to recognize the U.S. annexation of Texas and ended with the occupation of Mexico City by U.S. troops.

At the end, Mexico ceded nearly half of its territory to the United States, forming the states of California, Nevada, Utah and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming.

Mexicans remain sensitive about the loss and the location of the border. At the same time, the United States is fortifying barriers to keep out undocumented Mexican migrants.

Some Mexicans use the term "Reconquista" (reconquest) to refer to the growing presence in California of Mexican migrants and their descendants.

France's Pernod Ricard is taking over Absolut vodka, one of the world's top-selling spirit brands, after buying Vin & Spirit from the Swedish government at the end of March.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich, editing by Philip Barbara)

Marci Kaptur North American Union Cintra

Youtube.com

A House Speech from Rep. Marcy Kaptor (D) from a couple years ago.

Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies: Ron Paul on The Emerging Surveillance State

Ron Paul
Free Market Man
April 7, 2008

Last month, the House amended the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to expand the government’s ability to monitor our private communications. This measure, if it becomes law, will result in more warrantless government surveillance of innocent American citizens.

Though some opponents claimed that the only controversial part of this legislation was its grant of immunity to telecommunications companies, there is much more to be wary of in the bill. In the House version, Title II, Section 801, extends immunity from prosecution of civil legal action to people and companies including any provider of an electronic communication service, any provider of a remote computing service, “any other communication service provider who has access to wire or electronic communications,” any “parent, subsidiary, affiliate, successor, or assignee” of such company, any “officer, employee, or agent” of any such company, and any “landlord, custodian, or other person who may be authorized or required to furnish assistance.” The Senate version goes even further by granting retroactive immunity to such entities that may have broken the law in the past.

The new FISA bill allows the federal government to compel many more types of companies and individuals to grant the government access to our communications without a warrant. The provisions in the legislation designed to protect Americans from warrantless surveillance are full of loopholes and ambiguities. There is no blanket prohibition against listening in on all American citizens without a warrant.

We have been told that this power to listen in on communications is legal and only targets terrorists. But if what these companies are being compelled to do is legal, why is it necessary to grant them immunity? If what they did in the past was legal and proper, why is it necessary to grant them retroactive immunity?

In communist East Germany , one in every 100 citizens was an informer for the dreaded secret police, the Stasi. They either volunteered or were compelled by their government to spy on their customers, their neighbors, their families, and their friends. When we think of the evil of totalitarianism, such networks of state spies are usually what comes to mind. Yet, with modern technology, what once took tens of thousands of informants can now be achieved by a few companies being coerced by the government to allow it to listen in to our communications. This surveillance is un-American.

We should remember that former New York governor Eliot Spitzer was brought down by a provision of the PATRIOT Act that required enhanced bank monitoring of certain types of financial transactions. Yet we were told that the PATRIOT Act was needed to catch terrorists, not philanderers. The extraordinary power the government has granted itself to look into our private lives can be used for many purposes unrelated to fighting terrorism. We can even see how expanded federal government surveillance power might be used to do away with political rivals.

The Fourth Amendment to our Constitution requires the government to have a warrant when it wishes to look into the private affairs of individuals. If we are to remain a free society we must defend our rights against any governmental attempt to undermine or bypass the Constitution.

US jobless figures: The specter of a new depression

David Walsh
Global Research
April 6, 2008

Friday’s Labor Department report, revealing that US payrolls were cut by 80,000 jobs in March and that 232,000 jobs have been lost in the past three months, can only mean new levels of social misery and raises the specter of a severe economic slump, perhaps the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The March decline in jobs is the largest in five years. The number of private sector jobs has dropped by 300,000 since November 2007.

Millions of Americans face the prospect of a sharp decline in living standards and conditions of life. Because of their commitment to the profit system, no section of the US political establishment—neither the Bush administration and the McCain campaign nor the Clinton and Obama camps—is capable of proposing any measures that will materially assist those seeing their jobs, homes nor social benefits disappear or devastated by the present developments.

