3,500 confront Bush at Portland fundraiser
Compiled By John Lapp
Aug. 26 (AGR)— Thousands of boisterous, but generally
orderly, protesters angered by a wide range of Bush policies jeered
the presidential motorcade Thursday, Aug. 21, as it rolled into the
gated University of Portland campus for a $2,000-a-plate fund-raising
lunch.
Riot police stood outside the Chiles Center on the campus, where US
President George W. Bush appeared at a fundraising event. Demonstrators
protested Bush policies on issues ranging from Iraq to the economy,
gay rights, civil rights and the environment.
“I’ve never been to a protest before in my life,” said
Joel Spinhirne of Hood River, who opposes Bush. “I’m just
an ordinary middle-class guy, but things are happening in an outrageous
fashion. I read the paper, I watch the evening news, and I just had
to be here.”
Amid the drumbeats, burning flags and signs deriding President Bush,
there was a cheerleading squad. Dressed in pink and shaking pompoms,
two dozen women taunted the president’s motorcade Thursday as
it rolled past the thousands of protesters gathered near the University
of Portland campus.
“U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi,” the Pink Code Cheerleaders
yelled, before intoning that the war in Iraq, the USA Patriot Act
and Bush himself were ugly.
The message was harsher from a band of anarchists, who set off fireworks
and burned two US flags.
March organizers estimated the crowd at about 3,500 and reported up
to seven scattered arrests. The Portland Police Bureau confirmed 10
arrests.
Protesters marched down Willamette Boulevard to the campus.
Some wore Bush masks. One sign read: “My Apache helicopter killed
your Iraqi honor student.” Another said: “Somewhere in Texas
a village is missing its idiot.”
Police came out in a very heavy presence Thursday. They rode bicycles,
horses, and all-terrain vehicles. They erected an eight-foot-tall
fence topped with barbed wire around the campus. On the other side
of the fence, police in riot gear were stationed about 50 feet apart.
Thursday morning, people living in the University Park neighborhood
of Portland learned police were serious about securing the streets
around the University of Portland in preparation for the mass of people
who were coming to protest President Bush’s policies. They woke
up to find their parked cars had been towed from the street the night
before.
Four officers on the dome of the Chiles Center, where Bush raised
an estimated $1 million for his re-election campaign, began videotaping
the crowd. Protesters then began to chant: “Jump! Jump!”
Organizers said police approached demonstrators in Columbia
Park after the march, took one woman into the street and pepper-sprayed
several people who tried to interfere. Portland Police Bureau spokesman
Sgt. Brian Schmautz said he had no details of the incident.
Despite 10 arrests and the use of pepper spray to clear a Columbia
park, Portland police said Thursday’s four-hour protest during
Bush’s two-hour visit was fairly orderly. Sgt. Brian Schmautz,
a Portland police spokesman, attributed this to three factors: the
president was only in town for a few hours, not overnight; he spoke
at a locale outside heavy downtown traffic; and the venue for the
president’s visit created little opportunity for conflict between
protesters and participants.
Later, demonstrators stopped a bus loaded with campaign donors attempting
to leave the area, leading to a few arrests.
Another group sat in the middle of North Willamette Boulevard as police
tried to reopen the street to traffic. A police captain persuaded
them to get up without a confrontation.
“I think we were all pleased,” said Assistant Chief Derrick
Foxworth. “We had a good plan.” This year, police made provisions
to move donors past the protesters and into the fund-raiser. People
attending the event arrived at the campus in limousines, luxury cars
and three charter buses, using a stretch of North Portsmouth Avenue
that was closed to other traffic.
“I’m actually quite astounded that he (Bush) showed up,”
said Stella Anderson, 32, of Portland, an anti-Bush demonstrator.
“I think that he would have avoided Portland altogether if we
had done our job right the first time.” Anderson was referring
to a protest last year in Portland against Bush, which ended with
mass police violence and many injuries.
Small groups of Bush supporters showed up as well. A man on a red
pickup covered with flags shouted: “We love Bush. We support
our troops. We pledge allegiance to our flag.”
“I’m mad, and I’m embarrassed. We just need to make
clear that we’re not all supportive of this regime and what it’s
doing,” said protester Jennifer Murdock, of Portland, who was
there with her 2-year-old daughter.
Geoff McNamara, a spokesman for the group Portland Says No to Bush,
considered the gathering a success. “We did what we wanted to
do — to have a highly visible presence,” he said, “and
to show Bush that he can’t show his face here without mass opposition.”
Sources: Associated Press, New York Times,
Portland Oregonian, Reuters
Britain DNA database pledges
to defend confidentiality
By Steve Connor
Aug. 23— The scientist in charge of setting
up Britain’s DNA databank, which will collect information on the
lifestyle, health, and genes of 500,000 people, said he will oppose
any attempt by police or the courts to gain access to the data.
