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Report Outlines Medical Workers' Role in Abusive C.I.A. Interrogations
Medical personnel were deeply involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects held overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency, including torture, and their participation was a “gross breach of medical ethics,” a long-secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded.
Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said.
Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers’ intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals’ role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had “condoned and participated in ill treatment.”
At times, according to the detainees’ accounts, medical workers “gave instructions to interrogators to continue, to adjust or to stop particular methods.”
UK climate policy not up to scratch, warns CBI
Business leaders have delivered a surprise attack on the government's environmental policy, arguing that ministers are not doing enough to cut global warming emissions or make sure the UK does not run out of power.
The CBI says billions of pounds of necessary investment will move to the US and China unless the government takes "urgent action".
It comes amid widespread disappointment that the G20 heads of state failed to come up with any real push on green issues as part of a $1.1tn (£743bn) financial aid package for the global economy.
The warning from the CBI follows a series of announcements by major energy companies, including Shell, BP and Centrica, that they would axe or reconsider investment in "low carbon" energy such as wind and solar power and carbon capture for coal-fired power stations.
Richard Lambert, the CBI's director general, said "politics and policy", not the recession, were delaying investment in the UK. He said the government's policies were on the "right path", but companies were "jittery" about investing in the UK because of delays with planning permission, poor National Grid connections, slow funding for new technology, and uncertainty over long-term carbon prices.
The government needs "to get on with it," said Lambert, ahead of today's launch of a new strategy for the energy industry. "If they don't, the risk is that the private capital needed will not come here in the volumes required."
Further evidence of the growing crisis of confidence in the green energy sector is exposed today by a survey which revealed that more than three quarters of Britain's green energy companies were now facing enormous financial difficulties gaining vital access to loans and investment money - a finding that has seriously shaken the industry's parent body.
Out of 39 member companies that responded to a poll by the Renewable Energy Association (REA), 32 said they were suffering from a shortage of cashflow and other problems, while only six said they were not affected at all.
Thomas Jefferson on Banks' Fictitious Capital
From the "more things change, the more they stay the same" file, an excerpt from a Thomas Jefferson letter in 1819:
Source: Paul Kedrosky (via Richard Metzger on BoingBoing)
Personal web data to be stored for a year
New law forces service providers to record all your calls and emails from Monday
The mobile calls, emails and website visits of every person in Britain will be stored for a year under sweeping new powers which come into force on Monday. Privacy campaigners warned last night that the information would be used by the Government to create a giant "Big Brother" super-database containing a map of everyone's private life.
The new powers will, for the first time, place a legal duty on internet companies to store private information, including email traffic and website browsing histories.
Although the new retention powers will not permit the storage of the content of emails or phone calls it will show details such as IP addresses, date, time and user telephone numbers. Under the terms of the EU directive, the Home Office has written to leading internet service providers and phone companies offering to compensate them for the costs incurred in retaining the data for a year.
A spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association confirmed that the leading ISPs had received written orders from the Home Office setting out their obligations under the new rules.
Phil Booth of the civil rights campaign group, NOID, said: "Inch by inch, the Government's plans to map and monitor everyone's communications are creeping into place. Today it's retention of data, soon it'll be a giant database to suck it all up. And unless we speak out and stop this, what used to be private – details of your relationships and personal interests – will end up in the ever-widening control of the stalker state."
Last week the The Independent reported that millions of Britons who use social networking sites such as Facebook could soon have their every move monitored by the Government and saved on a "Big Brother" database.
Then ministers faced a civil liberties outcry over the plans, with accusations of excessive snooping on the private lives of law-abiding citizens. Others fear the risk of security breaches. "Quite clearly, this new legislation opens up a whole can of worms for the ISPs when it comes to potential security implications," said Neil Cook, a security expert with the internet data protection firm Cloudmark.
BBC: Warning of food price hike crisis
A crisis is unfolding in the UK as people in poverty struggle with rising food prices and the recession, the Save the Children charity has warned.
It comes as new figures from The Grocer magazine show food prices rose by more than 18% over the last year.
On Monday, the charity will launch a crisis grant scheme to help families.
The government says it believes food prices have peaked and it is tackling child poverty through increased child benefits and child tax credits.
'More unequal'
Colette Marshall, of Save the Children, said: "We are facing a crisis. Benefits simply haven't been enough and with rising food costs it means that families cannot afford to give children proper decent food.
"We think we are heading towards malnutrition here in the UK."
Pensioner on her struggle with food costs
She is calling on the government to meet its target of halving child poverty by 2010 by putting £3bn in the Budget.
OECD warns that global trade is in freefall
World leaders gathering for Thursday's G20 summit in London were warned today by the Organisation of Cooperation and Development that the world economy was shrinking much faster than previously thought and that global trade was in freefall.
The Paris-based thinktank also told the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, there was no room for the type of fiscal stimulus that the prime minister had been touting around the world.
"The world economy is in the midst of its deepest and most synchronised recession in our lifetime caused by a global financial crisis and deepened by a collapse in world trade," the OECD said in its latest twice-yearly economic forecasts.
It predicted that in spite of big cuts in interest rates around the world, fiscal stimuli and banking system bailouts, recovery would not come until 2010 at the earliest.
The organisation had warned on Monday that unemployment among its 30 rich nation members was likely to rise by 25m in the current crisis.
Japan and Germany announced big rises in joblessness today: in Germany it rose to 3.5m, its highest since February 2008 and giving a jobless rate of 8.1%, while Japan's rate reached a three-year high of 4.4%. Japan announced a new fiscal stimulus package as it seeks to pull its economy - a big exporter punished by the slump in world trade - out of a deep recession.
Brown said G20 leaders should aim to save or create 20m jobs and must act together to increase the potential impact of their actions.
"Leaders meeting in London must supply the oxygen of confidence to today's global economy and give people in all of our countries renewed hope for the future," he said .
The OECD expects global trade volumes to slump by 13% this year. "International trade is in freefall," it said.
It expects its member economies to shrink by an average 4.3% this year, with the United States contracting by 4%, the eurozone by 4.1% and Japan by 6.6%. It forecasts Britain's economy will shrink by 3.7% - the worst performance since the second world war.
Separately, the World Bank forecast that growth in the developing world would slow to just 2.1% this year from 5.8% in 2008.
"Across the developing world, we see that conditions of recession are affecting the poorest people, making them even more vulnerable than before to sudden shocks but also reducing opportunities available to them, and frustrating their hopes," said Justin Yifu Lin, the World Bank's chief economist.
Art Imitates Life
'The Big Takeover' - Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."
Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.
Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
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The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.
"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"
But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.
Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.
A fascinating and extensive explanation of the developments that led to the economic apocalypse.
A great read!