The figures contained in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) survey are bleak. The number of those officially counted as jobless rose by 434,000 in March to 7.8 million. The unemployment rate rose from 4.8 to 5.1 percent (the highest since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005). In the past 12 months, 1.1 million people have been added to the jobless rolls and the official jobless rate has climbed by 0.7 percent.

The number of people unemployed because they lost jobs climbed to 4.2 million; that figure has grown by almost one million in a year.

The debacle in the housing, credit and financial sectors is leading to “a broad-based decline,” in the words of Moody’s economist Mark Zandi. March’s figures on jobs, said Zandi, indicated that the problem “wasn’t just housing and Wall Street. The problems in the housing market have now affected the rest of the economy.” (Los Angeles Times)

Construction continued to be hard hit, with a loss of 51,000 jobs in March. Construction employment is down 394,000 since its peak in September 2006. Most of the decrease in March, 42,000 jobs, took place among specialty trade contractors. Both residential and commercial construction employment declined. David Wyss of Standard and Poor’s told the Associated Press that the construction figures were “doubly troubling” because March is “the first good month you get on construction because seasonal factors aren’t as large as they are in January.”

Manufacturing jobs fell by 48,000 in March (the largest drop since October 2006) and 310,000 have been lost in the past 12 months. The biggest job losses have taken place in durable goods, where wages and benefits tend to be higher.

Construction-related industries, such as wood products (5,000 jobs), nonmetallic mineral products (5,000 jobs) and furniture and related products (also 5,000 jobs) all suffered. Plastics and rubber products and textile mills also lost jobs, according to the BLS.

Jobs in employment services fell by 42,000 in March and have decreased by 210,000 since August 2006. Twelve thousand jobs in retail trade were lost, including 9,000 in building material and garden supply stores.

The March employment figures were worse than analysts had predicted. Moreover, the unemployment numbers for January and February were revised upward, adding another 67,000 jobs lost. John Silvia, chief economist for Wachovia, told CNNMoney.com, “The revisions are the real surprise in the report. If we had known it was anything like that, there would not have been any debate going on about whether we were in a recession. It’s pretty stark.”

Other analysts chimed in with gloomy comments. “Another terrible report,” said Joseph Shapiro of MFR, Inc., an economic forecasting firm in New York. “Private payrolls now down for four consecutive months. Consumer spending outlook is grim, with wage and salary income growth fading fast and other headwinds as strong as ever… This economic slump is going to be a long, grinding one, and a ‘v-shaped’ recovery appears quite unlikely.”

Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics noted that the overall numbers were “significantly worse than expected … Trends are awful; unemployment will keep rising, squeezing spending.”

The Economic Policy Institute pointed out that for “the fifth month in a row, fewer than half of industries have added jobs, demonstrating the pervasive nature of job loss.”

The government’s jobless rate notoriously underestimates the actual number of people out of work. The BLS reports that the “total unemployed” rate, a somewhat more realistic gauge of the actual job situation, which includes those working part-time involuntarily and those who have given up looking for employment, stood at 9.1 percent in March 2008 (seasonally adjusted), some 13.9 million people, up from 8.0 a year earlier, an increase of 13.75 percent over 12 months.

At the same time, increases in workers’ wages are falling behind inflation. Over the course of the year, wages grew 3.6 percent, less than the inflation rate of approximately 4 percent. Furthermore, since weekly hours also slowed during the past 12 months, weekly earnings are only up 3.3 percent, markedly behind the rate of inflation.

For certain staple items, prices have risen far faster than 4 percent. Flour, milk and eggs were up 24 percent for the year ending in February, according to the Consumer Price Index. By March 30, American Automobile Association figures indicate, gasoline had risen to an average of $3.287 a gallon for regular unleaded, more than 61 cents (or 23 percent) above the price a year ago.

Associated Press economics writer Jeannine Aversa commented, “With lofty energy and food prices, workers may feel like their paychecks are shrinking.” This is, in fact, a mass experience, at the same time as Wall Street operators and corporate CEOs continue to rake in vast fortunes. These geniuses, who have proclaimed the wonders of the market for the past quarter-century, preside over the present disaster threatening wide layers of the population.

