Ban torture for security's sake, coalition tells Bush | csmonitor.comBan torture for security's sake, coalition tells Bush
The bipartisan group this week sought an executive order, but acknowledged change may not occur until next presidency.
By Jane Lampman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the June 27, 2008 edition
A bipartisan coalition of elder statesmen, military and national security honchos, and religious leaders is calling on the president to return to pre-9/11 standards for the treatment of prisoners.
An executive order to ban torture is essential, they say, to improve national security, shore up alliances in the war on terror, and recommit to American values.
"I've been worried for some time that the way we're conducting our struggle against terrorism was undercutting America's 'soft power' – our ability to attract others," says Joseph Nye Jr., former assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs and chair of the National Intelligence Council, in an interview. "We're not only committing something unethical, but counterproductive at the same time."
But will President Bush pay attention? For the politically savvy folks involved, it's not a strong expectation. Yet they say the stakes are too high not to move forward now and build public support and momentum. "I'm not sure the outgoing administration is going to issue an executive order," Dr. Nye adds. "But I think a new president, whether McCain or Obama, would be willing to consider it."
The coalition released its statement June 25 with more than 200 prominent signatures, including former secretaries of State George Shultz and Madeleine Albright, former secretaries of Defense Harold Brown and William Cohen, national security advisers, retired military leaders, counterterrorism experts, and religious leaders.
"We have the synergy here of realpolitik with moral values," says Linda Gustitus, president of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
The plan now is to seek broad public endorsement of the declaration in coming weeks, and then take it to the president.
Those involved see the current policy, in which CIA interrogators are not restricted by military interrogation rules, as having devastating consequences.
"Other countries have cut back their cooperation with us ... on the battlefield and in intelligence," said Alberto Mora, former general counsel of the US Navy, in a conference call with reporters. "There are serving US military officers today who are of the view that the first [two] identifiable causes of combat deaths in Iraq are Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo" because of their power as recruiting tools.
The Bush administration counters that interrogations have prevented further terrorist attacks. Responding to a question specifically on the declaration at a White House press briefing, spokeswoman Dana Perino said, "We face a very different enemy today than America has ever faced before," and "we think we have the mechanisms in place to address the issue."
Retired Gen. Paul Kern, who led the Army's internal investigation of Abu Ghraib prison, takes issue with that view. "In the investigations during the last year of my active duty, I could find no evidence that torture produces any answers that are credible and useful for commanders...."
He spoke of his 40 years in uniform following the Geneva Conventions, and said recent deviations have hurt the uniformed soldier. "This declaration of principles returns our country to the values embodied in our Constitution, which we in uniform have taken an oath to follow."
The declaration endorses the "Golden Rule" – no interrogation methods we would not want used against Americans – and one national standard for the treatment of prisoners across all agencies. It emphasizes the rule of law – no secret prisons or disappearances, and an opportunity to prisoners to prove their innocence – and calls for clarity in policy and accountability regardless of rank.
Supporters of the campaign face obstacles. Many citizens think torture is necessary to protect the country, and the administration fears failing to do what's necessary to protect Americans, says Douglas Johnson of the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, Minn.
Coalition members hope the American people will come to realize that the bifurcation between national security and moral values is a false dichotomy.
Print Story: White House says spy bill telecom protection vital on Yahoo! NewsWhite House says spy bill telecom protection vital
By Thomas Ferraro
The White House on Thursday urged the U.S. Senate to reject any bid to deny liability protection to telecommunication companies that participated in President George W. Bush's warrantless spying program.
"Failure to provide retroactive liability protection would undermine the private sector's willingness to cooperate," the White House said in a statement. "Such cooperation is essential to protecting the country from another terrorist attack."
A bill to revamp U.S. spy laws and protect telecommunication companies from potentially billions of dollars in damages from privacy lawsuits easily cleared a procedural hurdle in the Senate on late Wednesday.
But the measure, passed overwhelmingly last week by the House of Representatives, faced more Senate roadblocks and delays.
And it was uncertain if the Senate would be able to give anticipated final approval to the measure before lawmakers begin a holiday recess at the end of this week.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said, "I'm convinced we will be able to work out an agreement to complete this bill."
