Mood:  on fire

No Justice for Canadian Rendition Victim Maher Arar

Court Refuses to Hold US Officials Accountable for Complicity in Torture Abroad

Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:18 AM PST

Updated: Monday, 2 November 2009 2:20 PM PST

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Mood:  a-ok

Noam Chomsky - Crisis and Hope in the Age of Obama, Oct. 4, 2009

http://www.vimeo.com/7014761

-------------------

Noam Chomsky - When Elites Fail, and What We Should Do About It, Oct. 2, 2009

http://www.vimeo.com/7194947

Filmed by:

http://www.pdxjustice.org/

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:51 AM PDT

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Mood:  loud

Protester Arrested on Courthouse Steps in Portland 10.29.09

Posted by Joe Anybody at 5:40 PM PDT

Updated: Saturday, 31 October 2009 1:23 PM PDT

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Mood:  crushed out

Editorial sketchbook:

Something approaching beauty in Baghdad

By Mike Francis, The Oregonian

October 21, 2009, 5:31PM

http://bit.ly/43ZfQW

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MIKE FRANCIS/THE OREGONIAN

..................................................................

The rotunda of Al Faw Palace in Baghdad where Oregon National Guard troops have been assigned.CAMP VICTORY SOUTH, Iraq -- Saddam Hussein's artistic sensibilities, like those of many self-important dictators, were somewhat blunted. He was given to pseudo-classical motifs, clumsy statuary and, of course, he had a fondness for heroic images of himself.

Yet here at the former Al Faw Palace compound, now the center of a massive military base on the western edge of Baghdad, Saddam's vision found something approaching beauty.

The Al Faw compound is a complex of substantial, buff-colored buildings, built on man-made peninsulas and ringing a series of lakes formed by canals from the Tigris River. There remains much for an architectural critic to disdain, but there is also the foundation for an upscale resort that could impress even jaded world travelers.

There are just a few things to do before Iraq can hang out the welcome sign:

Lose the concertina wire.

And the sandbags.

And the blast walls.

And the Porta-Potties.

And the uniformed Ugandans who stand at the checkpoints with rifles slung over their shoulders.

And the stream of paired Black Hawk helicopters, racing over the near horizon.

And the signs warning of the authorization of deadly force against intruders.

And, if possible, minimize the frequency of unexplained explosions, which tend to bring visitors out to the sidewalk with questions on their lips. ("Controlled det, I think," muttered one last week.)

In fact, Al Faw, for all its hard edges, is a showpiece for the U.S. military. Late-night comic Stephen Colbert performed here. The Army hosts band parties on the patio overlooking the lakes. The military even has set up an honest-to-goodness hotel in the pillared hunting lodge that looks west toward Al Faw.

Today, the hotel is a project of the Oregon Army National Guard, whose soldiers check in guests, show them to their rooms and explain when the dining room opens for breakfast. It turns out the Army needed somebody to operate a hotel at Camp Victory, the better to entertain visitors, distinguished and otherwise. So the job was assigned to the incoming soldiers of Oregon's 41st Brigade.

So bring your duffel bag to the front desk and say hello to the uniformed soldier behind the desk. He (or she) will be happy to guide you to the Chief Joseph Room, across the parking lot full of armored Humvees. He'll be happy to show where the soldiers fish for the carp, eels and other unlovely species that populate the lake. And, good host that he is, he'll advise you against eating anything you pull out of these waters.

Then, when the door closes behind you, you'll lie on your bed and think, "If only Saddam could see me now."

--Mike Francis

Associate Editor Mike Francis is in Iraq reporting on the Oregon National Guard soldiers assigned to tours of duty there. Read more and comment at: blog.oregonlive.com/oregonatwar/

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:01 AM PDT

Updated: Saturday, 31 October 2009 1:25 PM PDT

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Mood:  incredulous

click here to download PODCAST # 7  

Hey Z3 Readers here is podcast number 7 ..its not my opinion, it is me reading an email I recieved from the E-listserve by Dahr Jamil, the independent journalist in Iraq.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 6:50 PM PDT

Updated: Sunday, 25 October 2009 7:34 PM PDT

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Mood:  not sure

Major Religions Call for

Investigation into

Torture

by Charles Busch

http://www.peaceworker.org/2009/09/major-religions-call-for-investigation-into-torture/

Our nation is presently involved in a debate about the sanctioned use of torture by the United States since 9/11. Is it enough to denounce torture and focus on the future, or do we need to investigate the past and seek accountability? This question takes in considerable territory, including the security of the state and the insistence of justice. But for me, ultimately, it is a question of conscience, collective and individual.

On June 11 this year, in solidarity with religious leaders from five major religions standing in front of the White House, it was my privilege to stand with Rev. Bonnie Tarwater, minister of the Congregational United Church of Christ in Lincoln City and Rev. Carl Reynolds, a member of that congregation. The purpose of our witness along Highway 101 in downtown was to add our voices to the call for a Commission of Inquiry into U.S. torture practices.