The process feeds on itself. Economic uncertainty and the loss of jobs lead to decreased purchases, which contribute to further layoffs. US auto sales fell sharply in the first three months of 2008, as domestic and foreign car companies combined to post one of the worst first quarters in years. US auto sales as a whole dropped 12 percent over the same quarter a year ago; General Motors sales were down 19 percent; Ford, 14 percent; Toyota, 10 percent and Honda, 3.2 percent.

The BLS reported Friday that auto jobs fell by 24,000 in March, in part because of the ongoing strike at American Axle in Detroit and western New York state; the average monthly decline in auto was 6,000 jobs per month in the year ending in February.

The day before the bureau issued its report, an influential member of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen of San Francisco, told an audience that the US economy has “slowed to a crawl” and said no improvement was likely until 2009 at the earliest.

Addressing a conference in Florida in mid-March, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which dates business cycles in the US, remarked: “I believe the US economy is now in recession. Could this become the worst recession we have seen in the postwar period? I think the answer is yes. I would emphasize the word ‘could.’”

The assault on the working population goes beyond the growth in joblessness and inflation, as serious as they are. This “perfect storm” of an economic crisis means that the value of the only asset many people possess, their home, is dropping even as the job market shrinks and prices rise. Standard & Poor’s recently indicated that US home prices might decline as much as 20 percent by the end of 2008 from their peak in 2006.

The result is a flood of mortgage foreclosures, which rose to an all-time high at the end of 2007, the Mortgage Bankers Association revealed in a March 6 report. RealtyTrac reported at the end of March that 225,000 properties were in some stage of foreclosure, an increase of nearly 60 percent from the same period one year earlier.

The social consequences are appalling.

The increased number of empty houses for sale (now, in percentage terms, as high as at any time since 1956, when records were first kept) has led to an epidemic of break-ins aimed at stripping homes of pipes made of copper and other valuable metals. Reuters reported April 1, “In areas hit hardest by foreclosures, such as the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, copper and other metals used in plumbing, heating systems and telephone lines are now more valuable than some homes.” A Cleveland city councilor, Tony Brancatelli, explained, “We’re seeing houses sold for $100 that are distressed houses that should not be recycled.”

Meanwhile the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind on, resulting in the deaths of countless Iraqis and Afghans, the killing and maiming of thousands of Americans and the draining of the US treasury to the eventual tune of trillions of dollars.

The lame-duck Bush administration barely goes through the motions in the face of alarming economic news. The Wall Street Journal noted acerbically Friday that, apart from tracking economic data and advising Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, “Treasury officials seem to have two clear missions: agree with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and don’t utter the word ‘recession.’”

A White House spokesperson indicated the administration was “not happy” with the jobs report and promised that the economy would pick up later in the year.

George W. Bush spent Friday evening with the president of Croatia, Stjepan Mesic, in Zagreb. Oblivious to popular suffering either in America or the Balkans, during the course of his toast to Mesic, Bush idiotically declared: “We believe there’s a Creator that has given every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth the great gift of freedom. We believe markets are capable of unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit of our peoples. We understand that freedom requires sacrifice.”

Even as this “entrepreneurial spirit” was wreaking havoc in the US and global economy, the various major party rivals for Bush’s office made clear they intend to do nothing to alleviate the economic distress of the broad mass of the population.

Presumptive Republican Party candidate for president, John McCain, promised more of the same “free market” policies that have led to the present calamity, declaring, “it is essential to reduce the burdens on businesses and workers by lowering taxes, streamlining regulation, tackling health care costs, opening markets to American goods and helping those workers in need.”

The Democrats sought to gain political advantage from the bad economic news, without offering any concrete plan for remedying the situation. New York Senator Hillary Clinton praised the $30 billion Bear Stearns bailout and urged “equally aggressive action to help American families struggling in our bearish economy.”

