Commemorating Palestinian Political Prisoners

Commemorating Palestinian Political Prisoners

by Stephen Lendman

April 24, 2011 Since 1979, April 17 annually is Palestinian Prisoners Day, commemorating Mahmoud Hijazi's 1974 release - the first ever prisoner swap with Israel. Acknowledging the day, the Addameer Prisoners Support and Human Rights Association highlighted the thousands of persecuted prisoners, launching a new campaign on their behalf "to raise awareness of specific cases....whose detention (pose) serious risks." Ayed Dudeen is one of many affected, incarcerated without charge or trial since October 2007, the longest interned administrative detainee. A father of six, he's, in fact, been held for most of the past 19 years unjustly like so many others for shorter or longer periods. Addressing Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, Military Judge Advocate General Avihai Mandelblit, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel's Permanent UN Mission in Geneva, Addameer expressed "strong concerns" on his behalf. Serving as deputy director of the Hebron Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance and emergency services, his detention was renewed 30 times, most recently on April 11, 2011. Yet no evidence proves criminality, political or otherwise. Nonetheless, he's been denied minimal due process, preventing his right to a just defense. Addameer expressed outrage about "the manifest breaches of human rights and international humanitarian law" violations against him, like so many others. As a result, the organization strongly urged: -- his immediate and unconditional release, as well as others unjustly held; -- an immediate end to arbitrary arrests and administrative detentions without charge for indefinite periods; and -- respect for international human rights and humanitarian law provisions regarding arrests, detentions and treatment. Addameer currently estimates about 6,000 political prisoners in Israeli prisons. The Prisoners at Risk Campaign highlights cases getting little public attention yet deserve urgent action. They include: -- prisoners seriously ill at risk of further deterioration because of willful medical neglect; -- those held indefinitely without charge of trial; -- human rights activists; -- those longest held; and -- those severely tortured because they refuse to be silent about their ill-treatment. Addameer's director, Sahar Francis, says: "This campaign, and its focus on the mobilization of international civil society, is absolutely essential because the failure of peace talks, including Oslo (and subsequent sham efforts), to resolve the prisoner issue has amply demonstrated that without intense external pressure, Israel will never abide by international human rights and humanitarian law." On April 17, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) headlined its press release, "Palestine Prisoners Day - Narratives Behind Locked Doors," saying: Commemorated annually, the day "support(s) and recognize(s) Palestinians currently in custody in Israel" unjustly. According to the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the number ranges from the current low up to 12,000 or more, mostly for political and related reasons, including women and children. From 1967 - 2008, Addameer reported over 650,000 detained, or about 20% of the total Occupied Territory (OPT) population and 40% of all males. Moreover, since the beginning of the September 2000 second Intifada, 70,000 were interned. According to PCHR, 760,000 have been held since 1967. Currently, it states, about 6,500 are detained, including over 250 children and 37 women. Most are held in Palestine, but many others in Israeli civil and military prisons, in violation of numerous Fourth Geneva provisions, including Article 49 stating: "....forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons (including prisoners) from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive." "PCHR notes with particular concern the many violations of human rights and humanitarian law that prisoners are subjected to while in Israeli detention. In particular violations of Articles 7, 9 and 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Israel is a State Party." Moreover, children are treated like adults in brazen violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), defining a minor is anyone below age 18. Israel is a CRC signatory yet violates this law like all other international ones flagrantly. On June 7, 1967, Military proclamation No. 1 justified detentions "in the interests of security and public order," subjecting all Palestinians to police state persecution. Hundreds of other orders followed, gravely harming their rights and well-being. As a result, they may be held indefinitely as well as subjected to months of abusive, inhumane and degrading interrogations and treatment, then detained without charge or tried in military courts, denying due process and judicial fairness. In confinement, Israel willfully and systematically violates international humanitarian law, including Geneva's Common Article 3, requiring: "humane treatment for all persons in enemy hands, specifically prohibit(ing) murder, mutilation, torture, cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment (and) unfair trial(s)." Fourth Geneva's Article 4 calls "protected persons" those held by parties to a conflict or occupation "of which they are not nationals." They must "be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention." They're entitled to full Fourth Geneva rights. Prisoners of war under Third