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US ‘targets minorities’
New rules amount to racial profiling - critics
By Nicholas Keung and Tracy Huffman
Jan. 7— New American security measures that require fingerprints
and photographs of millions of visitors a year won’t make the US
any safer, but will further stigmatize Canada’s landed immigrants
as potential terrorists, community activists say.
“Unfortunately, the terrorist attacks have changed our life and the
way we view things. For the US government, racial profiling seems to be
the answer to the threat,” said John Asfour, spokesperson for the
Canadian Arab Federation.
“The new rule targets racial minorities on both sides of the border
and will only further anger the enemy, so to speak.”
Kimberly Weissman, of the US Department of Homeland Security, said the
increased security measures under the United States Visitor and Immigrant
Status Indicator Technology program, or US-VISIT, are part of the administration’s
anti-terrorism initiative.
Weissman said although exemptions apply for residents of many countries,
officials may use their own discretion.
“This is not a discriminatory program,” she said. “Based
on intelligence information or national security information ... an inspector
may feel that someone needs further questioning or further processing.
... It is very situational.”
By the end of this year, the program will be implemented at all border
crossings and apply to people coming in and out of the US, Weissman said.
Alex Swann, spokesperson for Canada’s Public Safety and Emergency
Preparedness Department, played down the program’s potential impact
on Canadian travelers.
“The majority of students and workers with student visas and some
work permits should be okay as long as they have no (visa) stickers in
their passports,” he said in an interview yesterday. “The sticker
is the flag.”
Swann said Canadian officials have been working closely with their American
counterparts on border security since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the
United States and had been consulted on the launch of the program.
He said Canada has no plans yet to follow some European countries and
implement digitized fingerprints on its passports. “We take policy
based on our Canadian needs. We are not going to rule in or rule out on
that,” he said.
Critics see the new US program as an attack on civil liberties.
“The US-VISIT program is not going to make America more secure,”
said Avvy Go, of the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic.
“Real terrorists are not going to enter the States through visas
anyway, and there will always be home-grown terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh,
in their country.”
Go said Canada has already created two classes of people by requiring
landed immigrants to acquire a permanent resident card to get in and out
of the country, and the US-VISIT program is going to further stigmatize
Canada’s immigrants, who are not exempt from the new border rules.
Asfour agrees. “Under the banner of national security, the US government
has taken away the basic civil rights of its people and the rights of
others in the world. It raises serious personal privacy concerns,”
he said.
Go said Canadians should find the initiative offensive. “All our
immigrants have been screened for security concerns when they move to
Canada. Basically what the Americans are saying is, `Sorry, we don’t
trust your process and we see them as potential terrorists.’”
Source: Toronto Star
The return of ARCAD
Austin, Texas and Hamburg, Germany, Jan. 6— Newly-released
US government documents indicate that recent Pentagon research on so-called
“non-lethal” weapons is a revived version of a weapons program
that was canceled due to the Chemical Weapons Convention. Elements of
the decade-old program on incapacitating chemicals, called ARCAD (Advanced
Riot Control Agent Device), have been re-initiated by the Pentagon’s
Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate. The links that Sunshine Project
Freedom of Information Act requests have established between ARCAD and
recent research underscore how and why the Pentagon’s “non-lethal”
weapons program threatens treaty controls on chemical and biological
weapons.
In 1992, the US Army’s ARCAD program was supposed to have been
terminated because of prohibitions in the Chemical Weapons Convention,
which was then in late stages of negotiation. But it is now clear that
elements of the program continued to operate under a new guise. As of
2002, ARCAD’s legacy was being pursued with a new institutional
base -- the US Marine Corps-directed Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate
(JNLWD). Weapons development deemed legally unacceptable in 1992 has
found new life with the “non-lethal” moniker, despite US ratification
of the Chemical Weapons Convention and attacks on states alleged to
be developing chemical and biological weapons.
Building on Cold War research, by the early 1990s, US Army weapons developers
at Aberdeen Proving Ground (Maryland) were making headway in a quest
for new incapacitating chemical weapons. Foreshadowing the Moscow Theater
disaster a decade later, they reported in early 1992 that they had weaponized
chemical cocktails of powerful opiates, such as fentanyl, mixed with
supposedly safety-enhancing chemicals (opiate antagonists, similar to
those used to treat heroin overdose). The weapons were designed to knock
out groups of people, in battle and in other situations, presumably
including “rioting” civilians.
