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1. If WikiLeaks Had Been Around, Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?
If WikiLeaks had been around in 2001, could the events of 9/11 have been prevented? The idea is worth considering. There were a lot of us in the run-up to September 11 who had seen warning signs that something devastating might be in the planning stages. But we worked for ossified bureaucracies incapable of acting quickly and decisively. Lately, the two of us have been wondering how things might have been different if there had been a quick, confidential way to get information out. One of us, Coleen Rowley, was a special agent/legal counsel at the FBI’s Minneapolis division and worked closely with those who arrested would-be terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui on an immigration violation less than a month before the World Trade Center was destroyed. Following up on a tip from flight school instructors who had become suspicious of the French Moroccan who claimed to want to fly a jet as an “ego boost”, Special Agent Harry Samit and an INS colleag ue had detained Moussaoui. A foreign intelligence service promptly reported that he had connections with a foreign terrorist group, but FBI officials in Washington inexplicably turned down Samit’s request for authority to search Moussaoui’s laptop computer and personal effects. Those same officials stonewalled Samit’s supervisor, who pleaded with them in late August 2001 that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” WikiLeaks might have provided a pressure valve for those agents who were terribly worried about what might happen and frustrated by their superiors’ seeming indifference. Official channels for whistle-blower protections have long proved illusory.
Coleen Rowley & Bogdan Dzakovic/Los Angeles, Gulf Times
2. The 'Cyberwar' Against The American People is Over. The National Security Agency Has Won
A "Memorandum of Agreement" struck last week between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA) promises to increase Pentagon control over America's telecommunications and electronic infrastructure. The Agreement follows closely on the heels of reports last week by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that DHS has been tracking people online and that the agency even established a "Social Networking Monitoring Center" to do so. Documents obtained by EFF through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, revealed that the agency has been vacuuming-up "items of interest," systematically monitoring "citizenship petitioners" and analyzing "online public communication." Despite the Agreement's garbled bureaucratese, we can be sure of one thing: the drift towards militarizing control over Americans' private communications will continue.
Tom Burghardt, Global Research
Related Links:
* The Internet War
Nadim Kobeissi, The Link
3. Greece Plummets In Press Freedom Ranking
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - More than half of the EU's 27 countries score badly in the annual press freedom index carried out by the Paris-based NGO Reporters without Borders - a negative trend compared to previous years, even though three EU members are the freest places in the world in which to be a journalist. Thirteen of the EU's 27 members are in the world top 20. But some of the other 14 stand very low while the gap between good and bad performers continues to widen, the report says. The poor performers include France and Italy, where events in the past year – violation of the protection of journalists' sources, concentration of media ownership, displays of contempt by government officials and judicial summonses - continue to follow a negative line. Greece got the worst marks in the EU, plummeting a huge 35 places to 70, where it now sits alongside the bloc's other media villain, Bulgaria. The Greek plunge is due to political unrest and related ph ysical attacks on journalists. Iceland won special praise for its bill, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), to provide a unique level of legal protection for reporters. The survey did not mention the strange case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Sweden.
Valentina Pop, EU Observer
Related Links:
* Julian Assange Case Setting Off Major Civil Rights Alarm Bells
Information Release, Rixstep
4. Pfizer Hormones, Breast Cancer Death And Lawsuits
A new study from the Women's Health Initiative links Pfizer's Prempro hormone replacement treatment, which is already linked to a higher risk of breast cancer and heart disease, is now linked to a higher risk of death. And the publicity for this finding, which will be considerable, may finally put the cabash on Prempro sales. After the WHI was released eight years ago, HRT use plummeted and led to a drop in breast cancer rates, with about 100,000 fewer invasive tumors detected from 2002 to 2007 than expected, said lead researcher Rowan Chlebowski, chief of medical oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, tells Bloomberg News. Using a 10-year mortality rate of about 20 percent, he calculates the reduction in hormone use may have prevented about 20,000 deaths. The findings should cause doctors to cut back on long-term usage to treat hot flashes and night sweats.
Ed Silverman Pharmalot
5. How Juries Are Fooled By Statistics - The Tragic Sally Clark Case Example
Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly reveals inn this video the common mistakes humans make in interpreting statistics -- and the devastating impact these errors can have on the outcome of criminal trials. The woman whom Dr Donnelly discusses, Sally Clark, eventually had her double murder convictions quashed, but a short time later, was found in her home, dead of acute alcohol poisoning, her life destroyed by a statistical fallacy perpetuated upon her by lawyers, the medical industry, the court system, and by society at large. So in short, statistics might seem like "an annoying school course that has no relevance to real life," but in fact, whether we understand statistics or not, it touches all our lives and affects our decisions every day.
GrrlScientist, Political Equilibrium, The Guardian
Related Links:
What Killed Sally Clark's Child?