She again endorsed proposals being drafted by Democrats Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, aimed at averting an even deeper financial crisis and propping up the banks by ending the decline in home prices. The Frank-Dodd plan—which will not be enacted, in any event, due to Republican opposition—would aid only a fraction of the millions of families facing foreclosure.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama also criticized the Bush administration without offering a serious alternative. Both Clinton and Obama always have to make certain that they do not offend powerful financial and banking interests, on whose endorsements and funding they depend.

Obama said, “Instead of doing nothing for out-of-work Americans, we need a second stimulus that extends unemployment insurance and helps communities that have been hit hard by this recession. Instead of tolerating decades of rising inequality, we need to grow the middle class by investing in millions of new Green Jobs and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.” These vague promises, which will never be carried out, will not help anyone.

The leading Democrats are insulated from the day-to-day reality and sentiments of broad masses of people in the US and could not respond even if they were aware of them. They speak for one wing of the oligarchy that rules the country.

Meanwhile a radicalization is under way that will blow apart the two-party system and the entire political set-up in America. A poll whose results were published in the New York Times Friday provides a glimpse into the actual state of popular opinion. The newspaper reported that Americans “are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s.”

The survey found that 81 percent of respondents believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” an increase from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002. Only 21 percent of those surveyed said the overall economy was in good shape, and 78 percent felt that the US was in worse condition than 5 years ago. Only 28 percent approved of Bush’s performance.

The decline of the position of American capitalism in the world, its decisive loss of global hegemony, has the most profound implications. For wide layers of the population it means, in the first place, a series of severe shocks. In the end, this process must have revolutionary political consequences.

Police State Tactics: Tasering Pregnant Women and the Elderly

John W. Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
April 7, 2008

In George Lucas’ film THX 1138 (1970), the police in a futuristic state make citizens compliant by shocking them with “pain prods.” After seeing the movie, I remember thinking that if the police were ever allowed to use implements such as these, we would rapidly move into a police state. This has now happened with tasers.

Tasers are electro-shock weapons that are currently used by more than 11,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. Designed to cause instant incapacitation by delivering a 50,000-volt shock, tasers are hand-held electronic stun guns that fire two barbed darts. The darts, which usually remain attached to the gun by wires, deliver a high voltage shock and can penetrate up to two inches of clothing or skin. The darts can strike the subject from a distance of up to 35 feet, or the taser can be applied directly to the skin. Although a taser shot is capable of jamming the central nervous system for up to 30 seconds, it can disable the subject for even longer. And because tasers can be aimed anywhere on the body, they can immobilize someone more easily than pepper spray, which must be sprayed in the face.

Taser manufacturers and police agencies insist that tasers are a safer alternative to many conventional weapons typically used to restrain dangerous individuals. This may be true in situations where tasers are used as an alternative to other impact weapons that can cause serious injury, such as batons or lethal force. However, research shows that in many police departments, officers routinely use tasers primarily as a substitute for low-level force weapons such as pepper spray or chemical spray. Tasers have become a prevalent force tool, often used against individuals who pose no serious danger to themselves, the officers or others.

Amnesty International reports that in instances where tasers are used, 80% of the time they are used on unarmed suspects. In 36% of the cases, they are used for verbal non-compliance, but only 3% of the time for cases involving “deadly assault.”

Since 2001, over 300 cases indicate that tasers exacerbate health issues and accelerate death. In November 2003, a mentally disabled man was tasered by Georgia police a total of six times for violating a home detention order. Hours later, he died in jail.

Incredibly, police officers have tasered pregnant women, even when they are fully aware of their pregnancies. In 2001, Cindy Grippi was tasered in the back for entering her house against the instructions of police officers, despite the fact that she was not engaging in any truly disruptive or criminal behavior. As a result, Grippi fell onto her stomach and recounts that she “felt a sharp pain in her abdomen as the taser struck her.” Hours later, doctors diagnosed Grippi with “fetal demise,” and she delivered a stillborn child. Tianesha Robinson was tasered by police officers in 2006 for resisting arrest during a traffic stop. Days later, she suffered a miscarriage.

