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Confess or die, US tells jailed Britons
By Martin Bright, Kamal Ahmed, and Peter Beaumont
July 6— The two British terrorist suspects facing a secret US
military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay will be given a choice: plead guilty
and accept a 20-year prison sentence, or be executed if found guilty.
American legal sources close to the process said that the prisoners’
dilemma was intended to encourage maximum “cooperation.”
The news comes as Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, prepares
to urge US Secretary of State Colin Powell to repatriate the two Britons.
He will say that they should face a fair trial here under English law.
Backed by Home Secretary David Blunkett, Straw will make it clear that
the government opposes the death penalty and wants to see both men tried
“under normal judicial process.”
Lawyers acting for Moazzam Begg, 35, from Sparkbrook, Birmingham, and
Feroz Abassi, 23, from Croydon, said that any confessions gathered while
the men were kept without charge or access to lawyers in Bagram airbase
in Afghanistan and Camp Delta in Cuba would have no status in international
law and would be inadmissible in British courts.
Gareth Peirce, who acts for Moazzam Begg, said: “Anything that
any human being says or admits under threat of brutality is regarded
internationally and nationally as worthless. It makes the process an
abuse. Moazzam Begg had a year in Bagram airbase and then six months
in Guantanamo Bay. If this treatment happened for an hour in a British
police station, no evidence gathered would be admissible,” she
said.
Stephen Jakobi of Fair Trials Abroad, which is leading the campaign
for the two men, said: “Our concern is that there will be no meaningful
way of testing the evidence against these people. The US Defense Department
has set itself up as prosecution, judge, and defense counsel and has
created the rules of trial. This is patently a kangaroo court.”
Begg’s family believe he was kidnapped in Pakistan by US authorities.
He was taken to Bagram on suspicion of passing funds to al-Qaida and
later transferred to Camp Delta. He has not seen a lawyer since he was
seized.
In a clear signal of the high levels of concern within the government,
the acting British ambassador in Washington, Tony Brenton, will raise
“official concern” with the White House.
According to US legal and constitutional experts, the Final Rule, the
regulations that will govern the military commissions, has rendered
a fair trial almost impossible.
Among those representing the two British men in the United States is
Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who believes
the tribunals are weighted in favor of securing guilt verdicts.
“The trial system in Guantanamo Bay allows a whole series of serious
breaches of defendant rights that would mean that they could never come
to trial in the US,” Ratner says. “First, it allows the wiretapping
of attorney-client meetings, although those wiretaps cannot actually
be used in evidence. Then there is the fact that the Pentagon ‘Appointing
Authority’ — probably US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
— has the ability to remove a judge at any time without giving
any reason.”
Among other concerns about the 50-page Final Rule, which was published
by the Department of Defense last week for governing the trials, are:
• that rules of evidence are so broad that it is left at the discretion
of the trial’s presiding officer whether to allow any evidence
he believes would be convincing to a “reasonable person” and
that that would appear to allow the admission of hearsay evidence;
• that evidence can be admitted by telephone and by pseudonym;
• that it is insisted that only security-screened civil attorneys
be allowed to appear before the court and they can also be removed at
any time.
The concerns follow allegations by Amnesty International and other human
rights groups that US detainees in Guantanamo Bay have suffered severe
abuse, including beatings that may have led to the death of two men
held at the US detention facility at Bagram.
In March, Amnesty wrote to Bush to complain about the treatment of detainees
after US military officials reportedly confirmed that post-mortem reports
in the cases of the two men who died at Bagram gave cause of death as
“homicide” and “blunt force injuries.”
Source: Observer (UK)
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Washington rolls out Big Brother database
By Gabriel Packard
New York, New York, July 2 (IPS)— The Hollywood movie Minority
Report starred Tom Cruise as a cop in a world where a trio of omnipotent
psychics predict crimes before they happen, and suspects are punished
before they can do the deed. The US government, in similar fashion,
is developing a sprawling computer system to predict terrorist activity
and identify terrorists.
The Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project will use cutting-edge
technology to automatically monitor and look for suspicious patterns
in telephone records, credit card transactions, broadcasts, phone calls,
relationships, internet use, medical files, legal information, travel
details, and a myriad of other data sources.
