The Peace Train

400,000 Rape Kits Never Processed!

Every year, more than 200,000 rape victims, mostly women, report their rapes to police. Most consent to the creation of a rape kit, an invasive process for collecting physical evidence (including DNA material) of the assault that can take up to six hours. What most victims don't know is that in thousands of cases, that evidence sits untested in police evidence lockers.

The LA Times op-ed page has actually published a responsible piece about rape. It�s called �Lost Promise for Rape Victims� by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, and is about the infuriating and heartbreaking fact that hundreds of thousands of rape kits in America are not being tested. And she exemplifies the injustice by describing the grueling process that is rape kit collection.

The process � which can last more than four hours � begins in a private interview room, separate from the hospital emergency room, where a counselor asks in detail what happened during the rape. The counselor is there throughout the subsequent examination.

The rape victim would next be led into the exam room and asked to undress while standing on a large sheet of butcher paper so that anything that falls from their clothing or body that may provide links to a perpetrator or a crime scene (hairs and carpet or clothing fibers) can be carefully collected and placed in the rape kit.

They are examined on a gynecological table with stirrups. Their body would be scanned with an ultraviolet light to find otherwise undetectable semen or saliva that might contain the assailant�s DNA.

[. . .]

Afterwards, the police officer on duty at the center might drive the rape victim home with the rape kit in the patrol car. The victim might imagine that the police were taking it directly to the crime lab to test the samples for DNA that could identify my assailant or provide evidence against an already identified suspect.

And after going through all that? Forget the relatively low chances of the kit turning up useful evidence, resulting in an arrest, a court date and then a conviction. The kit most likely won�t even be cracked open.

This isn�t exactly news to those who do anti-rape advocacy work. But it angers at me every time I hear the horrible fact repeated. Clearly, it�s not being repeated enough because the problem isn�t being solved. People still either don�t know, or just plain don�t care.

Yesterday the Washington Post had a piece on the backlog of untested rape kits in the U.S.

The backlog of untested evidence gained national attention in 2001 when Debbie Smith, a rape victim, testified before Congress. The Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program was started in 2004 with the goal of processing the nearly 400,000 untested rape kits nationwide. But the program has been expanded to allow states to test backlogged DNA evidence from any crime. Even as the proportion of rape victims who report their assaults is increasing, the processing of rape evidence is still backlogged -- and the arrest rate of rapists is decreasing.

Rape kits can help identify unknown assailants by matching DNA profiles obtained from evidence to profiles in the FBI's national DNA database. The kits can confirm the presence of a known suspect's DNA, corroborate a victim's version of events or exonerate innocent suspects.

Most states are not required to notify victims if their evidence has not been tested, so people usually have no idea whether their kits have been processed. Many victims assume that silence from the police means that their kit did not yield helpful information. A much-delayed National Institute of Justice report on the state of the rape-kit backlog is due to be submitted to Congress in the fall; experts on the crime expect it to show that a significant backlog remains.

Click Here to Read More. . .

Sex & Senility: Can Dementia Trump Consent?

I'd rather die from a sex-related heart attack than from something very less pleasurable, like choking on my own drool.

She was 82. He was 95. They had dementia. They fell in love. And then they started having sex. An Affair To Remember by Melinda Henneberger

Bob's family was horrified at the idea that his relationship with Dorothy might have become sexual. At his age, they wouldn't have thought it possible. But when Bob's son walked in and saw his dad's 82-year-old girlfriend performing oral sex on his 95-year-old father last December, incredulity turned into full-blown panic. "I didn't know where this was going to end," said the manager of the assisted-living facility where Bob and Dorothy lived. "It was pretty volatile."

Because both Bob and Dorothy suffer from dementia, the son assumed that his father didn't fully understand what was going on. And his sputtering cell phone call reporting the scene he'd happened upon would have been funny, the manager said, if the consequences hadn't been so serious. "He was going, 'She had her mouth on my dad's penis! And it's not even clean!' " Bob's son became determined to keep the two apart and asked the facility's staff to ensure that they were never left alone together.