Democratic Sens. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut led the opposition, complaining liability protection was unwarranted. They drafted an amendment to strip it out, but appeared far short of the votes needed to prevail.
"We hope our colleagues will join us in supporting Americans' civil liberties," Feingold and Dodd said in a joint statement. They maintain the courts should determine what the companies did before dismissing any suit.
A number of companies agreed to participate in the warrantless surveillance program Bush secretly began shortly after the September 11 attacks.
About 40 lawsuits have been filed accusing AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications Inc and Sprint Nextel Corp of violating Americans' privacy rights. Damages could total in the billions of dollars.
Bush contends that any company that participated should be thanked, not punished, for helping protect the United States.
Critics charge Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in authorizing the spy program without court approval. He maintains he had the wartime power to do it. But in January 2007 he put the program under FISA court jurisdiction.
The House-passed bill would replace a temporary surveillance law that expired in February.
It would increase judicial and congressional oversight of U.S. intelligence activities and bolster privacy protection -- but not as much as civil liberties groups and a number of lawmakers want.
In addition, it would enable a federal district court to dismiss a lawsuit against a telecommunication company if the firm can produce certification that the administration told it the spying program was legal.
Since certification was provided, critics denounce the so-called compromise drafted by Democratic and Republican negotiators as a sham.
Democrats control the House and Senate. Yet they have faced election-year pressure to pass the bill, fearing failure to do so would let Republicans paint them as weak on security and force them to accept what they saw as a more objectionable earlier version of the legislation.
Storm botnet takes advantage of Valentine's Day | 21 Feb 2008 | ComputerWeekly.com
Storm botnet takes advantage of Valentine's Day
Author: Ian Grant
Posted: 17:17 21 Feb 2008
Just over a year since it was first detected, Storm, the blended malware attack, looks like becoming a major vehicle for criminals, say malware researchers.
After months of relative dormancy, traffic generated by the Storm botnet ramped up just before Valentine's Day to peak at between 4% and 5% of internet traffic, said researchers at e-mail hosting service MessageLabs, and security supplier Kaspersky Labs.
Dan Hubbard, vice-president of security research at Websense, said most Storm traffic in the past month was phishing messages. The messages tried to lure recipients into opening e-mails with subject lines such as Love Rose, Just You, I Love You, Lovetrain, My Heart, Poem About Us, Sweetest Things Aren't Things!, Valentine Day and Valentine Dad.
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The e-mails contained links that apparently went to a Valentine e-card or song that the supposed beloved had chosen. Clicking on the link may well have delivered a card or song, but it also installed malware on the user's PC to capture keystrokes, load viruses, copy and transmit or delete files, and enrol the PC as part of Storm's botnet.
Storm uses social engineering techniques - typically temptation and falsely based trust in unsolicited e-mail messages - to lure people to infectious websites. Once a visiting PC is infected, the code hides itself on the user's PC. Using a variety of methods it then goes on to infect and remember other PCs, thus setting up a peer-to-peer botnet.
Each infected PC carries the entire Storm malcode. This means there is no central "mothership" to detect and keep off the internet. Once the botnet is set up, the owners can seed infected PCs with a malcode program to capture keystrokes, copy, transmit or delete files.
Botnets can be hired by anybody.
Several researchers suggested this Valentine's Day was the first example of botnets being hired by criminals on a large scale. In effect, Storm is becoming the virtual internet service provider for the criminal class, they say.
According to Hubbard, Storm's success rate has been remarkable around one in three messages resulted in an infection, making it attractive to criminals.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, an IT security company, said Storm's owners are now showing less care in coding, despite the huge number of variations they have brought out. This was a symptom of Storm's maturity as a product. "It is almost as if they always have another version in the pipeline. It is now about driving cost down and getting the job done," he said.
Cluley said what distinguished Storm was the "ferocity" with which its developers have combined different techniques to make Storm a means to make money. They do this by renting it to criminals who sell pornography or counterfeit products, extort money from banks and gambling companies whose website they block, and who steal personal details to commit fraud, among others.