The Army was making headway in weapons design, but the collapse of the
Soviet Union had turned political winds toward disarmament and decidedly
against new chemical weapons. International momentum was building for
a global ban on chemical weapons and, in September 1992, the text of
the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was completed. Anticipating the
CWC’s restrictions, in 1992 the Pentagon cancelled the Advanced
Riot Control Agent Device (ARCAD) program. The decision, quoting an
Army official in the recently-released papers, was “because of
multilateral treaty language restricting the use of riot control agents.”
But frustrated Army weapons developers were unwilling to let ARCAD die.
Spurred on by a dispute that arose between experts about the extent
of the CWC’s prohibitions on use of incapacitating chemicals, they
cited a Vietnam-era policy (Executive Order 11850, still standing) that
conflicts with the CWC. They found interest in their chemical weapons
research at the Non-Lethal Coordinating Cell, a small new Pentagon office
with big plans and influential backers, including US military strategist
Paul Wolfowitz. Impelled by the US military’s disastrous deployment
to Mogadishu, Somalia, the Coordinating Cell was looking for new ways
to neutralize crowds of civilians. Later, the Coordinating Cell came
under the administration of the US Marine Corps and was renamed the
Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD).
When the Coordinating Cell obtained research funding and put out a request
for proposals, the Army chemical weaponeers saw their chance. In proposals
written in 1994, they not only sought to restart ARCAD, they requested
JNLWD support to move into aerosol testing of the opiate cocktails.
They also proposed new ideas, such as studying weaponization of an experimental
pharmaceutical suggested to the Army by a University of Utah anesthesiologist
who had seen it used to tranquilize wild elk (Cervus elaphus). Also
new were short-acting opiates being developed by Glaxo Pharmaceuticals
(now GlaxoSmithKline). In its proposals, the Army group asserted that
the military could legally use the chemical as weapons for “peacekeeping
missions; crowd control; embassy protection; and counterterrorism.”
From here, the story gets murky, but an important new detail is available.
For five years, there was no public action by JNLWD on the (heretofore
confidential) Army proposals. Despite JNLWD’s denials that it is
engaged in chemical weapons development, a contract released to the
Sunshine Project under FOIA in 2002 states that, in 2001, the Directorate
trained Marine Corps officers in the use of classified antipersonnel
“non-lethal” chemical weapons.
In light of the newly-released documents, it was in 2000 that the ARCAD
program resurfaced publicly in the form of a Pentagon contract awarded
to Optimetrics, Inc. The Optimetrics studies parallel those proposed
by the Army to JNLWD in 1994. Not coincidentally, the lead researcher
was C. Parker Ferguson, an Aberdeen Proving Ground veteran who pushed
JNLWD to revive ARCAD in 1994. By 2000, Ferguson had left Aberdeen for
Optimetric’s nearby office in Bel Air, Maryland. Phase One of the
Optimetrics contract was a “Front End Analysis” of Chemical
Immobilizing Agents, including testing of “promising” chemical
cocktails on animals. Phase Two moved into human testing.
Not long after the Optimetrics contract was issued, JNLWD launched a
two year research program titled “Front End Analysis for Non-Lethal
Chemicals” (FY 2001 and 2002). While this JNLWD program was operating
(including during the Moscow Theater disaster), the Directorate vociferously,
and incorrectly, denied that it was conducting research on incapacitating
chemical weapons. Contradicting its own public relations officers, in
early 2003 a short document describing the “Front End Analysis”
program was briefly posted on the JNLWD web site (and then rather quickly
removed). The Optimetrics and JNLWD efforts appear to be linked; but
the exact relationships remain unclear because both JNLWD and the Army
deny that they are collaborating to develop new chemical weapons.
With the recent release of papers, how JNLWD’s research has come
from the canceled ARCAD program can now finally be documented. The documents
are the set of proposals made in 1994 by the Army and, interestingly,
it is in these proposals that the term “Front End Analysis”
first appears to describe phase one of ARCAD’s revival. The totality
of the circumstances, including specific terminology, personnel, preferred
chemical formulations, and other materials obtained under FOIA (available
on the Sunshine Project web site), makes clear that after ARCAD was
officially canceled, at least part of the program was folded into the
Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate. (What additional work has been
conducted under classification is unknown.)
The significance of these documents is far more than historical. ARCAD
was terminated because, in 1992, the Pentagon determined that it would
violate the Chemical Weapons Convention. But it is now clear that the
weapons research did not end. As of 2002 ARCAD’s legacy was being
pursued with a new institutional base -- the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons
Directorate. The research appears to have resulted in classified antipersonnel
chemical capabilities, according the JNLWD contract to train Marine
Corps officers. US chemical weapons development deemed legally unacceptable
in 1992 has found new life with the “non-lethal” moniker.