Geneva have the same rights and those under Common Article 3. Israel willfully denies them. Under the 1971 Israeli Prison Ordinance, no provision defines prisoner rights. It only provides binding rules for the Interior Minister who can interpret them freely by administrative decree. For example, it's legal to intern 20 inmates in a cell as small as five meters long, four meters wide and three meters high, including an open lavatory, and they can be confined up to 23 hours daily. As a result, they're subjected to horrific conditions, including: -- severe overcrowding; -- poor ventilation and sanitation; -- no change of clothes or adequate clothing; -- sleeping on wooden planks with thin mattresses, some infested with vermin; blankets are often torn, filthy and inadequate; hot water is rare and soap is rationed; -- at the Negev Ketziot military detention camp, threadbare tents are used, exposing detainees to extreme weather conditions; in summer, vermin, insects, scorpions, parasites, rats, and other reptiles are a major problem; -- Megiddo and Ofer also use tents; in addition, Ofer uses oil-soiled hangers; -- for some, isolation in tiny, poorly ventilated solitary confinement with no visitation rights or contact with counsel or other prisoners; -- no access to personal cleanliness and hygiene; toilet facilities are restricted, forcing prisoners to urinate in bottles in their cells; -- inadequate food in terms of quality, quantity, and dietary requirements; -- poor medical care, including lack of specialized personnel, mental health treatment, and denial of needed medicines and equipment; as a result, many suffer ill health; doctors are also pressured to deny proper treatment, some later admitting it; -- extreme psychological pressure to break detainees' will; -- widespread use of torture, abuse, cruel and degrading treatment; -- women and children are treated like men; -- NGOs like Physicians for Human Rights - Israel and the ICRC are deterred from aiding detainees; -- denied or hindered access to family members and counsel; and -- enforced conditions subordinating visits to national security priorities, requiring prisoners not be security risks, that persons applying for visits not have a security record, and whatever other stipulations Israel imposes. PCHR noted special concern for about 700 detained Gazans, denied visits, phone calls, mail or other communications with family members for nearly four years with rare (usually one-time only) exceptions allowed. This outrageous prohibition, "exacerbates the already difficult conditions of confinement and constitutes a violation of international human rights law." PCHR commemorated Palestinian Prisoners Day by releasing nine poignant narratives, including "The Mother of a Minor in Prison - Amal Abdul-Allah." For many years, she endured enormous hardships. Her father was incarcerated for 17 years. Her husband was arrested and released in 1983. Her brother and nephew were also imprisoned, and in February 2009, Israeli her third-oldest son, Oudai. "He was arrested on his way to Ramallah, at Beit Iba checkpoint near Nablus. We realized that he must have been arrested when he did not come home to sleep that night. He had been arrested in the morning and forced to spend the entire day and night at the checkpoint. He had to lie on the ground the entire time, until they took him to Megiddo prison the next day." Family members weren't told of his whereabouts. The ICRC got spotty information. For several months, he was repeatedly transfered to new prisons. With one exception, Amal and other family members were totally denied visitation rights for "security reasons." Family members occasionally get information from released prisoners, Amal learning that Oudai was healthy but emotionally exhausted, depressed, always crying, and wanted to go home. Amal told PCHR: "I am emotionally in pain because I haven't seen him in so long. The whole situation is very hard. I can't bear it. Also, when I saw him for the first time in court, it was very hard for me, especially since I hadn't seen him for (months). I could not stop crying, but I was afraid for him and I tried to hold myself together as much as possible. For now, what hurts me most is that I am not allowed to visit him." Moreover, Oudai, like most other child or adult prisoners, is held on spurious charges, assuring months or many years of injustice and harsh treatment. Unlike detained Jews given due process in civil courts, Palestinians get none under occupation. Nor do Israeli Arabs for their faith and ethnicity in a Jewish state. Final Comment On April 17, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) said about 1,000 Hebron protesters marked the day by rallying for release of Palestinian prisoners. "At the same time, thousands of prisoners joined a one-day hunger strike," protesting their treatment and legal rights. Protesters included family members, local authorities, and international activists. According to former political prisoner Abdul Nasser Farwana's new report, virtually every Palestinian household has had members jailed. It explains that most of those detained are unrelated to alleged security issues; that torture is freely used to extract confessions; that no consideration is given women, children and those ill; and that overall treatment violates fundamental international law. On April 17 and throughout the year, remember how abusively Israel treats Arabs for their faith and ethnicity, and that conduct this reprehensible no longer can be tolerated. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