After that, Dorothy stopped eating. She lost 21 pounds, was treated for depression, and was hospitalized for dehydration. When Bob was finally moved out of the facility in January, she sat in the window for weeks waiting for him. She doesn't do that anymore, though: "Her Alzheimer's is protecting her at this point," says her doctor, "who thinks the loss might have killed her if its memory hadn't faded so mercifully fast."

But should someone have protected the couple's right to privacy�their right to have a sex life?

"We were in uncharted territory," the facility manager said�and there's a reason for that. We're squeamish about the sex lives of the elderly�and even more so when those elderly are senile and are our parents. But as the baby boom generation ages, there are going to be many more Dorothys and Bobs�who may no longer quite recall the Summer of Love but are unlikely to accept parietal rules in the nursing home. Gerontologists highly recommend sex for the elderly because it improves mood and even overall physical function, but the legal issues are enormously complicated"; Can someone with dementia give informed consent? How do caregivers balance safety and privacy concerns? When families object to a demented person being sexually active, are nursing homes responsible for chaperoning? This one botched love affair shows the incredible intensity and human cost of an issue that, as Dorothy's doctor says, we can't afford to go on ignoring.

So it was left to her daughter, her doctor, and the woman who runs the assisted-living facility to explain how this grown woman, who lived through the Depression and survived breast cancer, managed a home and mourned a mate, wound up being treated like a child.

Downstairs, in her bright, tidy office, I met the woman who runs the facility�one of the nicest I've seen, with tea service in the lobby and white tablecloths in a dining room that's dressed up like a restaurant. In 30 years of taking care of the elderly, she's seen plenty of couples, but none as "inspiring" or heartbreaking as Dorothy and Bob. Which is why she keeps a photo of the two of them on her desk. In the picture, Dorothy is sitting at the piano in the lobby, where she used to play and he used to sing along�with gusto, usually warbling, "I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair," no matter what tune she was playing. She is all dolled up, wearing a jangly red bracelet and gold lam� shoes, and they are holding hands and beaming in a way that makes it impossible not to see the 18-year-olds inside them.

Before Dorothy came along, the manager said, Bob was really kind of a player and had all the women vying to sit with him on the porch. But with Dorothy, she said, "it was love." One day, the staff noticed that they were sitting together, then before long they were taking all their meals together, and over a matter of weeks, it became constant. Whenever Bob caught sight of Dorothy, he lit up "like a young stud seeing his lady for the first time." Even at 95, he'd pop out of his chair and straighten his clothes when she walked into the room. She would sit, and then he would sit. And both of them began taking far greater pride in their appearance; Dorothy went from wearing the same ratty yellow dress all the time to appearing for breakfast every morning in a different outfit, accessorized with pearls and hair combs.

But according to the facility manager, the son was convinced that Dorothy was the aggressor in the relationship, and he worried that her advances might be hard on his father's weak heart. He wasn't the only one troubled by the physical relationship. The private-duty nurse who had been tending Bob also had strong feelings about the matter, said the manager: "At first, she thought it was cute they were together, but when it became sexual, she lost her senses" for religious reasons and asked staff members to help keep the two of them apart.

Employees wound up choosing sides�as did other residents, including some women who were apparently jealous of Dorothy's romance. And because the couple now had to sneak around to be together�for instance, cutting out when they were supposed to be in church�their intimacy became more and more open and problematic. At one point, the manager had to make Bob stop "pleasuring her" right in the lobby, where Dorothy sat with a pillow placed strategically over her lap. In all of her years of working with elderly people, the manager said, this was not only her worst professional experience but was the only one that left her feeling she had failed her patients. She had a particularly hard time staying neutral and detached, she said, because she kept thinking that "if that was my mom or dad, I'd be grateful they'd found somebody to spend the rest of their lives with."

Finally, Bob's family decided to move him and insisted that neither he nor Dorothy be told in advance. No one in either family was there the morning Bob's nurse hustled him out the door. Later, the manager called his son and asked if there was any way Dorothy might come and visit just briefly, to say goodbye. The son thought about it for a few days and then said no, his father was already settled into his new home and was not thinking about her at all anymore. The lawyers told Dorothy's family that there was no way they could make the legal case that Bob's rights were being violated by his family, because you couldn't put people with dementia on the witness stand.

Click Here to Read More. . .

Young, Gay, And Murdered In Junior High!