(Apparently) Accidental Release
Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Sunshine Project requested
the documents from the US Marine Corps in September 2001. After delaying
for more than two years, in late 2003 the Marine Corps responded in
a letter stating that the documents, titled “Demonstration of Chemical
Immobilizers,” “Antipersonnel Calmative Agents,” and
“Antipersonnel Chemical Immobilizers: Synthetic Opiods,” required
a security review that the Marine Corps Systems Command could not perform.
This status strongly suggested that the documents would be severely
edited or not released at all.
Inexplicably, in the same envelope as the security review letter, the
Marines enclosed a complete set of the documents. The Marines also sent
the Sunshine Project versions of the chemical weapons papers with large
blocks of text blacked-out. These apparently were the Marines’
view of what portions should remain secret. The circumstances suggest
that the Marines sent the Sunshine Project the documents that were supposed
to go to the Pentagon for security review. After study, the Sunshine
Project determined to publicize the documents because they shed light
on JNLWD’s secretive chemical weapons research program and how
it threatens international treaties.
Source: The Sunshine Project
US extremists to be sentenced over bomb
plot
Texas couple had arsenal capable of killing
thousands
By Julian Borger
Washington, DC Jan. 8— Three Americans are due to be sentenced
next month for their involvement in a plot to explode a cyanide bomb
capable of killing thousands of people, in a case that has served as
a reminder that homegrown terrorism is still a menace in a country permanently
braced for another attack from abroad.
It is still unclear what the bomb and the arsenal of other weapons unearthed
in the small town of Noonday, Texas, would have been used. The conspirators
— rightwing extremists who were caught with forged identity passes
to the United Nations and the Pentagon, and a variety of racist and
anti-government pamphlets — have refused to cooperate with investigators,
who believe others involved in the plot may still be at large.
The central figure in the case, William Krar, is a small-scale manufacturer
of gun components who has pleaded guilty to possessing a chemical weapon
and faces a possible life sentence. The plot was uncovered by accident
in early 2002 when Krar and his partner, Judith Bruey, posted a package
to a third conspirator, Edward Feltus, a member of a rightwing group
called the New Jersey militia. The package, filled with fake identity
documents and a note saying “we would hate to have this fall into
the wrong hands” was delivered to the wrong person.
When investigators searched a storeroom rented by Krar and Bruey in
Noonday, 100 miles east of Dallas, they found half a million rounds
of ammunition, 65 pipebombs and briefcases that could be detonated by
remote control, as well as 800g of almost pure sodium cyanide. According
to the Los Angeles Times, the cyanide was already packed in an ammunition
canister, next to a variety of acids and bombmaking formulas. Investigators
believe that such a bomb would send up a cloud of poison that could
kill everyone inside a large building. “It was clearly one of the
most lethal arsenals associated with the US paramilitary right in the
past 20 years,” said Daniel Levitas, the author of a book on rightwing
extremism, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical
Right.
It is, however, far from an isolated incident. Mark Potok, who keeps
tabs on hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, says
up to 40 major conspiracies involving domestic terrorism have been uncovered
since the 1995 Oklahoma attack by a right-wing war veteran, Timothy
McVeigh, which killed 168 people.
One foiled plot, by Ku Klux Klan members in 1997, was aimed at blowing
up a Texan oil refinery and could have killed up to 30,000 people in
the immediate vicinity.
But domestic conspiracies have received much less publicity than foreign
threats.
“There is no question at all that had William Krar been a Muslim,
this would have been announced from the steps of the justice department,”
Potok said. The arrests were announced locally in Texas but received
hardly any press coverage.
Levitas said Krar had been arrested on previous occasions on gun charges
but then released.
“He came on to the radar screen of federal authorities and promptly
fell off their radar. It points to a failing of the justice department
to exercise due diligence,” Levitas said.
A series of anthrax letter attacks which took place in the weeks after
Sept. 11, 2001 are also thought by FBI investigators to have been the
work of an American fanatic. The case has not yet been solved and has
similarly been largely forgotten.
The justice department has denied taking domestic terrorism less seriously
than foreign threats, saying it pursued all violations vigorously.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Industry slowing action on mad
cow disease - activists
By Emad Mekay
Washington, DC, Jan. 6 (IPS) — A group of activists and
consumer advocates is accusing the US government of doing too little
to stop the spread of mad cow disease in the country because of pressure
from the powerful beef industry.