130 intrusions to Palestinian prisoners' cell-rooms and tents

130 intrusions to Palestinian prisoners' cell-rooms and tents

by Friends of Humanity International

April 24, 2011 Friends of Humanity International releases detailed report about the conditions of Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jails in the last year 2010. The organization has also confirmed that this year was unusual to the Palestinian prisoners. More than 130 brutal and humiliating intrusions executed by the Israeli Prison service and forces against the Palestinians rooms and tents in many jails. Meanwhile its following up to intrusive operations, the rightful band documentized big amount of hostilities and brutal inspections assaulted by the Israeli prison service units and special forces on the prisoners rooms and tents which can be accounted as follows: - Launching tear-gas to suffocate prisoners. - Beating prisoners using electronic sticks. - Confiscating prisoners possessives and belongings. - Isolating some prisoners in individual isolating cells. - Executing random transferring to prisoners from a prison to others as happened to Hadareem jail prisoners in which Israeli prison service units intruded and oppressed prisoners then transfer them from section 3 to section 5. - Moreover, Israeli prisons security units destroyed walls on rooms and shifted all prisoners to a lifeless section with even no basics of living. Israeli prison authorities alleged that they were looking for forbidden-smuggled mobiles. The same brutal intrusion and suppression has been repeatedly executed against prisoners in Nafha jail, in which hundreds of long-terms and life imprisonments-sentences prisoners detained in. Thus, dozens of prison security units aggressively intruded the jail many times. They attacked and humiliate prisoners to the extent that the jail officer calls one prisoner's wife which waged a furious uprising among prisoners inside the jail. Later, the prison administration has presented apology on this immoral behavior and promised to open an investigation to this accident. Reemon Jail is another grief story. The chief of this prison is constantly humiliating and degrading prisoners throughout frequent mid-night inspections and suppression to prisoner rooms by which pushed prisoners to warn higher Jail authorities that a special escalation and procedures will be protested against this brutal chief if he continues his provocative and humiliating intrusions and hostilities against prisoners in Reemon jail. Correspondingly, the organization confirmed registering many constant intrusions by the Israeli special forces to the Palestinian female prisoners' rooms for the sake of provocative frequent inspections and humiliations. This disgustingly occurs in front of a queue of Israeli soldiers in the time of inspection. Lately, the Israeli Prison service has escalated humiliating and provocating all Palestinians prisoners in all jails through adapting abrupt assault and intrusion to prisoners' rooms and confiscating their possessives and belongings by which made life of prisoners instable and incontinent. Hence, regarding the usual techniques of inspections and suppression, the organization has published a precise description of jails intrusions and inspection that executed by special security forces called Mitsada or Nakhshoon. These special forces frequently intrudes and attack prisoners rooms and tents in path of inspecting or looking for forbidden materials or escape dug-tunnels. They aggressively and inhumanly intrude rooms and tie prisoners blocking them in a place then hold a very accurate inspection to everything in the rooms. They inspect electric-light bottoms, beds, clothes, WC even TV. They open it and make sure prisoners haven't hid anything inside it. Accordingly, the organization has clarified that number of Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jails reached 6600 prisoner in the last year as follows: · 35 Palestinian female prisoners. · 9 Palestinian legislative council members. · 270 kids and children under 18 age in which international laws forbidden arresting them. · % 79 of prisoners is already sentenced. · 820 prisoners have been sentenced to life imprisonment or even duple or triple life imprisonments. · 5 Palestinian female prisoners were sentenced to life imprisonment. · 307 prisoners arrested by the Israeli occupying forces before Oslo Agreement for Peace that was signed by Palestinian and Israeli parts in 1993. These prisoners are commonly called, old prisoners. · 120 prisoners have eventually spent more than 20 years in the Israeli jails. · 3 prisoners have spent more than 30 years in the Israeli jails, they are: Nael Al Barghouthy, Fakhri Al Barghouthy and Akram Mansour. · More than 1000 prisoners are prevented to obtain the right of family visit in jails. Vienna, April 23, 2011

No Place to Hide: Internet Tracking Probe Unveiled as New Smartphone Spy Scandal Unwinds

No Place to Hide: Internet Tracking Probe Unveiled as New Smartphone Spy Scandal Unwinds