Torture is Not Only Immoral,

 It is Criminal

As a Christian, I am heartened by this public witness because, during the Nazi reign in Germany, almost all the leaders of Christian churches held their tongues and ignored Nazi crimes in exchange for being left alone to worship and pursue personal piety. Among the few heroic leaders who risked dissention, was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian. Marilynne Robinson writes that Bonheoffer “chastised those who accommodated their religion to the prevailing culture so thoroughly as to have made the prevailing culture their religion.”

Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and hanged in 1945 as a traitor.

As a child in Sunday school, I learned that intentional cruelty to another person is immoral, and as a Marine Corps recruit, I learned that torture is a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. These early instructions confirmed what my conscience already knew, that the nightmare stuff of torture is evil.

Humans throughout the world hate and fear torture. This is evidenced by more than a century of Geneva Conventions. Specifically, the Third Geneva Conventions were enacted in 1949 to govern the treatment of prisoners of war. Articles 13 to 16 state that prisoners of war must be treated humanely and their medical needs met. Articles 17 to 20 state what information a prisoner must give and the limits of interrogation: “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion.” Nearly all 200 countries of the world are signatory nations.

In addition, the 1985 U.N. Convention against Torture was ratified by the United States and 64 other nations. Nationally, our Constitution has guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment, the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits torture, and the War Crimes Act of 1996 limits interrogation practices. We are a nation of laws.

Evidence that these codes against torture had been violated by U.S. personnel emerged when photographs were published in April 2004 of prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. Then came allegations of excessive interrogation practices of “enemy combatants” at the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In 2005, the secretary-general of Amnesty International called Guantanamo ”the gulag of our times.”

Then, word of secret “black site” prisons emerged. In April 2009, the Washington Post published a leaked confidential inspection report by the International Red Cross (which is charged with monitoring war crimes). This report provided detailed evidence of the torture of prisoners at “black sites” by CIA and other government-paid personnel. The evidence is persuasive and mounting that crimes against humanity have been committed and were sanctioned (i.e., practiced in multiple prisons over a period of years).

The details are horrific. They include: the water-boarding of a single prisoner 183 times, men chained by their wrists from the ceiling for days, toes barely touching the floor, men deprived of sleep for more than a week straight, forced feeding, slamming prisoners into walls up to 30 times in a row, brain washing, and men sitting in cells with music blasting their ears for days on end. Many men were jailed without evidence or any legal charge for years. A child would know these acts are monstrous.

How Will our Nation

Respond to its Own Crimes?

How will we, as a nation, respond to evidence of our own crimes against humanity? In this, I am guided by my Christian understanding that the life of each person is sacred, and that we are all part of one intricate, indivisible whole. I am also guided by two principles.

First: However politically inconvenient, when a crime has been committed, it may not be ignored.

Second: To create a just future, we must first be honest about our past.

To date, only a few low-level soldiers have been held accountable and served jail sentences. But with the recent release of the “Torture Memos,” written in August 2002 and March 2003 by five Justice Department lawyers, it is obvious that torture was policy approved at the highest levels of government. The purpose of these memos, which attempt a legal rationale for torture, was to provide immunity from future prosecution.

As I stood in Lincoln City, the leaders of five major religious faiths also stood, with other clergy and lay leaders, on Pennsylvania Ave in front of the White House to deliver a collective message to our President. Participants included the president of my church denomination, Rev. John Thomas (United Church of Christ), Archbishop Vicken Aykazian (Armenian Church in America), Rabbi Steve Gutow (Executive Director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs), Ingrid Mattson (President of the Islamic Society of North America), and the Rev. Michael Cinnamon (General Secretary of the National Council of Churches).

They came as a united part of The National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT). The message they delivered: President Obama, we look to you and the Department of Justice to authorize a Commission of Inquiry into recent U.S. torture practices. This Commission must be independent and nonpartisan. If it is found that crimes have been committed, then the responsible individuals must be indicted and held accountable.

In this call for accountability, there is no place for self-righteousness. Since May 2004, it has been public information that torture was being committed by the United States, and we citizens did not do what was needed to stop it. We are all complicit.

At the heart of torture is an ancient, recurring lie: That the pain inflicted on just one more person will save us. Every Christian knows and ought to abhor this lie; it’s the very lie that led to Jesus’ torture and political execution.

Will we as a nation investigate and be accountable? As we consider our answer, we do well to listen to these words from Stanley Kunitz’s poem, “Bonhoeffer.”

Slime, in the grains of the State,
like smut in the corn,
from the top infected
Hatred made law,
wolves bred out of maggots
rolling in blood,
and the seal of the church ravished
to receive the crooked sign.
All the steeples were burning.
In the chapel of his ear
he had heard the midnight bells
jangling: if you permit
this evil, what is the good
of the good of your life?
And he forsook the last things,
the dear inviolable mysteries—
Plato’s lamp, passed from the hand
of saint to saint—
that he might risk his soul in the streets, where the things given
are only next to last.Φ

Charles Busch, the founder and President of Peace Village, Inc. and a United Church of Christ minister, lives on the Oregon Coast.