Almost all the Storm traffic comes from as many as a million home PCs connected to broadband networks, researchers said. The chances of cleansing them all are remote. That means Storm may have become pervasive, said Mark Murtagh, technical director of Websense.
Its pervasiveness, its persistence, its technology and its management make Storm impossible to defeat purely with technology, researchers say. Because Storm depends on people clicking to connect to an insecure website, users will have to stop doing that, and law enforcement and police have to trace and arrest the Storm gang, they say.
But there is no globally enforceable legal injection against developing products such as Storm, Murtagh said. "We have to hope that the criminals break some other law connected to pornography, paedophilia, counterfeiting or gambling so that the police can act."
Researchers note that Storm's owners "have a life" outside computers. All Storm attacks to date have related to social events such as Valentine's Day, New Year, and news. "The Olympics promises to be huge (for Storm)," said Hubbard. Then there's Easter, the US election, and ad hoc news events.
So far, the attacks have related to Western social events, and English in particular. But as home computer populations grow in India, China and Eastern Europe, Storm is likely to find fresh markets.
Corporate networks, which are better defended than home PCs, contribute relatively little Storm traffic. That does not mean chief information security officers can sleep easy. Any staff member who uses a home PC for work could inadvertently introduce the malware to the company. The company still needs to protect both entrance and exit points on its networks, and staff and their family need to practise safe surfing.
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Print Story: APNewsBreak: US asks to rewrite detainee evidence on Yahoo! NewsAPNewsBreak: US asks to rewrite detainee evidence
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
The Bush administration wants to rewrite the official evidence against Guantanamo Bay detainees, allowing it to shore up its cases before they come under scrutiny by civilian judges for the first time.
The government has stood behind the evidence for years. Military review boards relied on it to justify holding hundreds of prisoners indefinitely without charge. Justice Department attorneys said it was thoroughly and fairly reviewed.
Now that federal judges are about to review the evidence, however, the government says it needs to make changes.
The decision follows last week's Supreme Court ruling, which held that detainees have the right to challenge their detention in civilian court, not just before secret military panels. At a closed-door meeting with judges and defense attorneys this week, government lawyers said they needed time to add new evidence and make other changes to evidentiary documents known as "factual returns."
Attorneys for the detainees criticized the idea, saying the government is basically asking for a last-minute do-over.
"It's sort of an admission that the original returns were defective," said attorney David Remes, who represents many detainees and attended Wednesday's meeting. "It's also an admission that the government thinks it needs to beef up the evidence."
Justice Department spokesman Erik Ablin declined to comment on the plan. The discussions were confirmed by several attorneys and officials who attended or were briefed on the meeting with the judges and defense lawyers.
"It's a totally fishy maneuver that suggests that the government wants, at the 11th hour, to get its ducks in a row," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney representing several detainees. He was briefed on the plan.
The documents include the government's accusations and summaries of the evidence that was presented to the military review panel. The records were filed in federal court in many detainee cases in 2004 and 2005, before Congress stripped those courts of the authority to hold hearings.
Detainees' attorneys who have reviewed the records criticized much of the evidence as hearsay cobbled together from bounty hunters and border guards who accused people of being terrorists in exchange for reward money.
At Guantanamo Bay, the traditional rules of evidence do not apply in trials run by the military. In a Washington federal courtroom, they would.
The government wants to submit new records, which would allow it to add new intelligence and expand its reasoning for holding the detainees. Since the hearings will decide whether the detainees are lawfully being held now — not whether they were lawfully being held over the past several years — the government wants to provide the court its newest, best evidence.
It will be up to federal judges to decide whether the Justice Department can rewrite those documents.
The question is part of a broader dispute over what the upcoming hearings will look like. Attorneys for the detainees want judges to review all the evidence and decide whether each prisoner should be released. The government believes the judges should look only at limited evidence prepared by officials at Guantanamo Bay.
That's why defense attorneys are troubled by the idea that authorities now want to rewrite that evidence. If the court limits arguments to just the government's record, and gives the government a chance to improve that record, they believe the detainees' chances will be hurt.
"They're not just talking about making a little supplement where they've learned something new," said attorney Charles H. Carpenter, who was in the meeting. "They're talking about possibly amending every single one."