In Colorado, a man was repeatedly tasered in the genitals for “resisting” after being handcuffed and placed in the back of a police car. In 2003, an imprisoned African-American woman was asked to remove all her jewelry. When she asked for a mirror to help remove her eyebrow ring, she was pepper sprayed and tasered. The tasering caused her to “fall to the ground and lose control of her bladder. While on the ground, a male officer forcibly removed her eyebrow ring with pliers. She was left in her urine for several hours without being given anything to clean herself with.” In August 2007, a man was tasered while holding an infant–causing him to drop the child on its head.

Police using tasers are supposedly trained to press the trigger lightly to guarantee that the shock lasts no longer than five seconds. However, there are numerous cases in which police officers have continued to press down on their triggers in hopes of elongating the shot and maximizing pain. In other cases, police officers have continued to shock individuals repeatedly, despite the fact that the first shock achieved their goal of thoroughly immobilizing the target. In 2003, an elderly blind woman, who was also extremely hard of hearing, was struck by a taser three times for failing to respond to police officers. As a result of the taser shocks to her back and the pepper spray to her face, the woman’s prosthetic right eye was ultimately dislodged from its socket.

The use of tasers by police raises a number of concerns for the protection of human rights. Portable and easy to use, with the capacity to inflict severe pain at the push of a button without leaving substantial marks, tasers are obviously open to abuse by officers. Their use often violates standards set out under the United Nations Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials, which requires that force be used as a last resort and that only the minimum amount necessary be used.

Taser International, the company that manufactures and sells the stun guns, has sold them primarily to law enforcement agencies. The company has sold several hundred thousand to such agencies nationwide. However, since 1994, slightly less powerful tasers have been sold to the general public.

This development is truly alarming. Silent and instantly crippling, the taser is an ideal weapon for criminals to assist them in robbery, rape, abduction, etc. An attacker can now carry his own personal victim-paralyzing device, powerful enough to instantly incapacitate the victim and give the attacker complete control.

Tasers are also ripe for sadistic use. For example, in January 2008, a man in Albany, N.Y., was sentenced to 46 months in prison and 24 months of probation for using a 30,000-volt stun gun on his 18-month-old son during a game of peek-a-boo. He claimed that he “wanted his child to be tough…to be the toughest cage fighter ever.” It is impossible to remain untroubled by these words, as well as the image of a father purposefully torturing his defenseless child. The Social Services caseworker who investigated the situation said, “The look in the child’s eyes will not easily be forgotten.”

Clearly, the use of tasers should be suspended immediately–or at least until a comprehensive medical study can be conducted proving they are safe to the general public when used by police officers. And the police must by law be severely restricted in their use. Otherwise, we are opening the door for rampant abuse and police state tactics.

Petraeus Testimony Will Signal Iran Attack

Paul Craig Roberts
Information Clearing House
April 6, 2008

Today the London Telegraph reported that “British officials gave warning yesterday that America’s commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government. A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian militiary facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment.”

The neocon lacky Petraeus has had his script written for him by Cheney, and Petraeus together with neocon warmonger Ryan Crocker, the US governor of the Green Zone in Baghdad, will present Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday with the lies, for which the road has been well paved by neocon propagandists such as Kimberly Kagan, that “the US must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq.”

Don’t expect Congress to do anything except to egg on the attack. On April 3 the International Herald Tribune reported that senators and representatives have made millions of dollars from their investments in defense companies totaling $196 million. Rep. Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is already on board with the attack on Iran. The London Telegraph quotes Skelton: “Iran is the bull in the china shop. In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi’ite groups, whether they be political or military.”

All Skelton knows is what the war criminal Bush regime tells him. If Iran really does have all these connections, then it behooves Washington to cease threatening Iran and to make nice with Iran in order to stabilize Iraq and extract the US from the nightmare.

Reporting from Tehran on April 4, Reuters quotes Mohsen Hakim, whose father, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, an ally of the Maliki US puppetgovernment in Iraq: “Tehran, by using its positive influence on the Iraqi nation, paved the way for the return of peace to Iraq and the new situation is the result of Iran’s efforts.”

