Thought Police Version 2.0

In George Orwell's novel, 1984, the government attempts to control the speech and the thoughts of its citizens, cataloging incorrect thoughts as "thought crimes". While this story was first published in 1949 as fiction, now in 2008, in a world affected by terrorism, it may become prophetic. Predicting malicious intent from mere observations is becoming a government skill.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) already uses human agents and surveillance cameras to search airport passengers for their bodys' non-verbal clues to predict whether they intend harm to their fellow passengers. And the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is updating this skill using a mobile laboratory with its Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) program (formerly known as "Project Hostile Intent") to detect harmful intentions from its citizens.

The premise is to reconfigure large trailers to become mobile screening modules that can be set-up at major events, border crossings or even airports that consist of an array of sensors that can measure breathing patterns, pulse rates, facial expressions and skin temperatures as persons answer a series of controlled questions. These questions are akin to those asked by polygraph examiners, such as, "Are you attempting to detonate an explosive device in this airport today?"

The benefit of this approach is that unlike a polygraph examination there is no baseline questioning or wires connected to an individual, so it takes less time. It is being described by DHS and its technology partners as an, "X-ray for bad intentions". The system, known as "Malintent," uses multiple sensors - everything from cameras to infrared sensors to laser radars to collect and collate data to determine if people are displaying certain behavioral, biological or psychological markers that can be classified as malicious.

 

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Shell 'wins' Iraq gas contract

Oil giant Shell has recently won the Big Oil race to become the first major oil company to gain access to Iraq's energy sector since the 1970s. With no competitive bidding process, the Dutch-British multinational has 'won' a $4bn contract to process and market natural gas with the South Gas Company in Basra.

The deal has been conducted in secret, leaving important information about the terms and authorship unknown. This secrecy has meant the contract was not subject to any public scrutiny or debate. Platform co-director Greg Muttitt surmised that "a country under occupation has introduced an oil policy that is favourable to western oil companies. The [US] State Department has already admitted that it has advisers working on oil policy and there is a likelihood they may have drafted the Shell contract."

However, attempts to gain control over Iraq's oil fields have not gone so well. As Corporate Watch reported last year, an oil law permitting de-facto oil privatisation was drafted under pressure from Big Oil, the US and UK governments, their consultants, and the IMF. It was presented to the Iraqi parliament in May 2007 and was expected to pass quickly. However, Iraqi and international opposition to transferring oil sovereignty to multinational oil companies has helped create a climate in which the Iraqi parliament has been able to resist the extreme pressure by US and UK governments and the has not been passed to date. So the big oil companies and governments are busy finding other avenues to the eventual prize of control over Iraq's vast oil fields.

These avenues include discussing, preparing, and now bidding for contracts such as Risk Service Contracts (RSCs). While usually offering companies less in terms of long-term control over production and revenue than the prized Production Sharing Contracts (PSCs), they can nonetheless be written to be very similar to PSCs. The 'devil' is in the detail with these complex agreements, details which have not been disclosed. What is certain is that, if secured, they will represent a radical departure from traditional Iraqi – and indeed international – oil policy

 

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Secret U.S. mission hauls uranium from Iraq

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

What's now left is the final and complicated push to clean up the remaining radioactive debris at the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 12 miles south of Baghdad — using teams that include Iraqi experts recently trained in the Chernobyl fallout zone in Ukraine.

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World Bank climate funds under fire

Two days before the World Bank's annual meetings, a coalition of watchdog and non-profit groups exposed World Bank lending for dirty projects and urged individual nations to refrain from supporting the World Bank's new "Climate Investment Funds."

 

The groups released a report today titled "Dirty is the New Clean: A Critique of the World Bank's Strategic Framework for Development and Climate Change."

 

The report argues that the World Bank's track record disqualifies it from managing clean technology transfer and climate adaptation funds. Instead, the groups argue, such funds should be established under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in order to ensure they are used equitably and effectively, in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, and that nations receiving financing are thoroughly involved in funds' design and implementation.

"The World Bank has a very troubling track record on climate change. It has repeatedly invested in dirty projects and called them 'clean,'" said Janet Redman of the Institute for Policy Studies and the lead author of the report. "It is beyond ridiculous for the World Bank to continue to claim that projects such as the Tata coal plant in India—expected to be one of the world's top 50 global warming polluters—are part of the solution to the climate crisis. The World Bank cannot be trusted to oversee climate change funding."

The groups' analysis shows that World Bank Group lending to coal, oil and gas in 2008 increased 94 percent from 2007, reaching over $3 billion. Coal lending alone increased an astonishing 256 percent.

The World Bank claimed major increases in fiscal year 2008 in its renewable energy and energy efficiency lending, but the vast majority of that comes from environmentally and socially destructive large hydropower projects and energy efficiency. Lending for "new" renewables—wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and hydropower projects that produce up to 10 MW per facility—only increased from $421 million to $476 million from last fiscal year, representing a 13 percent increase, not the 87 percent that the World Bank claims.

"The World Bank provided political and financial support to Exxon and the Chadian government for the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline. Precisely as we warned the World Bank years ago, its support for this pipeline established a new petrol dictatorship in Africa. The World Bank is now withdrawing from the project, but who is left to deal with the monster that it created? Our people are worse off and the local environment is ravaged. We are outraged by the suggestion that this same World Bank is now planning to administer climate change funds," said Samuel Nguiffo of Friends of the Earth Cameroon.

Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to which the U.S. is a party, industrialized countries most responsible for global warming are obligated to finance clean technology and adaptation to climate impacts in developing countries.

"Developing countries have clearly articulated at multiple UN climate negotiations that financing for climate change mitigation and adaptation should be fully accountable to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is simply wrong for the World Bank—an undemocratic, unaccountable institution—to have any role in controlling climate financing," said Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth-U.S.

The groups are:

FRIENDS OF THE EARTH INTERNATIONAL
INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES
OIL CHANGE INTERNATIONAL
CAMPAGNA PER LA RIFORMA DELLA BANCA MONDIALE
ACTION AID USA

 

MORE INFORMATION:

Two page factsheet on World Bank's "Climate Investment Funds": http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/#770

New "Dirty is the New Clean" report on World Bank's climate framework: www.ips-dc.org/reports-list.php#780

Two-page World Bank and Climate factsheet: http://www.foe.org/Climate_Investment_Funds/WorldBank-ClimateOverview.pdf

~ Friends of the Earth International ~

 

Waiting for the Barbarians

By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933), translated by Edmund Keeley

 

 

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

 

~ source ~