Print Story: Report: Exams prove abuse, torture in Iraq, Gitmo on Yahoo! NewsReport: Exams prove abuse, torture in Iraq, Gitmo
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 39 minutes ago
Medical examinations of former terrorism suspects held by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, found evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders, according to a human rights group.
For the most extensive medical study of former U.S. detainees published so far, Physicians for Human Rights had doctors and mental health professionals examine 11 former prisoners. The group alleges finding evidence of U.S. torture and war crimes and accuses U.S. military health professionals of allowing the abuse of detainees, denying them medical care and providing confidential medical information to interrogators that they then exploited.
"Some of these men really are, several years later, very severely scarred," said Barry Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Fordham University who conducted psychological tests on six of the 11 detainees covered by the study. "It's a testimony to how bad those conditions were and how personal the abuse was."
One Iraqi prisoner, identified only as Yasser, reported being subjected to electric shocks three times and being sodomized with a stick. His thumbs bore round scars consistent with shocking, according to the report obtained by The Associated Press. He would not allow a full rectal exam.
Another Iraqi, identified only as Rahman, reported he was humiliated by being forced to wear women's underwear, stripped naked and paraded in front of female guards, and was shown pictures of other naked detainees. The psychological exam found that Rahman suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had sexual problems related to his humiliation, the report said.
The report came as the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed documents showing military lawyers warned the Pentagon that methods it was using post-9/11 violated military, U.S. and international law. Those objections were overruled by the top Pentagon lawyer.
President Bush said in 2004, when the prison abuse was revealed, that it was the work of "a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values." Bush and other U.S. officials have consistently denied that the U.S. tortures its detainees.
Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass., that investigates abuse around the world and advocates for global health and human rights, did not identify the 11 former prisoners to protect their privacy. Seven were held in Abu Ghraib between late 2003 and summer of 2004, a period that coincides with the known abuse of prisoners at the hands of some of their American jailers. Four of the prisoners were held at Guantanamo beginning in 2002 for one to almost five years. All 11 were released without criminal charges.
Those examined alleged that they were tortured or abused, including sexually, and described being shocked with electrodes, beaten, shackled, stripped of their clothes, deprived of food and sleep, and spit and urinated on.
The abuse of some prisoners by their American captors is well documented by the government's own reports. Once-secret documents show that the Pentagon and Justice Department allowed, at least for a time, forced nakedness, isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation at both Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and at Abu Ghraib.
Because the medical examiners did not have access to the 11 patients' medical histories prior to their imprisonment, it was not possible to know whether any of the prisoners' ailments, disabilities and scars pre-dated their confinement. The U.S. military says an al-Qaida training manual instructs members, if captured, to assert they were tortured during interrogation.
However, doctors and mental health professionals stated they could link the prisoners' claims of abuse while in U.S. detention to injuries documented by X-rays, medical exams and psychological tests.
"The level of the time, thoroughness and rigor of the exams left me personally without question about the credibility of the individuals," said Dr. Allen Keller, one of the doctors who conducted the exams, in an interview with the AP. "The findings on the physical and psychological exams were consistent with what they reported."
All 11 former detainees reported being subjected to:
_Stress positions, including being suspended for hours by the arms or tightly shackled for days.
_Prolonged isolation and hooding or blindfolding, a form of sensory deprivation.
_Extreme heat or cold. _Threats against themselves, their families or friends from interrogators or guards.
Ten said they were forced to be naked, some for days or weeks. Nine said they were subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation. At least six said they were threatened with military working dogs, often while naked. Four reported being sodomized, subjected to anal probing, or threatened with rape.
The patients underwent intensive, two-day long exams following standards and methods used worldwide to document torture.
"We found clear physical and psychological evidence of torture and abuse, often causing lasting suffering," he said.
Keller, who directs the Bellevue/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture, said the treatment the detainees reported were "eerily familiar" to stories from other torture survivors around the world. He said the sexual humiliation of the prisoners was often the most traumatic experience.
Most former detainees are out of reach of Western doctors because they are either in Iraq or have been returned to their home countries from Guantanamo.
___
On the Net:
The report: http://www.brokenlives.info