They also say that a number of senior employees in the US Department
of Agriculture (USDA) come from the meat and dairy industries and might
have loyalties to their former employers.
Last week, US officials said they would immediately implement a new
set of safeguards to protect the nation’s beef supply against bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) also known as “mad cow” disease,
after an infected animal was found in Washington state.
A human form of the disease known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
or vCJD, a rare but fatal brain disorder, can result from consuming
contaminated cattle products.
The safeguards include removing non-ambulatory or “downer”
animals from the human food chain, along with all brain, spinal cord
and nervous-system tissue that could carry BSE; adding protections to
mechanised meat processing; and instituting a national animal identification
program.
Downers are animals that are unable to walk to slaughter because of
disease or broken legs and other injuries.
Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman has also called for a team of international
experts to review inspection procedures and make recommendations following
completion of the current probe into the case of the single BSE-positive
cow.
The team will be led by Dr. Ulrich Kihm, the former chief veterinary
officer of Switzerland, who now owns a consulting company, Safe Food
Solutions, Inc.
But the announced measures failed to allay consumers’ fears both
in the US and abroad.
Cattle-futures prices have fallen sharply, and none of the more than
30 nations that have required import bans on US beef are reportedly
moving to ease their restrictions. The controls have already cost the
US beef industry millions of dollars in exports.
Consumer groups and activists here Monday decried the measures as grossly
lacking. Some say Britain, for example, managed after 15 years to defeat
the disease by putting a ban on feeding slaughterhouse waste to livestock
and by testing millions of cattle before consumption. “The USDA’s
latest steps on mad cow disease are pathetic,” said John Stauber
co-author of the book ‘Mad Cow USA’. “Today in the US
farmers legally feed billions of pounds of slaughterhouse waste to cattle,
and even wean calves on cattle blood protein.”
Farmers in the United States routinely feed animal remains, blood and
manure — particularly chicken feces — to cattle.
In Europe, where one of every four cows is tested, and Japan, where
authorities test 100 percent of cattle bound for human consumption,
officials have found a number of cases of mad cow disease in animals
that appeared perfectly healthy.
“France, which has only a fraction of the US cattle population,
tests more cattle in a single week than the US has tested in a decade,”
said Michael Greger of the Organic Consumers Association.
Over the past two years, the USDA has tested only about 20,000 cattle,
or less than 10 percent of the downer animals, for mad cow disease annually.
“I suspect the recent cases of mad cow disease in the US and Canada
are just the tip of an iceberg, one that will continue to grow until
dangerous feeding practices are completely banned,” said Stauber.
In May 2003 a single BSE-infected cow was discovered in Canada. Since
then, many countries, including the US, have refused to import Canadian
beef. US officials say that the animal discovered in Washington state
was likely purchased from its northern neighbor.
The activists charge that the US beef industry is behind the lukewarm
testing here as it fears increased examination could unearth more cases,
which could further harm beef sales.
“The industry has been fighting tooth and nail against testing
ever since I got involved with this back in 1993, because the last thing
they want to do is something that would find a case,” Greger said.
“Now that a case has been found, they don’t want to find case
number two or case number three or case number four.”
Consumer groups fear the government’s position is dangerous —
as it tries to simultaneously protect the industry and maintain public
health.
“Three years ago, we submitted a list of recommendations to the
US government regarding mad cow disease — none were implemented,”
said Simon Chaitowitz of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine,
a Washington-based non-profit group that promotes preventive medicine.
“We believe the USDA has not instituted these protections because
many of its top staffers come from the meat and dairy industries, and
they care more about protecting cattle industry profits than public
safety.”
For example, Veneman’s chief of staff, Dale Moore, used to be executive
director for legislative affairs at the National Cattlemen’s Beef
Association in Washington, a powerful industry lobby group.
USDA Press Secretary Alisa Harrison, Deputy Under Secretary for Marketing
and Regulatory Programs Chuck Lambert and Senior Advisor on Food and
Nutrition Issues Elizabeth Johnson all previously worked for the same
organization.
US officials defended their record, saying that tests have been targeted
mainly at high-risk animals, those showing symptoms of nervous system
disorder or inability to walk.
The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), a body of the USDA, told
IPS the agency will be increasing the number of animals it tests. But
FSIS Spokesperson Steve Cohen said exactly which animals will be tested
has not yet been determined.
“At the time the BCE-infected cow was discovered, they (inspectors)
were testing many times more cattle than international standards would
have indicated for a country that had no BCE,” he said.