Instead of thanking Iran and working with Iran diplomatically to restore stability to Iraq, the Bush regime intends to expand the nightmare with a military attack on Iran. Ryan Crocker was quick to dispute Hakim’s report that Iran had used its influence to end the fighting in Basra. Crocker alleged that Iran had started the fighting. The absurdity of Crocker’s claim is obvious as even the neocon US media reported that the fighting in Basra was started by the US and Maliki in an effort to clear out the Shi’ite al-Sadr militias. Most experts saw the attack on al-Sadr for what it was: an effort to remove a potential threat to the US supply line from Kuwait in the event of a US attack on Iran.

Crocker alleges that the rockets dropping on the Green Zone during the Basra fighting were made in 2007 in Iran. As should be obvious even to disengaged Americans, if Iran were to arm the Iraqi insurgency, the insurgents would have modern weapons to counter US helicopter gunships and heavy tanks. The insurgents have no such weapons. The neocon lie that Iran is the cause of the Iraqi insurgency is just another Bush regime lie like the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al Qaeda and the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan attacked the US.

The Bush regime will tell any lie and orchestrate any event in order to “finish the job” in the Middle East.

“Finishing the job” means to destroy the ability of Iraq, Iran, and Syria to provide support for the Palestinians and for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Syria might simply give up and become another American client state. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Israel can steal the rest of the West Bank along with the water resources in southern Lebanon. That is what “the war on terror” is really about.

The entire world knows this. Consequently, the US and Israel are essentially isolated. The US can only count on the support that it can bribe and pay for.

At the NATO-Russian summit in Bucharest, Romania, on April 4, Russian President Putin said: “No one can seriously think that Iran would dare attack the U.S. Instead of pushing Iran into a corner, it would be far more sensible to think together how to help Iran become more predictable and transparent.”

Of course it would, but that is not what the warmonger Bush regime wants.

Perhaps the British government has derailed the plot to attack Iran by leaking in advance to the London Telegraph the disinformation Cheney has prepared for Petraeus and Crocker to deliver to the complicit US Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday. On the other hand, the US puppet media is likely to bury the real story and to trumpet Petraeus claims that Iran has, in effect, already declared war on the US by sending weapons to kill US troops in Iraq.

By next Thursday we will know from how the Petraeus-Crocker dog and pony show plays in the US Congress and media whether the Bush Regime will commit yet another war crime by attacking Iran.

Big Brother’s Plan to Put RFID on Americans

Kristi Heim
Global Research
April 7, 2008

Some University of Washington students, faculty and staff are being tracked as they move about the computer-science building, with details of where they’ve been, and with whom, stored in a database.

Professor Gaetano Borriello checks a computer to find graduate student Evan Welbourne’s last location: on the fourth floor, outside room 452 at 10:38 a.m. Wednesday. He opens another screen to reveal the building’s floor plan, and a blinking green dot representing Welbourne shows him walking down the hall.

If it seems a bit like Big Brother, that’s the intention. The project is meant to explore both positive and negative aspects of a world saturated with technology that can monitor people and objects remotely.

"What we want to understand," Borriello said, "is what makes it useful, what makes it threatening and how to balance the two."

The technology, radio frequency identification, or RFID, is rapidly moving into the real world through a wide variety of applications: Washington state driver’s licenses, U.S. passports, clothing, payment cards, car keys and more.

The objects all have a tiny tag with a unique number that can be read from a distance. Many experts predict that the radio tags, as an enhanced replacement for bar codes, will soon become ubiquitous.

Leaders of the UW’s RFID Ecosystem project wanted to understand the implications of that shift before it happens. They’re conducting one of the largest experiments using wireless tags in a social setting.

"Our objective is to create a future world where RFID is everywhere and figure out problems we’ll run into before we get there," said Borriello, a computer science and engineering professor.

RFID has been used primarily to track goods in supply chains, and the RFID Ecosystem works as a kind of human warehouse.

For more than a year, a dozen researchers have carried around RFID tags equipped with tiny computer chips that store an identification number unique to each tag. Researchers installed about 200 antennas throughout the computer-science building that pick up any tag near them every second.