Schools are caught between their desire to protect legitimate sexual expression and their obligation to prevent inappropriate, and potential harmful, behavior. This is difficult terrain for adults, teachers and admininistrators to navigate.

Two days before a shotgun-wielding Steven Kazmierczak shot 21 students inside a lecture hall on the campus of Northern Illinois University, taking the lives of five people as well as his own, 15-year-old Lawrence "Larry" King was shot in the head at the E.O. Green School in Oxnard, California, reportedly for being gay. He was in the eighth grade.

Three days after the shooting, on February 15, King was taken off life support and pronounced dead.

King's death came 10 years after the brutal murder of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, who was also killed because of his sexual orientation. But for some reason, King's murder generated just a fraction of the media coverage that follows most school-shooting incidents. In fact, most of the initial reports about the killing were turned out by local news agencies, and the national media didn't catch up until several days later.

At 15, Lawrence King was small�5 feet 1 inch�but very hard to miss. In January, he started to show up for class at Oxnard, Calif.'s E. O. Green Junior High School decked out in women's accessories. On some days, he would slick up his curly hair in a Prince-like bouffant. Sometimes he'd paint his fingernails hot pink and dab glitter or white foundation on his cheeks. "He wore makeup better than I did," says Marissa Moreno, 13, one of his classmates. He bought a pair of stilettos at Target, and he couldn't have been prouder if he had on a varsity football jersey. He thought nothing of chasing the boys around the school in them, teetering as he ran.

But on the morning of Feb. 12, Larry left his glitter and his heels at home. He came to school dressed like any other boy: tennis shoes, baggy pants, a loose sweater over a collared shirt. He seemed unhappy about something. He hadn't slept much the night before, and he told one school employee that he threw up his breakfast that morning, which he sometimes did because he obsessed over his weight. But this was different. One student noticed that as Larry walked across the quad, he kept looking back nervously over his shoulder before he slipped into his first-period English class. The teacher, Dawn Boldrin, told the students to collect their belongings, and then marched them to a nearby computer lab, so they could type out their papers on World War II. Larry found a seat in the middle of the room. Behind him, Brandon McInerney pulled up a chair.

Lawrence King was shot in the back of the head in the computer lab of the E. O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California (about an hour northwest of Downtown LA). The shooter was a 14 year-old classmate of King's who, according to the brief CNN article, had a "beef" with King. The "beef" that CNN refers to (which conjured up images of gang violence) was actually the fact that Lawrence (who went by Larry) asked 14 year old Brandon McInerney to be his Valentine, possibly as a way to get back at him for countless episodes of name-calling and verbal abuse because of King's sexual orientation. This apparently enraged McInerney so much that he brought a gun he got from his father's house and shot King twice in the head.

Click Here to Read More. . .

San Francisco Rogue Network Admin Problem!

Despite the horror stories, at least one can be thankful that when someone in the IT department goes postal, they tend to take down the mail server, not pick up an assault rifle.

Don't mess with the IT guy!? For that matter, don't mess with the Bus Driver, your Postman, Airline Pilot, Crane Operator, man with a drug resistant, highly contagious, skin eating virus... Mayhem is Easy when it's a seamless addition or deviation from the job you're being trusted to do. There is a reason law officers often say "it was an inside Job!"

Disgruntled Employee Holds San Francisco Computer Network Hostage. Trusted insiders can do a lot of damage:

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco's new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday.

Terry Childs, a 43-year-old computer network administrator who lives in Pittsburg, has been charged with four counts of computer tampering and is scheduled to be arraigned today.

Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city's new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates' bookings are stored.

Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn't work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.

He was taken into custody Sunday. City officials said late Monday that they had made some headway into cracking his pass codes and regaining access to the system.

Childs has worked for the city for about five years. One official with knowledge of the case said he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him.

"They weren't able to do it - this was kind of his insurance policy," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the attempted firing was a personnel matter.

Authorities say Childs began tampering with the computer system June 20. The damage is still being assessed, but authorities say undoing his denial of access to other system administrators could cost millions of dollars.

Officials also said they feared that although Childs is in jail, he may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.

Authorities have searched Childs' home and car for a device that could be used in such an attack, but so far no such evidence has been found.