The information dragnet TIA — which is headed by John Poindexter,
who was convicted of several felonies, including lying to congress,
during the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal — will be spread more widely
than any other that has ever existed.
The government says the focus will be on non-citizens. But it is by
no means the only channel through which the government is looking for
access to data on foreign nationals.
In April, the press reported that US firm ChoicePoint had bought files
on millions of citizens of eight Latin American countries. The company
had been selling the data to more than a dozen government agencies,
the Department of Homeland Security in particular.
Earlier this month, ChoicePoint agreed to hand back its Mexican data
files after outrage in Mexico and a long negotiation between Mexico,
the US government and ChoicePoint executives.
While several of the target countries have launched investigations,
ChoicePoint continues to supply the US government with data on citizens
of Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua
and Venezuela.
”Data trafficking is a violation of the right to privacy —a
fundamental human right,” said Daniel Camacho, coordinator of the
non-governmental Commission for the Defense of Human Rights in Central
America (CODEHUCA).
”Some countries have already incorporated this right in their legislation
— for example, the United States,” he said. “For that
reason, what the (President George W.) Bush clan cannot do in their
own country, they are trying to do elsewhere.”
And unlike US citizens, foreign nationals have no representatives in
Congress to protect their interests, says Mahir Ksirsagar, a policy
analyst for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which,
incidentally, first discovered ChoicePoint’s Latin American data.
Although a lack of data protection laws enables both schemes to access
foreign data, the scope of TIA dwarfs that of ChoicePoint’s Latin
database, which is limited mainly to basic information from electoral
registers.
In fact, the Terrorism Information Awareness project is by far the most
wide-reaching data-monitoring project ever attempted, many analysts
agree.
Video cameras, for example, will feed images to a program called Human
Identification at a Distance (HumanID) which will automatically identify
individuals from up to 500 feet away using technology that recognizes
faces, irises, and a person’s unique posture and way of moving
(gait recognition). Infrared and hyperspectral technology will mean
that Big Brother will still be watching you in the dark and in all weather
conditions.
A system called EARS (Effective, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-text)
will automatically listen to and transcribe telephone conversations
and broadcasts as well as ”multi-speaker environments (e.g. communal
centers, teleconferences and meetings)”, says a report presented
to Congress last month by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency
(DARPA), the wing of the Defense Department responsible for TIA.
”With EARS,” the report brags, ”the United States could
have 1,000 times more ‘ears’ working on exploiting voice communications
than we do now.”
HumanID and EARS are just two small parts of this massive data-mining
project, which will have systems constantly patrolling nearly every
available source of information and looking for patterns and that might
indicate terrorist activity.
TIA, for example, will use a system called Scalable Social Network Analysis
(SSNA), which is designed to examine and keep track of people’s
relationships, the groups to which they belong, the people they come
in to contact with, friends of friends, and associates of associates
of associates.
A number of trials are already underway to test out the TIA system.
But the only data being used at present, says DARPA, is already legally
available to the government or is artificial data created to test particular
scenarios.
Eight of the nine agencies testing the system are units of the Department
of Defense, such as the Joint Warfare Analysis Center, and the ninth
is the CIA.
The report says that DARPA is just beginning these tests and does not
yet have any results to report.
Even though the results are not yet in, the report says that actual
use of TIA is ”likely to occur in 2004” — just six months
away.
But while the government tests its ”Minority Report”-style
program, an increasingly large body of opposition is fighting to make
sure that, in this case, life does not imitate art.
”Our country must fight terrorism, but America should not unleash
virtual bloodhounds to sniff into the financial, educational, travel
and medical reports of millions of Americans,” said Democrat senator
Ron Wyden of Oregon, speaking to reporters after a TIA review earlier
this year.
Wyden is one of three Democratic senators and a raft of interest groups
— both liberal and conservative — that oppose the TIA.
A spokesman for EPIC, one of the groups to present evidence at a recent
hearing on TIA, said his group emphasized that TIA ”looks for crimes
that have not been committed by people who have not committed crimes.”
He added that EPIC urged Congress to ask questions such as, ”What
rights do those people have? And is this project compatible with American
values?”
Also presenting evidence were groups such as the liberal American Civil
Liberties Union and the conservative Americans for Tax Reform.
Ron Wyden along with fellow Democratic senator, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin,
has pledged to block funding of TIA until Congress has a chance to thoroughly
review the project’s implications.