By Tom Burghardt

April 24, 2010 As the United States morphs into a failed state, one unwilling and soon perhaps, unable, to provide for the common good even as it hands over trillions of dollars to a gang of financial brigands engorged like parasitic ticks on the wealth of others, keeping the lid on is more than just an imperial obsession: it's big business. Earlier this month, New Scientist reported that "a new way of working out where you are by looking at your internet connection could pin down your current location to within a few hundred metres." Although similar techniques are already in use, they are not very accurate in terms of closing the surveillance trap. "Every computer connected to the web has an internet protocol (IP) address, but there is no simple way to map this to a physical location," reporter Jacob Aron informs us. "The current best system can be out by as much as 35 kilometres." However, Yong Wang, "a computer scientist at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have used businesses and universities as landmarks to achieve much higher accuracy." According to New Scientist, "Wang's team used Google Maps to find both the web and physical addresses of such organisations, providing them with around 76,000 landmarks. By comparison, most other geolocation methods only use a few hundred landmarks specifically set up for the purpose." With geolocation tracking devices embedded in smartphones (and, as we'll see below, this data is stored without their users' consent), all of which is happily turned over to authorities by telecoms (for the right price, of course!), as privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian revealed in 2009, it becomes abundantly clear that sooner than most people think they'll be no escaping Big Brother's electronic dragnet. "The new method," Aron writes, "zooms in through three stages to locate a target computer." First, the team of public-private financed research snoops measured "the time it takes to send a data packet to the target and converts it into a distance--a common geolocation technique that narrows the target's possible location to a radius of around 200 kilometres." Wang and his cohorts then "send data packets to the known Google Maps landmark servers in this large area to find which routers they pass through." New Scientist reports that when "a landmark machine and the target computer have shared a router, the researchers can compare how long a packet takes to reach each machine from the router; converted into an estimate of distance, this time difference narrows the search down further." "We shrink the size of the area where the target potentially is," Wang cheerfully explained. "Finally," Aron writes, "they repeat the landmark search at this more fine-grained level: comparing delay times once more, they establish which landmark server is closest to the target." "On average," we're told, "their method gets to within 690 metres of the target and can be as close as 100 metres--good enough to identify the target computer's location to within a few streets." While New Scientist focused their attention on how an IP address tracking tool might be a boon to advert pimps, who else might find the method "useful in certain situations"? Tightening the Surveillance Noose Back in December, The Wall Street Journal reported that "few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name--even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off." As part of the Journal's excellent "What They Know" series, reporters Scott Thurm and Yukari Iwatani Kane revealed that an examination of more than 100 smartphone apps for Apple's iPhone and Google's Android platforms "showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent," 47 apps "transmitted the phone's location in some way," and "five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders." Like the New Scientist report above, the Journal focused their investigative lens on "intrusive effort[s] by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them." Without a doubt, such data is already being collected by various police intelligence agencies at the local, state and federal levels. In all likelihood, smartphone geolocation data has now been added to the dossier creation mix, another component of the secret state's massive national security index called "Main Core" by investigative journalists Christopher Ketchum and Tim Shorrock. As Ketchum reported in his 2008 piece, three unnamed former intelligence officials told him that "8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect" and, in the event of a national emergency, "could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention." We've now learned that Apple's iPhone and iPad and Google's Android smartphone platforms "constantly track users' physical location and store the data in unencrypted files that can be read by anyone with physical access to the device," The Register disclosed. And with technological advances far-outstripping legal remedies to protect Americans' privacy as Soghoian wrote last week, and with Congress and the Obama administration further lowering the boom, the notion that our personal communications are off-limits to advertisers and government officials is as quaint as the concept that financial institutions should be transparent when it comes to investing our hard-earned dollars. According to researchers Pete Warden and Alasdair Allen, who first reported their findings on the iPhone Tracker blog, the geolocation file is stored on both the iOS device and "any computers that store backups of its data," and "can be used to reconstruct a detailed snapshot of the user's comings and goings, down to the second." The researchers aver that despite Apple's refusal to even acknowledged the existence of these files, or frankly what the firm does with the data once its been downloaded to their servers, users of iPhones and iPads are put at risk that their movements are available to any and all comers with the requisite skills to access their information. "The most immediate problem is that this data is stored in an easily-readable form on your machine," Warden and Allen wrote. "Any other program you run or user with access to your machine can look through it. By passively logging your location without your permission, Apple have made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements." Needless to say, such information would be a boon to police agencies seeking to "terminate with extreme prejudice" the ability of protest organizers to communicate with demonstrators, as happened during the G20 protests in Pittsburgh, as Antifascist Calling reported in 2009. Elliot Madison was arrested after he relayed a police order to disperse message via Twitter to demonstrators during the protests. A week later, his New York City home was raided by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (!) which carted off his computers and cell phone as "evidence." Madison and co-defendant Michael Wallschlaeger were criminally charged with using computers, cell phones and a police scanner to track the movements of "Pittsburgh's finest." Federal prosecutors charged the activists with "hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime." While such repressive acts may have raised eyebrows two years ago, they have now become part of the seamless panopticon spreading across the "shining city on a hill" like an invisible swarm of privacy-killing locusts. Last week, in the wake of the smartphone tracking scandal, CNET News reported that "law enforcement agencies have known since at least last year that an iPhone or iPad surreptitiously records its owner's approximate location, and have used that geolocation data to aid criminal investigations." Security journalist Declan McCullagh revealed that although "Apple has never publicized the undocumented feature buried deep within the software that operates iPhones and iPads," the secretive Mountain View firm acknowledged to Congress last year that "cell tower and Wi-Fi access point information" is "intermittently" collected and "transmitted to Apple" every 12 hours. CNET reported that "phones running Google's Android OS also store location information," according to Swedish programer Magnus Eriksson. Another researcher told McCullagh that "'virtually all Android devices' send some of those coordinates back to Google." "Among computer forensics specialists," CNET avers, "those location logs--which record nearby cell tower coordinates and time stamps and cannot easily be disabled by someone who wants to use location services--are not merely an open secret. They've become a valuable sales pitch when targeting customers in police, military, and intelligence agencies." In other words, enterprising grifters from niche security firms servicing the secret state--or anyone willing to pay for their unique services, say a dodgy employer, a jealous spouse or a sociopathic freak for that matter--can take advantage of a smartphone's embedded location files. CNET reported that the "U.K-based company Forensic Telecommunications Services advertises its iXAM product as able to 'extract GPS location fixes' from an iPhone 3GS including 'latitude, longitude, altitude and time'." "Its literature boasts," McCullagh writes, that "'these are confirmed fixes--they prove that the device was definitely in that location at that time'." "Another mobile forensics company, Cellebrite," CNET avers, even "brags that its products can pluck out geographical locations derived from both 'Wi-Fi and cell tower' signals, and a third lists Android devices as able to yield 'historical location data' too." Just last week, The Tech Herald disclosed that the Michigan State Police have been using a handheld device and "secretly extracting information from cell phones during traffic stops," and have refused to release information on this program to the ACLU. The Tech Herald reports that for "nearly three years, the ACLU has attempted to get the Michigan State Police (MSP) to answer questions over their use of Cellebrite's UFED Physical Pro scanner." "The handheld device allows police to extract data from phones and SIM memory," journalist Steve Ragan writes, and that "in addition to the normal information, such as contact lists, email, and text messages, the UFED is also able to recover hidden and deleted data." Manufactured by security outfit Cellebrite, the company boasts that their "mobile forensics products enable extraction and analysis of invaluable evidentiary data including deleted and hidden data for military, law enforcement, governments, and intelligence agencies across the world," according to a blurb on their web site. The ACLU charges that the device is routinely used during traffic stops and that state troopers were able to access the mobile devices without their users being aware their data was being grabbed. In their letter to the MSP, the ACLU cautioned that "The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable searches. With certain exceptions that do not apply here," the civil liberties watchdogs averred, "a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity." "A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched." Sounds reasonable, right? The MSP responded by demanding the ACLU fork over $544,680 before they'd even consider releasing these public documents! But as Cryptohippie reported in their excellent study, The Electronic Police State, "two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these: 1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial. 2. It is gathered universally ('preventively') and only later organized for use in prosecutions." "In an Electronic Police State," researchers averred, "every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases. The individual can be prosecuted whenever the government wishes." Called a "Universal Forensic Extraction Device," Cellebrite claims their "UFED family of products is able to extract and analyze data from more than 3000 phones, including smartphones and GPS devices." According to the firm, such tools will prove invaluable to secret state snoops. "Diving deeper into a mobile phone's memory than ever before provides them with the ability to gather data and establish connections between networks and people that is quicker and easier to arrive at." The secret-spilling web site Cryptome has generously provided us with with Cellebrite's Smartphone PDA Spy Guide. Amongst other things, we're told that the firm's "UFED Forensics system empowers law enforcement, anti-terror and security organizations to capture critical forensic evidence from mobile phones, Smartphones and PDAs." "UFED," we're informed, "extracts vital data such as phonebook, camera pictures, videos, audio, text messages (SMS), call logs, ESN IMEI, ICCID and IMSI information from over 1,600 handset models, including Symbian, Microsoft Mobile, Blackberry and Palm OS devices." Think you've erased those messy call logs or text messages to your girl- or boyfriend? Better think again! With Cellebrite on the job, "the UFED can extract data from a phone, or directly from the SIM card. When extracting from phone, the UFED connects to the phone via cable, Bluetooth or infrared, and the data is read logically from the phone. It also performs a physical extraction from SIM cards, allowing extraction of additional data such as deleted SMS, ICCID, IMSI, location information and more." We're told that the company's UFED "helps intelligence agencies widen their view and form a complete picture with access to content that can be repurposed, analyzed, and linked to information existing in databases," Main Core, or a similar national security index, perhaps? "For us, people look like little particles..." While digital technologies advance by leaps and bounds, the Empire's political-economic requirements are determining how new devices will be used, who has access to the data points and, once our personal details are extracted--by corporations or shadowy intel outfits (public and private) who do their bidding--what happens to it once it's been stored in giant data farms. The Wall Street Journal reported that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are conducting a study that "has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones--recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending." "In this wealth of intimate detail," reporter Robert Lee Hotz writes, MIT researcher Alex Pentland "is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play." According to preliminary findings, "the data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future," and the data "can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows." "Advances in statistics, psychology and the science of social networks are giving researchers the tools to find patterns of human dynamics too subtle to detect by other means," the Journal reports. At Northeastern University in Boston for example, "network physicists discovered just how predictable people could be by studying the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users." "After analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position," Hotz reports, "the researchers determined that, taken together, people's movements appeared to follow a mathematical pattern," and that given enough information about past movements, scientists averred "they could forecast someone's future whereabouts with 93.6% accuracy." Chillingly, Northeastern physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who conducted the study, told the Journal: "For us, people look like little particles that move in space and that occasionally communicate with each other. We have turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be objectively followed." Ruthless "objectivity" such as this have real world consequences, not that it matters to those whose butter their bread by bludgeoning our privacy and cratering our political rights. "As a reward when the [MIT] experiment was done," the Journal laconically observed, "the students were allowed to keep the smartphones used to monitor them."