As part of his alleged sabotage, Childs engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying and doing related to his personnel case, law enforcement officials said.

Childs became the target of suspicions inside the technology agency this year, and the case was referred for police investigation in late June, authorities say.

At a news conference announcing Childs' arrest, District Attorney Kamala Harris was tightlipped about what his motive may have been.

"Motive is not necessarily an element of a crime," Harris said. "This city employee committed four felonies."

She added, "This involves compromising a public system that we rely on. Its integrity has been compromised."

The system continues to operate even though administrators have limited or no access, officials said.

"Right now our system is up and running and we haven't had any problems so far," said Ron Vinson, chief administrative officer for the Department of Technology.

Vinson said the city is "working around the clock" to make sure the system is maintained and operable.

Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom, said the mayor was "confident that (the Department of Technology) is doing everything necessary to maintain the integrity of the city's computer networks."

Childs appeared in court Monday but did not have a lawyer assigned to him.

Childs, according to payroll records, earned $126,735 in base pay in 2007 and additional premium pay of $22,534, for a total of $149,269. Vinson said the extra money was apparently compensation for being on-call as a trouble-shooter.

I wonder if like in the private sector his management chain is updating resumes. This demonstrates a disturbing and sloppy lack of control over this cities computing environment. No motive? They're probably planning on outsourcing his job to India.

Click Here to Read More. . .

The week In Review

"Killing Me Softly"
--- by Ada A. Aharoni

We wise grown-ups often advise our children
"Stop fighting, you will hurt each other,"
then calmly proceed to annihilate one another.
We breed black widows with red eyes in our labs.
War is eternal, you say.
Listen, my brother,
War's second cousin, "duelling," was once sung immortal,
the peak of honor and reason -
yet has been banished from our world and is no more.
Slavery redeemed eternal, and is no more.
And so much more, like killing me softly
with your guns and scuds
Does a lioness devour her cubs?
Does a gardener destroy his buds?
Let's awake and change our absurd "nuclear deterrence song",
for now we know,
in a nuclear war, or any war,
there are no winners any more.
We breed black widows with red eyes in our labs.
Let's remember in our canines in the blood of our temples
in a nuclear war or any small war, there ar no winners anymore,
and throw War quickly in the historic dirt-bin it deserves,
Let's not leave this terrible legacy to our children
in the twenty-first century,
Let's save cubs and buds before the fall,
or in the nuclear pit we'll all fall.

Poem Of the Week

Click Here to Read More. . .

VC Money Drives Solar-Tech Innovation!

Despite uneven support from the U.S. government, solar power is experiencing a global explosion. Concerns over climate change and rising energy prices have driven billions of dollars into developing the efficiency and variety of technologies that capture power from the sun.

And we're not just talking about new photovoltaic panels. The entire production chain is being re-engineered, from materials to manufacturing process to solar tracking.

Check out the hottest advances in sun-energy harvesting on display at this week's Intersolar North America conference.

China's Red-Hot Solar Water Tech

These strange-looking pipes are actually part of a solar hot-water heater produced by the Chinese company WesTech. Stick these on your roof, and they collect heat energy from the sun, heating the water inside, and insulating like a thermos to keep warm.

While U.S. residential setups usually employ other, more-expensive technologies, Chinese systems often just use evacuated tubes like these. Lower price points have helped drive the Chinese domestic market: An estimated one in 10 Chinese households owns one. And now, Chinese companies with big manufacturing capacity are trying to bring their low-cost tech to the United States.

Chasing the Sun

Solar-panel placement is like sunbathing: You want maximum exposure to the sun's most direct rays. That�s the idea behind this rotating rack for solar panels. As the sun moves across the sky, the superstructure and circular track rotate to keep the panels in the most direct sunlight.

SunCarrier (pictured) and RW Energy, which make similar systems, claim the rigs increase the efficiency of solar panels by 30 percent.

Designing for Robot (Overlord) Assembly

Photovoltaics have long been the province of scientists and green idealists. That's one reason why less than 1 percent of the world's energy is derived from solar power. To make a dent in the world energy market, solar players are going to have to scale up -- and fast.