In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Dr. John Newton said
strict confidentiality is essential if the UK Biobank project is to
enjoy the public confidence it needs to succeed. Three years ago, police
forced medical scientists in Edinburgh to hand over the confidential
data of another research project to prosecute a volunteer in the study.
Critics of the UK Biobank, which aims to compare the influence of genes
and lifestyle on the health of half a million volunteers, says there
is nothing to stop this information also being used by the police, employers
or insurance companies.
There is no specific legislation in the UK for protecting personal genetic
information from insurance companies and employers, and police have
special exemption from data protection laws to access medical records
in “exceptional circumstances.” Dr. Newton, the chief executive
of UK Biobank, said: “The police would have access to our data
only if they had a court order. If a High Court judge ruled it was in
the public interest for the police to have access to our data they could
have access.
“We would not give police access unless there was a High Court
order, and we would actually argue against this as much as we possibly
could, which might include taking legal advice and getting our own barristers.
We would do everything we could to prevent it. But ultimately if a High
Court judge rules that it’s in the public interest, one would have
to accept that, but it would have [to] be exceptional circumstances,”
he said.
UK Biobank is among the largest medical projects started in Britain.
A total of £61m has been assigned to it by the government’s
Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, a private medical research
charity. Doctors will soon begin to recruit volunteers, aged between
45 and 69, who will be asked about their health, physical and social
environment and lifestyle, as well as giving a blood sample for DNA
analysis.
Each man and woman in the study will be closely monitored over 10, 20
or 30 years, and their NHS records will be used to keep track on anyone
who moves from one part of the country to another.
“Many of our participants will inevitably develop the common disabling
and fatal diseases such as heart disease, cancer, arthritis, dementia
and so on,” Dr. Newton said.
“The biobank data record will allow scientists to look back in
time to see how those who became ill differed from those who did not.
This in turn will give important clues to the cause of disease, and
to specific disease mechanisms. One person’s diabetes is not the
same as another person’s, and the genetic information will help
us to match treatment to the person’s disease more closely.”
With the final completion of the human genome earlier this year, a project
to use this information to study illnesses that are influenced by both
genes and lifestyle was inevitable, Dr. Newton said.
“You have to have something like Biobank. It was a conclusion reached
in the UK three years ago, and has been reached in countries around
the world at about the same time. The most significant thing the volunteers
in the study are doing is giving us access to their medical records
so we can track their health, with extremely strong safeguards in terms
of data security and confidentiality,” said Newton.
Every consultation about UK Biobank has shown people are anxious about
the misuse of confidential medical records when they become the raw
data of scientists. Helen Wallace, a campaigner for Genewatch UK, said
the basis on which the police might be granted access to Biobank UK
with a warrant remains unclear.
“Addressing this issue is particularly important because the government
sees the biobank as a pilot study for a national genetic database, potentially
including the NHS,” Dr. Wallace said. “This raises the prospect
of future erosions of civil rights, by using DNA collected for medical
or research reasons for citizen surveillance or forensic purposes.”
But Dr. Newton said there were no plans for a national biobank covering
the entire population. He also questioned whether the information held
on UK Biobank would be of any interest to the police.
“People fear police will take a DNA sample from the scene of a
crime, do a DNA test on it, then go to Biobank and run that DNA against
our 500,000 and say, ‘OK, it was you’, and fish them out.
As far as I understand it, they won’t be able to do that. We will
not have done the entire DNA sequence of every participant, so we will
simply not have the information on the same genetic variables that the
police use [for DNA fingerprinting]. It is very difficult to say ‘never,’
but I can’t see how Biobank will help police.”
Alastair Kent, director of the Genetics Interest Group, agreed.
“To some extent it’s a red herring,” he said. “In
theory, it seems a problem but in practice it’s not going to be
an issue because if the police have got somebody whose identify they
want to check they would have to know the name of that person.”
Dr. Newton said the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust
are determined to demonstrate they will vigorously defend the confidentiality
of the data collected by UK Biobank. Asked whether he would routinely
oppose every application to have access to the information, Dr. Newton
said: “Yes, absolutely. The arguments would have to be very convincing
and our legal advisers have said this is what they would do.”
Source: Independent (UK)
Victory Act: one step forward, two
steps back
Compiled by Melita Kyriakou
Aug. 22 (AGR)— Just when it appeared US lawmakers themselves
were starting to resist the administration’s tendency post-9/11
to make laws that trample on civil rights, another bid to expand government’s
police powers has surfaced, while civil liberties organizations continue
to criticize the Patriot Act. And in the wake of Attorney General
John Ashcroft’s tour of the nation to drum up support for the
Patriot Act, a new Amnesty International report says Washington continues
to ignore global norms of human rights.