US: Military Commission Trials for 9/11 Suspects a Blow to Justice

US: Military Commission Trials for 9/11 Suspects a Blow to Justice

April 4, 2011

US Attorney General Eric Holder.

(New York) - The Obama administration's decision to prosecute the five men accused of plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States before a military commission is a serious setback for justice, Human Rights Watch said today. Reversing his November 2009 announcement that the men would be tried in federal court in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder announced on April 4, 2011 that the suspects will face trials before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay.
"The Obama administration has squandered a key opportunity to reject the unlawful counterterrorism policies of the past," said Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch. "It has sacrificed fundamental protections under the US constitution and international law in what may be the single most important case of President Obama's tenure."
The military commissions at Guantanamo have been marred by procedural irregularities, the use of evidence obtained by coercion, inconsistent application of ever-changing rules of evidence, inadequate defense resources, poor translation, and lack of public access. Although the Military Commissions Act of 2009 made significant improvements over the Bush administration's system, the law still departs in fundamental ways from fair trial procedures used in US federal courts and under international law binding on the United States.
"Any trial in the military commission system will carry the stigma of Guantanamo and be subject to challenge and delay," Prasow said. "It will keep the world focused on how the defendants were treated rather than the crimes they are accused of committing. A verdict in the federal court system, by contrast, would be recognized throughout the world as legitimate."
According to federal rules relating to the location of a case, a murder trial must take place in the jurisdiction where the crime occurred. In the case of the 9/11 attacks, the trials could have been held in the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, or the Western District of Pennsylvania.
In November 2009, Holder announced that the five 9/11 defendants would be moved from Guantanamo to stand trial in federal district court in New York City, a site of the attacks. In December 2009, prosecutors in New York obtained a sealed grand jury indictment against the five co-accused. After New York City officials raised objections based on purported security and cost concerns, the Obama administration put the decision as to the trial location on hold.
In December 2010, Congress passed restrictions on the use of Defense Department funds to transfer Guantanamo detainees to the US, either for prosecution or detention. The restrictions made it more difficult for the Obama administration to hold the 9/11 trials in the US, but not impossible. The restrictions expire at the end of this year and the administration still could have used Department of Justice or Homeland Security funds for the same purpose, Human Rights Watch said.
In a prepared statement, Holder said that, although he still believes federal court is the right venue to try the 9/11 case and that he could have proved the defendant's guilt in that forum, congressional restrictions gave him no choice but to bring the case in the military commissions. "Members of Congress [...] have taken one of the nation's most tested counterterrorism tools of the table and tied our hands in a way that could have serious ramifications," Holder said.
"The Obama administration blamed congressional restrictions for the decision to try the 9/11 suspects in a military commission, but in fact it had two years to bring the case to trial in US federal courts," Prasow said. "The congressional restrictions on Guantanamo transfers are no excuse for failing to prosecute the case in US federal courts."
Because federal courts are governed by over 200 years of precedent, verdicts obtained in them are more likely to withstand evidentiary, procedural, and constitutional challenges. Military commission proceedings also progress much more slowly than federal court terrorism cases. During the nine years since the military commissions were first announced, military prosecutors have brought only six cases to completion, four of them by plea bargain. Two convictions from 2008 are still only at the first level of appeal. Federal courts, by contrast, have prosecuted hundreds of terrorism-related offenses during the same period, convicting 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, among many others.
Many family members of 9/11 victims have spoken out in favor of civilian trials both because they support fair trials in the time-tested federal system and also because they want to be able to witness the proceedings.
"Trying the 9/11 case in New York made sense because it is where the crime happened and where most of the family members of the victims live," Prasow said. "Now with the trial taking on a military base, far away, many of those affected will be shut out of the process."

Iraq: Security Forces Raid Press Freedom Group

Iraq: Security Forces Raid Press Freedom Group

Equipment, Documents Seized in 2 a.m. Break-In

(New York) - Iraqi authorities should immediately investigate a raid by security forces on the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO), a prominent Iraqi press freedom group, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch also called on the government to ensure the speedy and safe return of all seized equipment and documents.

At about 2 a.m. on February 23, 2011, more than 20 armed men, some of them wearing brown military uniforms and red berets, and others wearing black military uniforms with skull-and-cross-bones insignia on their helmets, pulled up in Humvees outside the group's office in Baghdad and broke in, a witness told Human Rights Watch. The security forces conducted a destructive search of the office that lasted more than an hour and seized the organization's computers, external hard drives, cameras, cell phones, CDs, documents, and several flak jackets and helmets marked "Press," the witness said.
"This raid on the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory shows the contempt of Iraqi authorities for groups that challenge the state's human rights record," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
A spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command confirmed to Human Rights Watch that the men were part of the Iraqi army but gave few other details.
Ziyad al-Ajili, the group's executive director, told Human Rights Watch that the authorities "were obviously sending us a message to stop our work of supporting journalists.... This kind of governmental intimidation is precisely what we try to shed light on." In Iraqi television interviews over the days leading up to the raid, al-Ajili voiced support for the right of Iraqis to protest peacefully and the media's right to report on the protests.
Human Rights Watch visited the group's office the morning after the raid and saw extensive damage, including broken furniture, destroyed equipment, kicked-in doors, and ripped-up posters and literature for the organization's events, such as their annual "Press Courage Awards." Framed photographs of journalists killed in Iraq since 2003 were strewn on the floor, covered in broken glass.
Human Rights Watch expressed concern that authorities would not return the computer hard drives and other electronic data storage devices seized from the group.
Al-Ajili said he fears that the authorities used the raid as a pretext to close the office, which serves as an informal gathering point for local journalists. In late January, the group held an awards ceremony in Baghdad, honoring investigative journalists who had uncovered corruption and other wrongdoing.
Although improvements in security since 2008 have reduced the assaults against media workers, journalists and press freedom advocates remain at risk in Iraq. On February 21, Human Rights Watch released a survey report, "At a Crossroads: Human Rights in Iraq Eight Years After the US-led Invasion," which documents attacks against media and press restrictions. The report calls on the government to protect the rights of journalists and to amend its penal code and other laws that violate freedom of speech.