One major way, said Ian Chen of Multicontact, which makes solar-panel connectors, is the way industry has always done it: automation. It's not just "doing the same process you've been doing in a garage but at a larger scale," he said. To cut costs and increase production, solar companies are having to design processes for automation from the ground up.

Fast Robots Increase Throughput

This machine from Adept uses machine vision and a vacuum to pluck solar cells off a conveyor belt. This speedy, spidery robot -- the Quattro -- can be had for under six figures, according to Jay Sacharia, the company's head of corporate marketing.

Focused Sun

You could be staring at the future of solar power. SolFocus' concentrating solar panels use mirrors to focus the sun's rays on a small amount of highly efficient photovoltaic material. First, the primary mirror -- the curved backstop -- concentrates the light onto a smaller mirror that you can see the back of in the image. That second mirror bounces the light down the unit's optical rod to the waiting PV cell.

The setup allows SolFocus to capture light over a large area while keeping costs down. How much? Stephanie Southerland, head of corporate development, said the company's goal is "cost parity with fossil fuels by 2010." Talk like that has tickled investors' imaginations: They've already poured $95 million into the company through two rounds of financing.

Click Here to Read More. . .

Birth Control Redefined As Abortion!

What's the next definition of abortion? Coitus interruptus? Masturbation? Oral sex? Why don't we just pass a law that the only permissible sex is sex to create a baby and post a monitor in every bedroom to make sure that we all comply! We'll only be allowed to have sex when the woman is fertile. Get the religious right out of my f*(king life!

There are 188 days left in the Bush administration, and it is becoming painfully clear that if George W. cannot end the war, or boost the economy, he'll sure as hell make it his mission to chip away at Roe vs. Wade. As Reuters reports, a leaked Department Of Health and Human Services memo describes a plan to cut off federal funds to states, hospitals and clinics that discriminate against employees who refuse to offer birth control or abortions on religious or moral grounds.

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40% of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services.

In a draft of a proposed Federal rule, the Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control. Hospitals, clinics, researchers and medical schools would have to sign �written certifications� that they won't discriminate in any way against people or institutions that oppose abortion or some forms of birth control or refuse to perform them. This includes oral contraception and emergency contraception and is apparently an attempt by the radical religious right to classify oral contraception as abortion. Naturally, the Bush administration is eager to help out.

So, the inner city women's clinic employee who refuses to talk to patients about birth control? Can't touch her. The hospital pharmacist who refuses to fill prescriptions for birth control? She can't be fired or disciplined. The doctor who refuses to give emergency contraception to a rape victim for "religious reasons?" Give that man a promotion.

On the other hand, institutions that receive millions in "faith based" tax dollars are expressly allowed to discriminate against gay people and, in fact, can use our tax dollars to further their agenda of anti-gay hate. All in the name of Jesus, of course.

These guys don't even try to be subtle. The administration only exists to serve the needs of the chosen few.

It gets worse. The proposal could potentially redefine birth control as abortion. The proposal classifies abortion as "any of the various procedures -- including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action -- that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation." That last part is critical because some argue that hormonal birth control and emergency contraception can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg.

Click Here to Read More. . .

Fear And Anxiety Exploited By Zealots And Fools!

America should go �not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.�
�John Quincy Adams

During Jane Mayer's event today at New America promoting her penetrating new book, The Dark Side, a topic came up during the Q & A that I'd like to expand on--the possibility of establishing a truth commission for the Bush administration's transgressions. The idea has been getting some play recently, both from Nick Kristof in the NYT and scattered across some lefty blogs. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is generally held up as the model for such bodies, which don't have formal judicial power but instead serve primarily as instruments for the discovery of past wrongdoings by governments.

So far, when each instance of misconduct has been revealed -- from the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes and waterboarding to extraordinary renditions and habeas-corpus-free detention of prisoners at Guantanamo -- individual solutions have been sought and some individual actors have been put forth to be held accountable. But this approach is piecemeal at best and does not get at the connective tissue and the systematization of abuses.

A Truth Commission, however, would provide a more holistic approach to the violations that have been committed or ordered by individuals and agencies within the government. A commission would serve as an opportunity to look back and expose where the administration started to go wrong in its decision-making process; allow those whose rights have been violated to be heard; and give Americans on the whole a chance to cleanse our national conscience--and our image abroad.