Neville Hodgkinson, The Spectator
6. Disgusting U-Turn On Reversing The British Surveillance State
By resurrecting the Intercept Modernisation Programme, the government breaks a clear and fundamental promise. In all the fuss over the Spending Review, you will almost certainly not have seen that the appalling "Intercept Modernisation Programme" is to continue. Buried in the recently released Strategic Defence and Security Review are government plans to introduce a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept communications. This, in no disguise at all, is the Intercept Modernisation Programme – which will allow the security services and the police to spy on the activities of everyone using a phone or the internet. The state will therefore be able to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public, on the absurd pretext that it will help to tackle crime or terrorism (and by the way, the significant costs of the programme will of course be passed on to . . . you). This comes despite the Conservative Party's recent pledge to reverse the rise of the surveillance state. Couple this with the disgusting U-turn on the Summary Care Record, in which all of our medical records are to be lumped together in one convenient-to-leak, convenient-to-snoop, convenient-to-break database (despite similarly clear and concrete pre-election promises from both governing parties to the contrary), and a troubling picture emerges. It is fascinating and dreadful to see the speed of bureaucratic capture, the reversion to bureaucratic authoritarianism on show.
Alex Deane, The New Statesman
7. Disgraced Coalitiion Government Makes Weakest Take Worst Cuts
George Osborne has just gambled your British future on an extreme economic theory that has failed whenever and wherever it has been tried. In the Great Depression, we learned some basic principles. When an economy falters, ordinary people – perfectly sensibly – cut back their spending and try to pay down their debts. This causes a further fall in demand, and makes the economy worse. If the government cuts back at the same time, then there is no demand at all, and the economy goes into freefall. That's why virtually every country in the world reacted to the Great Crash of 2008 – caused entirely by deregulated bankers – by increasing spending, funded by temporary debt. Better a deficit we repay in the good times than an endless depression. The countries that stimulated hardest, like South Korea, came out of recession first. David Cameron and George Osborne have ignored all this. They have ignored the warnings of the Financial Times, the newspaper most critical of their strategy. Beneath the statistics, there was a swathe of human tragedies that will now unnecessarily unfold across Britain. Osborne has chosen the weakest people to take the worst cuts. It can't be coincidental that this is being done to us by three men – Cameron, Osborne, and Nick Clegg – who have never worried about a bill in their lives. On a basic level, they do not understand the effects of these decisions on real people. Britain just became a colder and crueller country. And for what? To pantingly follow a disproven ideology over a cliff.
Johann Hari, The Independent
8. UK Spending Review Latest
Well, details of the cuts to benefits under the spending review have finally been announced. The biggest blows are undoubtedly to people who claim contribution-based employment and support allowance, but who aren't in the support group, as payments will in future be time-limited and to people in residential care who currently receive DLA mobility component because it will cease to be paid. In the tabloids this weekend, multi-millionaire chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne announced new anti-fraud measures and compared benefits cheats to criminals who rob you in the street. As a method of increasing prejudice and hatred, especially towards claimants with invisible disabilities, his interview with the News of the World was probably highly effective. Not surprisingly however, on the subject of daylight robbery, he made no reference to this list of the top 100 private sector suppliers who, between them, walked away with almost £4.6 billion in DWP cash last year. Predictably, many more companies are lining up to climb aboard the DWP gravy train. Meanwhile, it seems that even some of its own staff are not happy with the way one of the DWP’s top ten suppliers does business. An Atos doctors’ trade union has condemned employment and support allowance (ESA) targets that medics have to meet as ‘wholly unrealistic’.
Steve Donnison, Benefits & Work
9. Concern Grows As Mother & Six-Year-Old Child Incarcerated In Dutch Jail
Melinda Stratton and her son Andrew
Concern is increasing among Human Rights and Children’s Rights groups in Australia and Europe regarding the detention without charge on 8 September 2010 of Melinda Stratton and her six year old son, Andrew. Melinda is being detained in Niewersluis Prison in Amsterdam and Andrew is in an institution with juvenile offenders. Melinda is not wanted for any criminal offences, only that she has taken her child abroad without his father’s permission and it is alleged that this is in breach of the Hague Convention, although there is no Court Order in force regarding Andrew’s custody. Melinda fled Australia with Andrew almost three years ago after separating from her husband Ken Thompson, the Deputy Fire Chief of New South Wales and becoming engaged in a Family Court battle over custody of Andrew. Melinda believed that Andrew had been sexually molested by his father, and that the only way that Andrew could be protected was to take him abroad. Aus tralian Family Courts automatically award contact and residency of children to fathers, even when they may have convictions for paedophilia, domestic violence, and child molestation. Inquiries are being held into allegations regarding a large number of ritualised sexual assault and harassment of new recruits into the New South Wales Fire Brigade which had been occurring since the 1980s. Charges are to be made against a number of serving fire officers and it is reported that the activities of sexual depravity were known at all levels of the Brigade. Ken Thompson rose through the ranks for 38 years to become Deputy Fire Chief. He resigned suddenly in May 2010 shortly after news broke of these events, to go to Europe to seek his son Andrew.
Charles Pragnell, Child & Family Advocate
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