Stop the presses, literally in Iraq

Stop the presses, literally in Iraq

The US military praises Iraqi security forces as they crack down on press freedom.

The US has remained largely silent following Iraq's recent crackdown on press freedom [GALLO/GETTY] The first months of this year have been grim for free speech in Iraq. As revolts swept across the Middle East and North Africa, they spread to Iraqi cities and towns, but took on a very different cast. In February, in places like Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul and Tikrit, protesters took to the streets, intent on reform - focused on ending corruption and the chronic shortages of food, water, electricity and jobs - but not toppling the government of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. The response by government security forces, who have arrested, beaten, and shot protesters, leaving hundreds dead or wounded, however, was similar to that of other autocratic rulers around the region. Attacks by Iraqi forces on freedom of the press, in the form of harassment, detention, and assaults on individual journalists, raids of radio stations, the offices of newspapers and press freedom groups have also shown the dark side of Maliki's regime. Many journalists have been prevented from covering protests or have curtailed their reporting in response to brutality, raising the spectre of a return to the days of Saddam Hussein's regime when press freedom was a fiction. Maliki's US allies, however, have turned a blind eye to the violence and repression, with the top spokesman for the US military in Iraq praising the same Iraqi units which eyewitnesses have identified as key players in the crackdown while ignoring the outrages attributed to them. In addition to providing training to these units, the US military is currently focused on upgrading the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces, including the creation a national intelligence and operations centre and more sophisticated use and understanding of social media, which some fear may further increase state repression. Maliki cracks down After ousting long-time dictator Saddam Hussein from power in April 2003, the US government pumped an estimated half a billion dollars or more, much of it by way of the US defence department, into the development of a national press in Iraq. The Pentagon's plan, as documents obtained by the National Security Archive show, was to dominate the media landscape in cooperation with a friendly Iraqi national government. In spite of this, an initial bloom of independent media outlets created a vibrant environment for journalism in post-Saddam Iraq. Sectarian divisions, a lethal insurgency, and governmental interference followed, however, and took an increasing toll on the free press. "Even before February's surge of violence, the deteriorating situation had caught the attention of the world's media monitors," writes Sherry Ricchiardi, an expert on the press in the Middle East, in a newly issued report to the Centre for International Media Assistance on "Iraq's News Media After Saddam". Samer Muscati, a researcher for Human Rights Watch's Middle East division who just completed a fact-finding mission in Iraq, echoed this, noting that - while more journalists were killed in attacks during the height of Iraq's insurgency - the strengthening of the Iraqi government has led to different hazards for reporters. "They're at more risk, now, of being harassed or interrogated or targeted by security forces or their proxies," he told me by telephone. Reports suggest that Maliki is now intent on dismantling much of what remains of the free press in Iraq. At 2 a.m. on February 23, 20 armed men, clad in distinctive uniforms topped by red berets or helmets bearing a skull and cross-bones, burst into the Baghdad offices of the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, an Iraqi press freedom group. For more than an hour they tore apart the facility and confiscated computers, external hard drives, cameras, cell phones and documents, according to a detailed report by Human Rights Watch. Forty-eight hours later, on what was billed as a "Day of Rage", Iraqi security forces detained 300 leading journalists, lawyers, artists and intellectuals who took part in or covered the protests over domestic issues and government accountability. Four journalists who were picked up long after leaving the protests in Baghdad's Tahrir Square told the Washington Post that troops operating out of the headquarters of an army intelligence unit had beaten them and threatened them with execution. Reporters also had their cameras and memory cards confiscated, Muscati told me. Other assaults on press freedom, including attacks on radio and television stations and the roughing up of reporters, took place all across the country. In early March, following another round of demonstrations, members of Iraq's Federal Police Force and the Baghdad Operation Command, a special force controlled by Maliki, arrived at offices of the Iraqi Nation party and the Iraqi Communist party – two political parties critical of the prime minister. They were told they had 24 hours to vacate the premises. The publicly-owned buildings were being turned over to the Iraqi Ministry of Defence. Jassin Helfi, a leader of the Communist party, said that their offices and the headquarters of the party's newspaper were targeted following a summit between Maliki's party and the Communist party's leadership. "The objective of the meeting was to try and convince us not to participate in the demonstrations, and when we did, our punishment was the order to close our offices," Helfi told the New York Times. National pride In the days after the crackdown, I talked with Major General Jeffrey Buchanan, the chief spokesman for the United States Forces-Iraq (USF-I), and asked him about Iraq's army intelligence units and Federal Police Force. He had a markedly different view of the US-trained security forces that have reportedly been deployed to squelch dissent and talked to me about his own personal relationship with one of the units. Involved in training Iraqi forces almost every year since 2003 (the only exception being 2007), Buchanan told me by telephone: "I personally was involved in training the Federal Police a number of years ago and it's pretty inspirational seeing them on several subsequent tours and how much progress they have made." Buchanan also made special reference to the instruction provided by NATO advisers to both street-level federal policemen and leaders in higher headquarters, singling out Italy's Carabinieri for their contribution.  "They have helped to build a Federal Police Force that is the pride of the country," he said. Seen by the US military as a key to freeing up the Iraqi Army from policing duties, the Federal Police have received instruction, according to Buchanan, "on everything from marksmanship, patrolling procedures, arrest procedures, etc. all the way up to counter-terrorism operations." As for the Iraqi Army's intelligence units, Buchanan told me that, at this very moment, the US is heavily involved in upgrading their capabilities. "This is actually one of our major focus areas for the remainder of 2011," he said. The Iraqi government already has an impressive intelligence gathering capability when it comes to human intelligence (called HUMINT by the US military), Buchanan explained to me, but lacks a comprehensive, national computer-based system for collecting, analysing and disseminating that information. "Somebody who may be running sources as part of a HUMINT network in Mosul," he said offering an example, might keep that information in notebook and might never send it on to authorities in Baghdad. As a result, the US military is helping the Iraqi security forces develop a national intelligence and operations centre to share information across agencies and throughout the country, creating a massive government database. Samer Muscati says there are definite accountability issues, even if US forces are scheduled to leave Iraq this year. "If the US is training these troops it has a responsibility to make sure that they're trained in ways that respect people's human rights, respect due process, and don't lead to abusive behaviours or coercive methods," he told me. In an email interview, Sherry Ricchiardi suggested that the US military could better train Iraqi security forces on how to deal with the media, specifically breaking news situations where military and police have often focused on thwarting reporters' efforts to cover stories. Facebook friends Like other countries across the region, social media has played a major role in activist organising in Iraq. The Washington Post noted that the same progressive young Iraqis who organised the February 25 "Day of Rage" that brought tens of thousands, from all across the country, into the streets saw their Facebook group leap from 700 followers to 4,000 in a country with extremely limited internet access (another group they started had, by mid-March, 10,000 members). Since then, Facebook has played a widening role in the protest movement. In Egypt, the Mubarak regime shut down the internet in an attempt to squelch dissent. In Libya, Tunisia and Bahrain, the governments have all taken steps to censor or stifle internet-aided activism. In Iraq, the US military is currently instructing the Iraqi government on more effective and sophisticated use of the internet. "We, right now, are dealing with the ministry of defence to help them understand how to employ Facebook," said Buchanan. The goal, he said, was for the Iraqi military to more effectively engage with Iraqi citizens, but as with the training offered to Iraqi police, fears exist that it could be employed for more sinister purposes. Human Rights Watch's Muscati explained that protest organisers in Baghdad said that they've seen on-line countermeasures employed against their organising efforts on Facebook. "People are being targeted via social media," Muscati said. "Abuses by the security forces and others are happening now. Even though Iraq is not as sophisticated as other governments in terms of its use of social media, it seems to be effectively countering the protests to some extent." Facts on the ground "Conditions on the ground continue to worsen for Iraq's journalists," Sherry Ricchiardi told me. This is backed up by figures released, last month, by the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory which counted more than 160 attacks on reporters, including 33 arrests or detentions and 40 instances of obstruction or the confiscation or damaging of equipment, over just two weeks. Additionally, according to Muscati, state security forces have killed more than 17 protesters and injured more than 250 persons during the recent unrest. General Buchanan talked about democracy, dissent, and protests in Iraq only obliquely, preferring to focus on what the Iraqi government was learning from demonstrations elsewhere in the region. He said that unrest throughout the Middle East and North Africa had "reinforced the Iraqis' understanding of what democracy is all about." While noting that Iraq's media was important to keeping the Maliki regime accountable to the people, Buchanan failed to address the severe crackdown on press freedom or the violence against journalists and indirectly mentioned only that the Iraqi "government is wrestling with how do they do that [allow for press freedom] and ensure protection of the people at the same time." Sherry Ricchiardi sees the recent repression in starker terms.  "It is part of the orchestrated crackdown on media," she wrote to me.  "The [Iraqi] government and security forces appear to be getting bolder in attacks on media." When asked if General Lloyd Austin, the commander of US forces in Iraq, had addressed the issue of media repression with his Iraqi counterparts, Capt. Dan Churchill, a spokesman for US forces in Iraq, explained to me that the general applauded the Iraqi government's "decision to investigate alleged incidents of excessive force by the Iraqi security forces." When asked for an official statement on the crackdown, Churchill responded by email: "We condemn any and all attacks on media organisations and journalists in Iraq. The protection of journalistic freedom is an essential aspect of all democratic societies." The US military continues, however, to advise and train Iraqi security forces and bolster their potential to suppress free speech. It already seems to be taking toll. "I think journalists are more reluctant to cover protests after what happened on February 25th because they're concerned for their security and they got the message that they shouldn't be doing this," Muscati said. If more journalists are silenced, more media outlets shut down and self-censorship takes hold, the results could be catastrophic. "The question now is whether Iraq will move forward on human rights and due process," Muscati told me, "or whether will revert to being a police state again." Nick Turse is an historian, essayist, investigative journalist, the associate editor of TomDispatch.com, and currently a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute. His latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books). He is also the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011415181326266737.html