This really cannot be done by journalists alone. Jane Mayer commented today that she has "subpoena envy" as a reporter and often has to beg for documents; a truth commission would bypass this poverty of access because it would have the power to subpoena relevant individuals and organizations for their testimonies and records.

And there is still much to be uncovered. Although Mayer's new book and other writings provide important details about the different programs the Bush administration instituted in the panicky atmosphere in the aftermath of September 11, she herself is the first to admit that there is still much that is unknown. Of particular interest to Mayer is the role of physicians and psychiatrists in interrogation -- she recounts instances in her book, and in this interview with Scott Horton of Harper's, of doctors being present or at the ready during the euphemistically titled "harsh interrogations" and wonders, as I do, who these doctors are and should they be permitted the keep their licenses, having flagrantly broken the Hippocratic oath.

Not everyone agrees, of course. One prominent argument against establishing a truth commission for the Bush administration is, according to Mayer, the country's lack of political will to prosecute officials who could claim they were defending Americans against an existential threat. But with today's release of the first video from Guantanamo added to many previously disclosed examples of prisoner abuse, the time has long come to stop this abhorrent institutionalization of maltreatment of those in our custody. September 11 should not have given the government a carte blanche to warrantless wiretap, reinterpret the Constitution according to David Addington, and expand the powers of the presidency beyond Nixonian levels. Surely a truth commission would go at least part of the way toward righting the laundry list of wrongs that have been carried out in the name of national security over the last seven years.

Scott Horton in a Harper's Magazine piece puts six questions to Jane Mayer on the subject of her book, The Dark Side:

Reports have circulated for some time that the Red Cross examination of the CIA�s highly coercive interrogation regime�what President Bush likes to call �The Program��concluded that it was �tantamount to torture.� But you write that the Red Cross categorically described the program as �torture.� The Red Cross is notoriously tight-lipped about its reports, and you do not cite your source or even note that you examined the report. Do you believe that the threat of criminal prosecution drove the Bush Administration�s crafting of the Military Commissions Act?

Whether anyone involved in the Bush Administration�s interrogation and detention program will be prosecuted is as much a political question as a legal one. Right now in Italy the CIA agents involved in the rendition of Abu Omar are facing criminal charges, which is obviously an unmitigated nightmare for the Bush Administration.But to get that far it took an extraordinarily independent and politically fearless local prosecutor, Armando Spataro. I may be wrong, but I personally doubt there will be large-scale legal repercussions inside America for those who devised and implemented �The Program.� Activists will be angry at me for saying this, but as someone who has covered politics in Washington, D.C., for two decades, I would be surprised if there is the political appetite for going after public servants who convinced themselves that they were acting in the best interests of the country, and had legal authority to do so. An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised.

As for the damning Red Cross report, as I make clear to readers in the book, I have not personally read it, because as you say, it is very closely held. I have instead relied upon multiple sources who are knowledgeable about it. Adding to the confidence I have concerning it is the specificity, and consistency of the details, as well as confirmation I was able to get from additional independent sources familiar with the treatment of the detainees. For instance, Abu Zubayda claimed to have been locked in a tiny cage, in which he had to remain doubled up for long periods of time, prior to the period when he was waterboarded. This account�which he gave to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)�was confirmed to me independently by a former CIA officer familiar with his interrogation. It also is consistent with the chronology of legal actions taken inside the Justice Department. Incidentally, being caged only made him angry, according to the former CIA source. The sadistic treatment of Abu Zubayda also seems to have affected him psychologically in bizarre ways. Two sources said that he became sexually obsessive, masturbating so much his captors feared he would injure himself. One described him as acting �like a monkey at the zoo.� A physician was called in for consultation�one of many instances in which health professionals have played truly disturbing roles in this program. (I personally feel that the medical and psychological professionals who have used their skills to further a program designed to cause pain and suffering should be a high priority in terms of accountability. It has long been a ghastly aspect of torture, worldwide, that doctors and other medical professionals often assist. The licensing boards and professional societies are worthless, in my view, if they don�t demand serious investigations of such unethical uses of science.)