Another Democrat, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, has complained that TIA
takes an ”Orwellian approach.”
Pressure from these senators and non-governmental groups has already
made sure that federal agents must first get senatorial approval before
using TIA to gather information on any US citizen.
The Information Awareness Office and DARPA were also made to submit
a report on TIA to Congress May 20.
They used the opportunity to re-christen the project Terrorism Information
Awareness — it was previously called Total Information Awareness.
DARPA says that the name was changed to stop the false impression that
the aim of TIA is to gather dossiers of information on citizens.
But EPIC’s Mahir Kshirsagar remains skeptical. ”The Pentagon
is trying hard to pretend that this is just a problem of public relations,”
he said. ”But actually it is one of substance. The original name
accurately reflected what TIA is doing.”
Nefer Munoz also contributed to this story
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Extreme weather prompts unprecedented
global warming alert
July 3— In an astonishing announcement on global
warming and extreme weather, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
signaled last night that the world’s weather is going haywire.
In a startling report, the WMO, which normally produces detailed scientific
reports and staid statistics at the year’s end, highlighted record
extremes in weather and climate occurring all over the world in recent
weeks, from Switzerland’s hottest-ever June to a record month for
tornadoes in the United States —and linked them to climate change.
The unprecedented warning takes its force and significance from the
fact that it is not coming from Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth,
but from an impeccably respected UN organization that is not given to
hyperbole (though environmentalists will seize on it to claim that the
direst warnings of climate change are being borne out).
The Geneva-based body, to which the weather services of 185 countries
contribute, takes the view that events this year in Europe, America,
and Asia are so remarkable that the world needs to be made aware of
it immediately.
The extreme weather it documents, such as record high and low temperatures,
record rainfall, and record storms in different parts of the world,
is consistent with predictions of global warming. Supercomputer models
show that, as the atmosphere warms, the climate not only becomes hotter
but much more unstable. “Recent scientific assessments indicate
that, as the global temperatures continue to warm due to climate change,
the number and intensity of extreme events might increase,” the
WMO said, giving a striking series of examples.
In southern France, record temperatures were recorded in June, rising
above 40ºC in places - temperatures of 5ºC to 7ºC above
the average.
In Switzerland, it was the hottest June in at least 250 years, environmental
historians said. In Geneva, since May 29, daytime temperatures have
not fallen below 25ºC, making it the hottest June recorded.
In the United States, there were 562 May tornadoes, which caused 41
deaths. This set a record for any month. The previous record was 399
in June 1992.
In India, this year’s pre-monsoon heatwave brought peak temperatures
of 45ºC--2ºC to 5ºC above the norm. At least 1,400 people
died in India due to the hot weather. In Sri Lanka, heavy rainfall from
Tropical Cyclone 01B exacerbated wet conditions, resulting in flooding
and landslides and killing at least 300 people. The infrastructure and
economy of south-west Sri Lanka was heavily damaged. A reduction of
20-30 percent is expected in the output of low-grown tea in the next
three months.
June was also the hottest in England and Wales since 1976, with average
temperatures of 16ºC. The WMO said: “These record extreme
events [high temperatures, low temperatures and high rainfall amounts
and droughts] all go into calculating the monthly and annual averages,
which, for temperatures, have been gradually increasing over the past
100 years.
“New record extreme events occur every year somewhere in the globe,
but in recent years the number of such extremes have been increasing.
“According to recent climate-change scientific assessment reports
of the joint WMO/United Nations Environmental Program Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, the global average surface temperature has
increased since 1861. Over the 20th century the increase has been around
0.6ºC.
“New analyses of proxy data for the northern hemisphere indicate
that the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have
been the largest in any century during the past 1,000 years.”
While the trend towards warmer temperatures has been uneven over the
past century, the trend since 1976 is roughly three times that for the
whole period.
Global average land and sea surface temperatures in May 2003 were the
second highest since records began in 1880. Considering land temperatures
only, last May was the warmest on record.
It is possible that 2003 will be the hottest year ever recorded. The
ten hottest years in the 143-year-old global temperature record have
now all been since 1990, with the three hottest being 1998, 2002 and
2001.
The unstable world of climate change has long been a prediction. Now,
the WMO says, it is a reality.
Source: Independent (UK)
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