The researchers hope to expand the project, funded by the National Science Foundation, to include participation by about 50 volunteers — people who regularly use the building. Volunteers will have the option of removing their data at any point.

The system can show when people leave the office, when they return, how often they take breaks, where they go and who’s meeting with whom, Borriello said.

The technology seems less intrusive than a camera, but it’s much more precise.

It’s a lot easier to fool a camera with a blurred image or disguise. But the latest RFID tags contain a 96-bit code meant to uniquely identify an object or person.

Yet if people don’t see the tags, it’s easy to forget they are giving out information whenever they come within range of a reader.

"One of the most surprising things is how invisible these tags can be," said Welbourne, who stashed the paper-thin tags in his jacket and bag nine months ago and doesn’t always remember he’s carrying them. "It’s a risk for people. I built part of the system, and I’m caught off-guard."

Lessons learned

UW researchers are gaining some valuable lessons on how to make the technology useful while protecting privacy. Radio tags add a new dimension to social networking. The key is allowing subjects to control who sees what information about them.

They created an application called RFIDDER that lets people use data from radio tags to inform their social network where they are and what they’re doing. The feature can be used on the Web and on a mobile phone, with a connection to the social-networking service Twitter.

Borriello can let Welbourne, the project’s lead graduate student, see where he is all day, or he can modify settings so Welbourne can only see where he is within 15 minutes of their scheduled meeting. The system is transparent, so each can tell if the other has checked his whereabouts.

The lab’s Personal Digital Diary application detects and logs a person’s activities each day and uploads them to a Google calendar. Users can search the calendar to jog their memories about when they last saw someone or how, where and with whom they spent their time.

Potential pitfalls

Yet the UW researchers also recognize many potential privacy pitfalls.

Some systems, including new U.S. passports and driver’s licenses, have been designed to divulge more information than necessary, opening the door to security and privacy problems, Borriello said.

Experts from the UW RFID team went to Olympia to testify on privacy issues related to the state’s Enhanced Driver’s License.

"There’s no reason to have remotely readable technology in a driver’s license," Borriello said. He recommends a system that requires contact with the surface of a reader, so the license-holder knows when information on his license is being read.

However, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security required states to use an RFID chip that is readable from a distance to be compatible with its REAL ID initiative.

Washington state went along so it could offer an optional Enhanced Driver’s License as an alternative to a passport for residents crossing the Canadian border.

Gov. Christine Gregoire signed a bill last week that attempts to mitigate security and privacy concerns by making it a felony for unauthorized users to read or possess information on another person’s identification document without that person’s knowledge or consent.

Piecing a profile

Without the right safeguards, data from radio tags can be pieced together to offer a detailed profile of a person’s habits without his or her knowledge.

"People don’t understand the implications of information they’re giving out," Borriello said. "They can be linked together to paint a picture, one you didn’t think you were painting."

If someone carrying the new RFID-chipped driver’s license visits a store that has an RFID reader and then uses a credit card, the store can start to form an association between the ID number and the credit-card number.

That information can be used to send targeted advertising messages to the customer, a scenario depicted in the film "Minority Report." A man is recognized as he walks by a store and given a personalized sales pitch.

RFID readers placed around shopping malls and airports could help government agencies collect information about visitors’ travel patterns, shopping habits and relationships.

"People might think maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe it will make me safer," Borriello said. But he added, "You can see this inching forward until we’re tracking people wherever they go."

That might sound far-fetched, but it’s going on in other parts of the world. Last year, the number of police requests for information from London’s RFID-based transit card rose from four per month to 100, Borriello said. Police use the data in criminal cases.

In southern China, the government is installing RFID readers throughout the city of Shenzhen to track movements of citizens, and U.S. companies are helping deploy the technology, The New York Times has reported. Chips in national ID cards contain not just a number, but a person’s work history, education, religion, ethnicity, police record and reproductive history.

"You could argue for any of this stuff in the name of security," Borriello said. "It’s important to understand what the technology can do and we, collectively, have to decide what we’re going to use it for."