The reaction of top Bush Administration officials to the ICRC report, from what I can gather, has been defensive and dismissive. They reject the ICRC�s legal analysis as incorrect. Yet my reporting shows that inside the White House there has been growing fear of criminal prosecution, particularly after the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the Geneva Conventions applied to the treatment of the detainees. This nervousness resulted in the successful effort to add retroactive immunity to the Military Commission Act. Cheney personally spearheaded this effort. Fear of the consequences of exposure also weighed heavily in discussions about whether to shut the CIA program down. In White House meetings, Cheney warned that if they transferred the CIA�s prisoners to Guantanamo, �people will want to know where they have been�and what we�ve been doing with them.� Alberto Gonzales, a source said, �scared� everyone about the possibility of war crimes prosecutions. It was on their minds.

You have patiently traced the torture techniques used by the CIA back to two psychologists, James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen�you describe them as �good looking, clean-cut, polite Mormons��who reverse-engineered their techniques out of the SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape) program used to train U.S. pilots in self-defense. In Dark Side, you identify an approach called �Learned Helplessness� as the model they used, and you note that its author, Prof. Martin Seligman, made a visit to the SERE school and spoke with Mitchell and Jessen as the program was being formed. Seligman is a former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), which is the sole association of health care professionals to buck condemnation of �The Program� and to resist calls that its members not be involved in it. Do you believe that Seligman�s proximity to the torture program helps explain the difficulty that APA has in rejecting it?

It was completely fascinating to me to learn that Martin Seligman, one of the most esteemed psychologists in the country, a former head of the APA, was connected to the CIA after 9/11. Seligman is known for work he did back in the 1960�s at the University of Pennsylvania in a theory he called �Learned Helplessness.� He and colleagues conducted experiments on caged dogs, in which they used electric charges to shock them randomly. He discovered that the random mistreatment destroyed the dogs emotionally to the point where they no longer had the will to escape, even when offered a way out. Seligman confirmed for me, by email, that in the spring of 2002, as the CIA was trying to figure out how to interrogate its first major high-value detainee, Abu Zubayda, he was brought in to speak about his theories to a high-level confab apparently organized by CIA officials, at the Navy�s SERE School in San Diego. He said his talk lasted some three hours. Seligman said his talk was focused on how to help U.S. soldiers resist torture�not on how to breakdown resistance in detainees.

But, according to numerous sources (who are quoted on the record in The Dark Side), Seligman�s theories were cited admiringly soon after by James Mitchell, the psychologist whom the CIA put on contract to advise on its secret interrogation protocol. Eyewitnesses describe Mitchell as quoting Seligman�s theories of �Learned Helplessness� as useful in showing how to break the resistance of detainees� to interrogation. One source recounts Mitchell specifically touting the experiments done on dogs in the context of how to treat detainees.

Through a lawyer, Mitchell has denied that these theories guided his and the CIA�s use of such coercive measures as close confinement, psychological manipulation, and calibrated pain. But Mitchell confirmed, when I spoke to him, that he admired Seligman�s work.

Among the U.S. Government�s interrogation techniques that seem to echo these experiments are the uses of random maltreatment�taking away any predictable schedule from detainees so that they have no idea what time it is, no sense of when meals are delivered, no idea if it is day or night, as well as manipulating temperature, sound, sleep, and using isolation, all of which are meant to cause psychic stress that would erode a prisoner�s resistance to being interrogated and foster total dependency upon an interrogator. Perhaps just coincidentally, the detainees have described other ways in which they were treated like dogs�the use of dog cages and of a collar and leash.

Click Here to Read More. . .

The POTUS Needs To Be Computer Liberate!

John McCain has acknowledged that he is �an illiterate� when it comes to computers. He said he �has to rely on his wife for all the assistance he can get.�

In an interview with New York Times, John McCain confirmed that he doesn�t email, doesn�t read blogs, doesn�t go online, but does occasionally read Drudge. I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don�t expect to be a great communicator, I don�t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need � including going to my daughter�s blog first, before anything else.

McCain aide Mark Soohoo made this extraordinary statement today while fielding questions during the Personal Democracy Forum in New York:
"You don't actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country"

"John McCain is aware of the Internet," says Soohoo. "This is a man who has a very long history of understanding on a range of issues."