The measures failed to satisfy at least one former official, who said
the USDA controls created “a voluntary or piecemeal system”
that was not sufficient to protect either public health or consumer
confidence.
Carol Tucker Foreman, chief of the agriculture department’s food
safety programs during the administration of former president Jimmy
Carter (1977-81), acknowledged the new USDA moves as positive but said
“industry pressure has kept the Bush administration from taking
all of the steps necessary to protect the public.”
“FDA did not expand the feed ban to preclude the use of all ruminants
in animal feed. Nor did FDA announce the assignment of enforcement resources
sufficient to assure the ban on feeding ruminant material to bovines
is effective,” she said in a statement.
Greger also faulted US authorities for treating BSE infection as a conventional
disease, in which case they would quarantine the herd and block distribution
of the meat.
“It (BSE) is not passed from animal to animal,” he said. “It’s
what this animal ate four years, five years ago. It is not ‘where
did the meat from that animal go?’ What about all the meat from
all the other animals that ate the same infected feed so many years
ago? That’s the concern.”
Wounded “held captive” at Walter
Reed: disabled vets fire back at Rumsfeld
By David Vest
Jan. 8 — The organization known as Disabled American Veterans
has been helping US combat casualties figure out what benefits they
have coming to them and how to apply for them since 1920. Lately the
Bush administration has been going out of its way to make the DAV’s
job harder.
An army of US veterans more than twice the size of Operation Iraqi Freedom
have lost their health insurance benefits since Bush took office. As
many as half a million vets are homeless. Seven VA hospitals are being
closed as part of an effort to “restructure” the Department
of Veterans Affairs. Meanwhile, veterans of the Iraq campaign can fall
in line with over 250,000 US veterans who are already waiting at least
six months to see a doctor.
The administration has consistently opposed any attempt to extend full
benefits to Reservists and National Guardsmen, twenty percent of whom
have no health insurance by General Accounting Office estimates.
The White House tried to roll back increases in monthly imminent-danger
pay and family separation allowance, and called a modest proposal to
increase the sum given to families of soldiers who die on active duty
“wasteful and unnecessary.”
Veterans now are having difficulty even finding out what their benefits
are.
Since Operation Iraqi Freedom got underway, it has been near impossible
for a DAV representative to get into a military hospital to help wounded
soldiers with their benefit applications. The Pentagon has been severely
limiting DAV access to wounded veterans and doing it on grounds of “security”
and protecting “privacy.”
It protects the veterans’ privacy by not allowing them to speak
with DAV representatives “unmonitored.”
Someone besides the Disabled American Veterans took notice.
When he got back to the office after celebrating New Year’s and
opened his mail, Donald Rumsfeld found a letter informing him that he
had messed with the wrong people this time.
Here’s part of what DAV Washington Headquarters Executive Director
David W. Gorman had to say to the Secretary of Defense:
“At one facility in particular [Walter Reed Army Medical Center]
our efforts to visit with wounded patients have been severely restricted.
For example, all requests to visit patients must now be made through
the WRAMC headquarters office, which then selects the patients we may
visit and strictly limits information about the patients, even the patient’s
name and the nature of the injury is withheld without express permission.
The DAV’s representatives also are escorted at all times while
in the facility, and all contact with patients is closely monitored
by the escort. This is particularly unnerving and inappropriate as all
conversations between a representative and client are confidential in
nature.
“I believe these overly broad restrictions on patient access inhibit
the ability of our professional accredited representatives to help ensure
these wounded service members have the vital information they and their
families need in order to obtain the medical care and benefits many
of these veterans will depend on for decades to come.
“The American public would be outraged if these restrictions became
public knowledge.”
There has been little or no coverage in the mainstream media since the
DAV released the letter.
Gorman goes on to say:
“The record of benefits awarded by the VA shows our honored wounded
and injured are getting less than they are rightfully entitled. Those
wounded and disabled in service to our nation should not be held captive
and deprived of the knowledge that would allow them to receive all their
rightful benefits, earned on a battlefield half a world away. It brings
great dishonor to our nation to learn of disabled veterans suffering
physical and economic hardships following their release from medical
treatment solely because they are unaware and uninformed of their rightful
benefits.”
Wounded veterans “held captive” ... prevented from seeing
people who have a congressional charter to serve them ... not allowed
to speak with DAV reps in private, lest their “privacy” be
violated ... an administration that regards Disabled American Veterans
as security risks.
A government increasingly unable to tell the difference between terrorists
and its own citizens.
Source: CounterPunch
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