UK: Hi-tech 'satellite' tagging planned

From: Prisoners 'to be chipped like dogs'

13 Jan 2008

 

" ... Ministers are planning to implant "machine-readable" microchips under
the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the
electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British
jails.

Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and
prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use
of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.

But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle,
the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of
offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio
frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice,
are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals,
including their identities, address and offending record.

The tags, labelled "spychips" by privacy campaigners, are already used
around the world to keep track of dogs, cats, cattle and airport
luggage, but there is no record of the technology being used to
monitor offenders in the community. The chips are also being
considered as a method of helping to keep order within prisons.

A senior Ministry of Justice official last night confirmed that the
department hoped to go even further, by extending the geographical
range of the internal chips through a link-up with satellite-tracking
similar to the system used to trace stolen vehicles. "All the options
are on the table, and this is one we would like to pursue," the source
added. ... "

 

Secret email that freed the mole at the Foreign Office

13 Jan 2008
The Observer

" ... The bundle of documents delivered to the Crown Prosecution Service by the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office on 6 December last year should have
contained few nasty surprises. The files told the alarming story of Derek
Pasquill, a civil servant in a hitherto obscure new unit set up to improve
relations with the Islamic world, who had broken one of the golden rules of
a Crown servant.

Pasquill, 48, had handed over confidential documents to an Observer
journalist after becoming concerned about Foreign Office contacts with
Islamic groups and individuals who backed violence. Now he was facing trial
for six breaches of Section 3 of the 1989 Official Secrets Act that,
according to Mariot Leslie, the Foreign Office's director of defence and
intelligence, had seriously damaged UK interests abroad and endangered the
life of a colleague.

The CPS and Special Branch officers who put together the case at the behest
of the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, were convinced that the secrets
case against Pasquill was watertight.

They were wrong. Included among the documents being prepared for disclosure
to Pasquill's defence team was a bombshell. It was an email that should have
been handed to both the defence and the CPS many months before. ... "

~ Read on... ~

 

the 'Shah' and the 'Shaykh'

From: The Coming Iranian Class Wars

by Rosa Faiz

" ... In the case of Iran, it is therefore the duty of leftists to insist on a social order and governance that represents and reinforces the true will of the people, who are the true source of all sovereignty, and the only legitimating base for any state. As progressives in Iran and the leftists worldwide, we must recognize and expose Rafsanjani as the face of U.S./U.K. intervention in Iran. It is wise to note that the same Belgian court which reviewed the cases brought against "pragmatists" such as Pinochet and Henry Kissinger, has reviewed a similar case against Rafsanjani. To support a reactionary system in the name of anti-imperialism is as naive as Reza Shah's support for the Germans which ultimately compromised Iran's independence for more than thirty years. As Samir Amin has characterized it, Islamic Fundamentalism is the ‘Dream of the Past’, something highly appreciated by the CIA as a ready-to-use weapon against the progressive forces of the Muslim countries. 4
 
We demand that imperialists stay out of our country, and allow us to settle our accounts with the barbaric regime that is choking us and keeping us all down, to the ultimate delight of the imperialists. An imperialist power that has some thousand of nuclear warheads at the ready, and who daily uses uranium-enriched munitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby exposing all the biological life of the region to radioactive poisoning for the next four billion years (half life of uranium), has no moral authority espousing concern over the offensive capabilities of a nation whose military budget is a mere drop in the ocean that represents the U.S. military expenditure, and who is completely surrounded by the U.S. military presence.
 
We further demand that the Islamic Republic regime respect the safety and health of the Iranian people and cease its pursuing of nuclear plans for the foreseeable future, until a government is established that exhibits thoroughness of modus operandi. In a country where the government cannot, yet, publicly account for the serial killings of the most prominent intellectuals and writers; in a country where thousands of political prisoners have vanished without any culpability; in a country where the government manifestly lacks any accountability for its methods and means when it comes to providing for its people (except when it comes to pursuing, terrorizing and killing dissidents); in a resourceful country that almost half of the population lives in poverty, the government that has thus thoroughly proven its incompetence has no right exposing the public to the enormously poisonous hazards of activities as dangerous as nuclear activities. ... "

 

creating an army of unfeeling monsters?

" ... Since World War II, our military has sought and found any number of ways to override the values and belief systems recruits have absorbed from their families, schools, communities and religions. Using the principles of operant conditioning, the military has found ways to reprogram their human software, overriding those characteristics that are inconvenient in a military context, most particularly the inherent resistance human beings have to killing others of their own species. "Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli," says Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, a professor of philosophy and ethics at West Point, "and this maximizes soldiers' lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely -- and understandably -- suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat."

By military standards, operant conditioning has been highly effective. It's enabled American soldiers to kill more often and more efficiently, and that ability continues to exact a terrible toll on those we have designated as the "enemy." But the toll on the troops themselves is also tragic. Even when troops struggle honorably with the difference between a protected person and a permissible target (and I believe that the vast majority do so struggle, though the distinction is one I find both ethically and humanely problematic) in war "shit happens." When soldiers are witness to overwhelming horror, or because of a reflexive accident, an illegitimate order, or because multiple deployments have thoroughly distorted their perceptions, or simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time -- those are the moments that will continue to haunt them, the memories they will not be able to forgive or forget, and the stuff of posttraumatic stress injuries.

And it's not just the inherent conscientious objector our military finds inconvenient: current U.S. military training also includes a component to desensitize male soldiers to the sounds of women being raped, so the enemy cannot use the cries of their fellow soldiers to leverage information. I think it not unreasonable to connect such desensitization techniques to the rates of domestic violence in the military, which are, according to the DoD, five times those in the civilian population. Is anyone really surprised that men who have been specifically trained to ignore the pain and fear of women have a difficult time coming home to their wives and families? And clearly they do. There were 2,374 reported cases of sexual assault in the military in 2005, a 40 percent increase over 2004. But that figure represents only reported cases, and, as Air Force Brig. Gen. K.C. McClain, commander of DoD's Joint Task Force for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response pointed out, "Studies indicate that only 5 percent of sexual assaults are reported." ... "

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Colville Tribe pleased with U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Teck Cominco case

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to intervene in an appeals court ruling that holds Canadian miner Teck Cominco Ltd. (TSX:TCK.B) subject to a U.S. Superfund law for polluting the Columbia River, under which Teck may have to pay a share of an estimated $1 billion in cleanup costs.

A federal appeals court last year ruled that Vancouver-based Teck could have to pay a share of the cost to clean up Lake Roosevelt, a 240-kilometre stretch of the upper Columbia River behind Grand Coulee Dam.

The Columbia has been polluted for a century with heavy metals and black slag leaching downstream from Teck Cominco's lead and zinc smelter complex in Trail, B.C., 15 kilometres north of the U.S. border and about 215 kilometres north of Spokane, Wash.

The company asked the Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court ruling, arguing that the Superfund law doesn't apply to a Canadian company discharging hazardous waste unless it "arranged" for the contamination to end up in the United States.

The pollution resulted from an "action of nature" - the southward flow of the river from Canada into the United States - the company said in court papers.

U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement said that for decades the company discharged millions of tonnes of hazardous substances into the river just north of the border. Likening the discharges to firing a gun across the border, Clement said "it was inevitable that the river would carry the pollution directly into the United States."

Virgil Seymour, a member of the local Colville Tribe's business council, said he was pleased with the top court's decision....

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