When contacted, The Internet said that he was aware of John McCain....but had dismissed him years ago.
Asked which blogs he read, he said: �Brooke and Mark show me Drudge, obviously. Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics.�

Not to get too pedantic here, but neither Drudge nor Politico are blogs and "RealPolitics" doesn't even exist. The thing I assume he's talking about isn't a blog either. Not that I necessarily expect a presidential candidate to spend a ton of time reading blogs, but maybe he should know what one is and if he doesn't read any and is asked about it could say that. Then on religion:
Asked if he considered himself an evangelical Christian, Mr. McCain responded, �I consider myself a Christian.�

�I attend church,� he said. �My faith has sustained me in very difficult times.� Asked how often he attended, he responded: �Not as often as I should.� He has recently been photographed going to church as his campaign has begun to make public the times he attends services.
Does he attend church when he's not campaigning for president? It sort of doesn't sound like it. Did you know McCain hasn't been baptized into the church he nominally belongs to? Again, I'm obviously not opposed to the idea of a non-observant president anymore than I'm opposed to a president who doesn't read blogs, but surely the straight-talk brand should require some honest answers to these questions.

Click Here to Read More. . .

Reality Has Moved Beyond Satire!

The problem with satire is that most of the time people don�t think it�s funny. Usually it�s the very people the creator is trying to raise awareness about or advocate for. The New Yorker, a so called liberal publication, isn�t helping matters with this latest addition to media misx.

The cover of this week's New Yorker, which features writer Ryan Lizza's take on Barack Obama's early years in Chicago, an article that is somehow totally related to this supposedly satirical illustration portraying Michelle and Barack as Muslim/Black Power extremists who worship Osama bin Laden and burn American flags and fist-bump and trade in their nice shoes for Birkenstocks and combat boots like I did in high school.

The New Yorker says it�s satire. It certainly will be candy for cable news.

At a press availability Sunday afternoon in San Diego, Senator Obama was asked, according to the diligent Maria Gavrilovic of CBS News: �The upcoming issue of the New Yorker, the July 21st issue, has a picture of you, depicting you and your wife on the cover. Have you seen it? If not, I can show it to you on my computer. It shows your wife Michelle with an Afro and an AK 47 and the two of you doing the fist bump with you in a sort of turban-type thing on top. I wondered if you�ve seen it or if you want to see it or if you have a response to it?�

Obama (shrugs incredulously): �I have no response to that.�

The magazine explains at the start of its news release previewing the issue: �On the cover of the July 21, 2008, issue of the The New Yorker, in �The Politics of Fear,� artist Barry Blitt satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama�s campaign.�

On the record, the McCain campaign adds: "We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it's tasteless and offensive." But privately, some McCain types admit they find the cover funny. And how bad can it be for your campaign when a national magazine, in an effort to take a shot at Fox News and talk radio, portrays your opponent like this? Some of Obama's supporters are likely to go over the top in their defensive outrage, sending subtle reinforcements to viewers who already believe that McCain is stronger than Obama on the issue of terrorism. Maybe it's funny, and maybe it's tasteless and offensive � maybe all three � but it will be noticed.

Dems are furious, Repubs are not-so-seceretly snickering:

Steve Benen, as he thinks the cover was inappropriate:
Now, I know what the New Yorker was doing here. It�s intended as satire. The image isn�t endorsing the insane smears made against the Obamas; it�s mocking the insane smears made against the Obamas. I get it.

But there�s clever, poignant satire, and then there�s ham-fisted, garish satire that�s in poor taste. The New Yorker cover falls comfortably into the latter category.
Rachel Sklar noted:
Presumably the New Yorker readership is sophisticated enough to get the joke, but still: this is going to upset a lot of people, probably for the same reason it�s going to delight a lot of other people, namely those on the right: Because it�s got all the scare tactics and misinformation that has so far been used to derail Barack Obama�s campaign � all in one handy illustration. Anyone who�s tried to paint Obama as a Muslim, anyone who�s tried to portray Michelle as angry or a secret revolutionary out to get Whitey, anyone who has questioned their patriotism � well, here�s your image.
Exactly. Smear artists running a scurrilous right-wing magazine would presumably run the exact same image of the Obamas on their cover, too. That we know the New Yorker is poking fun hardly makes matters better.

Click Here to Read More. . .