The draft law making the rounds on Capitol Hill is the Vital Interdiction
of Criminal Terrorist Organizations (VICTORY) Act of 2003, which could
be introduced to Congress this fall. The draft is a complex 89-page
document that, like the Patriot Act — the massive anti-terror
law passed overwhelmingly six weeks after the terror attacks of Sept.
11—would amend various existing statutes, ostensibly to allow
law enforcement to work more efficiently.
Apparently prepared by the office of Sen. Orrin Hatch, (R-UT) the
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and floated by a group
of Republican senators, the Victory Act would grant authorities more
power in the name of Bush’s “War on Terror” to seize
records and secretly listen to conversations in a bid to stop the
drug trafficking that the law’s backers say finances terrorist
activities.
It would also make it easier for investigators to freeze the assets
of alleged drug traffickers or terrorists and to convict those accused
of laundering money through informal networks or “hawalas,”
such as the ones said to have financed the activities of Osama bin
Laden’s al-Qaida.
Contradiction in Congress
The new bill’s appearance seems to contradict Congress’
latest moves against the Patriot Act. Last month, members from both
sides of the House of Representatives voted to add an amendment —
that still must be approved by the Senate and the president —
to the controversial law that would block “sneak-and-peek”
powers that allow federal agents to search homes, confiscate property,
and monitor computers without peoples’ knowledge.
A bill has also been introduced in the House to exclude bookstore
and library records from those that could be subpoenaed by law enforcement
without prior notification of the person whose records were being
seized, a provision challenged as unconstitutional by the ACLU which
filed suit in Detroit last month.
Critics have wasted no time taking aim at the new Victory Act. A Democratic
aide for the House Judiciary Committee said the linking of drug-related
crime and terrorism raises questions about the draft.
“This bill would treat drug possession as a ‘terrorist offense’
and drug dealers as ‘narco-terrorist kingpins,’” the
aide argued. “To say that terrorist groups use a small percentage
of the drug trafficking in the United States to finance terrorism
may be a fair point, but this bill would allow the government to prosecute
most drug cases as terrorism cases.”
Concluded the aide, “It really seems to be more about a political
agenda to jail drug users than a serious attempt to stop terrorists.”
American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Jameel Jaffer added,
“Absolutely nothing would prevent the attorney general from using
these subpoenas to obtain the records of people who have no connection
to terrorism, drug trafficking, or crime of any sort.”
Ashcroft takes it to the streets
The rebuke of the Patriot Act’s expansion of agents’ spying
powers is one reason, experts say, that Attorney General John Ashcroft
embarked last week on a nation-wide tour to win back support for the
Act, which has also been censured by three state legislatures and
more than 150 municipalities. The language of those local Patriot
Act resolutions ranges from statements affirming a commitment to the
rights guaranteed in the Constitution, to directives to local law
enforcement not to cooperate with federal agents involved in investigations
deemed to be unconstitutional.
Ashcroft began his tour in Washington, DC, to put out the message
personally that the Patriot Act has greatly aided the fight against
terrorism and has not infringed on constitutional rights or civil
liberties. Speaking at the conservative-leaning think tank American
Enterprise Institute, he lauded the achievements of law enforcement
in preventing another terrorist attack in the nearly two years since
Sept. 11, 2001, and in tracking down suspected terrorist cells in
Buffalo, NY and Portland, OR.
“We have built a new ethos of justice, one rooted in cooperation,
nurtured by coordination, and focused on a single overarching goal:
the prevention of terrorist attacks,” Ashcroft said. “All
of this has been done within the safeguards or our Constitution, and
the guarantees that our Constitution provides, protecting American
freedom.”
Another reason for the tour, analysts add, is that elections are scheduled
for 2004. “An attorney general going on the road, away from his
official duties, to favorably spin policies violative of civil liberties
is troubling, to say the least,” said Laura W. Murphy, director
of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative
office, in a statement this week.
“It raises two serious questions: is this tour political in nature,
and how prudent is it to be spending public money on a Patriot Act
charm offensive?”
The law, she added, goes beyond the fight against terrorism. “As
the New York Times reported, it’s been used — over the objections
of the State Department — to seize funds stolen by American con
artists and stashed in overseas accounts.”
“By the attorney general’s own admission to the judiciary
committee, the Act is actively being applied in non-terrorism related
investigations, even though terrorism was the sole justification for
the bill for most of the lawmakers who voted for it.”
Yet even before Ashcroft took to the road last Tuesday, the Justice
Department had begun defending the Patriot Act. The department recently
posted a new web site (www.lifeandliberty.gov), with questions and
answers addressing many of the complaints critics have about the Patriot
Act.
Justice has also suggested the 93 US attorneys around the country
hold town hall meetings to reach out to people in their jurisdictions,
to try to reassure them there is no threat to law-abiding people in
the Patriot Act.
Sources: IPS, ABCNEWS
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