The lessons from the UW RFID project point to the need for consent and transparency, informing people what data are being collected and giving them a way to review, correct or delete it.

The technology alone can’t be made to do the right thing without a good system of laws and policies around it.

Protection lacking

So far, there are few such legal protections in the U.S., Welbourne and Borriello say.

While RFID is relatively new, one technology with a potential to track people is well-established: cellphones.

"Most of us trust that information is not being tracked by anyone, but in fact it is," Borriello said.

Large U.S. telecommunications companies are in the middle of a bitter dispute over their role assisting in government wiretapping, and whether they can be sued or be given legal immunity.

Right now RFID is following a typical technology cycle, moving from obscurity into popular usage. The UW researchers are trying to stay ahead of that cycle.

"As soon as it becomes widely used, then it’s more attractive and people start attacking it," showing its vulnerabilities, Borriello said. The trouble is "by that time, it’s hard to change."

Leahy Takes Chertoff to Woodshed Over Vermont Checkpoints

EVAN LEHMANN
Reformer
April 7, 2008

WASHINGTON — Sen. Patrick Leahy chastised Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff Wednesday for his agency’s plan to build a permanent immigration checkpoint in central Vermont, wryly exclaiming that Chertoff should just “federalize Vermont.”

The interaction comes as the Bush administration is proposing a $4 million project to build fixed facilities within 100 miles of the Canadian border to conduct random vehicle checks for illegal immigrants, drugs and weapons, according to Leahy.

“So what you’re saying is in a little state like mine everyone should be stopped going down that interstate, no matter whether they’re going to visit a sick relative at the VA hospital?” Leahy prodded Chertoff in a Judiciary Committee hearing.

“We’re all sort of presumed guilty until proven innocent,” the Vermont Democrat added. “It sounds like Big Brother gone awry.”

Chertoff said, “Here’s the bottom line. Having checkpoints make sense.”

He said drug dealers and child molesters have been captured at similar checkpoints.

A similar, though temporary, checkpoint was maintained for 18 months along I-91 near Hartford, Vt., before closing in May 2005, according to Leahy.

But he says it’s an inconvenience for Vermonters miles away from the border they may never cross.

Leahy, for instance, was stopped at a different checkpoint in New York and told to get out his car, he recalled at a separate hearing last month. When he asked the Border Patrol agent under whose authority he was working, the agent pointed to his gun.

“That’s all the authority I need,” the agent said, according to Leahy.

Interior checkpoints are used mostly in the south as a second layer of security to apprehend terrorists, illegal immigrants and drug smugglers who evaded detection at the point of entry. But there is debate about the effectiveness of permanent facilities versus tactical checkpoints, which are moved frequently.

“We have dozens and dozens of roads you can take from the Canadian border to get down to either New York or Massachusetts from Canada,” Leahy said Wednesday, adding dryly, “Why don’t you just put roadblocks on every one of them and federalize Vermont?”

Leahy then leaned into his microphone and whispered conspiratorially: “We’ve had Canadians come up to my house in Vermont. Some of them are related to my wife.”

Chertoff responded, “That’s great. But I’m not sure what your point is, Mr. Chairman.”

But by then Leahy was done jesting with Chertoff.

“I think you understand my point,” Leahy said.

Shoppers’ fear shakes U.S. economy

ANNE D ‘INNOCENZIO
Associated Press
April 7, 2008

The gloomiest outlook for the economy in 35 years may be forcing Americans to live with what they have and save up for what they want.

Lynda Nicely has been living in a sparsely furnished rental apartment in a Milwaukee suburb since October while she saves enough money for furniture at a second-hand store. And when temperatures soar this summer, she plans to buy a fan, not an air-conditioner.

“I am a little rattled, ” said the 28-year-old resident of West Allis, who took a second job as a waitress and plans to hoard three months worth of emergency cash just in case she loses her primary job in public relations.

A growing number of anxious people across all income segments are shopping at less-expensive stores, reacquainting themselves with the library, paying down credit-card debt and cutting back on new clothes and cars, vacations and meals out.

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