Photo courtesy of : Ken McCormack

I have a link on "Torture Proof" on my website located here:

http://www.joe-anybody.com/id15.html

Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:02 AM PDT

Updated: Sunday, 25 October 2009 7:19 PM PDT

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Mood:  mischievious

A foolproof technique to secure your computer, e-mail, and bank account.

It's tempting to blame the victim. In May, a twentysomething French hacker broke into several Twitter employees' e-mail accounts and stole a trove of meeting notes, strategy documents, and other confidential scribbles. The hacker eventually gave the stash to TechCrunch, which has since published notes from meetings in which Twitter execs discussed their very lofty goals. (The company wants to be the first Web service to reach 1 billion users.) How'd the hacker get all this stuff? Like a lot of tech startups, Twitter runs without paper—much of the company's discussions take place in e-mail and over shared Google documents. All of these corporate secrets are kept secure with a very thin wall of protection: the employees' passwords, which the intruder managed to guess because some people at Twitter used the same passwords for many different sites. In other words, Twitter had it coming. The trouble is, so do the rest of us.

Your passwords aren't very secure. Even if you think they are, they probably aren't. Do you use the same or similar passwords for several different important sites? If you don't, pat yourself on the back; if you do, you're not alone—one recent survey found that half of people online use the same password for all the sites they visit. Do you change your passwords often? Probably not; more than 90 percent don't. If one of your accounts falls to a hacker, will he find enough to get into your other accounts? For a scare, try this: Search your e-mail for some of your own passwords. You'll probably find a lot of them, either because you've e-mailed them to yourself or because some Web sites send along your password when you register or when you tell them you've forgotten it. If an attacker manages to get into your e-mail, he'll have an easy time accessing your bank account, your social networking sites, and your fantasy baseball roster. That's exactly what happened at Twitter. (Here's my detailed explanation of how Twitter got compromised.)

Everyone knows it's bad to use the same password for different sites. People do it anyway because remembering different passwords is annoying. Remembering different difficult passwords is even more annoying. Eric Thompson, the founder of AccessData, a technology forensics company that makes password-guessing software, says that most passwords follow a pattern. First, people choose a readable word as a base for the password—not necessarily something in Webster's but something that is pronounceable in English. Then, when pressed to add a numeral or symbol to make the password more secure, most people add a 1 or ! to the end of that word. Thompson's software, which uses a "brute force" technique that tries thousands of passwords until it guesses yours correctly, can easily suss out such common passwords. When it incorporates your computer's Web history in its algorithm—all your ramblings on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere—Thompson's software can come up with a list of passwords that is highly likely to include yours. (He doesn't use it for nefarious ends; AccessData usually guesses passwords under the direction of a court order, for military purposes, or when companies get locked out of their own systems—"systems administrator gets hit by a bus on the way to work," Thompson says by way of example.)

Security expert Bruce Schneier writes about passwords often, and he distills Thompson's findings into a few rules: Choose a password that doesn't contain a readable word. Mix upper and lower case. Use a number or symbol in the middle of the word, not on the end. Don't just use 1 or !, and don't use symbols as replacements for letters, such as @ for a lowercase A—password-guessing software can see through that trick. And of course, create unique passwords for your different sites.

That all sounds difficult and time-consuming. It doesn't have to be. In Schneier's comment section, I found a foolproof technique to create passwords that are near-impossible to crack yet easy to remember. Even better, it'll take just five minutes of your time. Ready?

Start with an original but memorable phrase. For this exercise, let's use these two sentences: I like to eat bagels at the airport and My first Cadillac was a real lemon so I bought a Toyota. The phrase can have something to do with your life or it can be a random collection of words—just make sure it's something you can remember. That's the key: Because a mnemonic is easy to remember, you don't have to write it down anywhere. (If you can't remember it without writing it down, it's not a good mnemonic.) This reduces the chance that someone will guess it if he gets into your computer or your e-mail. What's more, a relatively simple mnemonic can be turned into a fanatically difficult password.

Which brings us to Step 2: Turn your phrase into an acronym. Be sure to use some numbers and symbols and capital letters, too. I like to eat bagels at the airport becomes Ilteb@ta, and My first Cadillac was a real lemon so I bought a Toyota is M1stCwarlsIbaT.

That's it—you're done. These mnemonic passwords are hard to forget, but they contain no guessable English words. You can even create pass phrases for specific sites that are coded with a hint about their purpose. A sentence like It's 20 degrees in February, so I use Gmail lets you set a new Gmail password every month and still never forget it: i90diSsIuG for September, i30diMsIuG for March, etc. (These aren't realistic temperatures; they're the month-number multiplied by 10.)

How many different such passwords do you need? Four or five at most. You don't have to keep unique passwords for every single site you visit—Thompson says it's perfectly OK to repeat passwords on sites that don't need to be kept very secure. For instance, I can use the same password for my accounts at the New York Times, the New Republic, The New Yorker, and other online magazines, because it won't hurt me too much if someone breaks into those. (My mnemonic is, I like to read snooty publications quite often.) You should probably use different passwords for each your social networking accounts—someone can do real damage by breaking into your Facebook or Twitter, so you want to keep them distinct—but you can still come up with a single systematic mnemonic to protect them: Twitter is my second favorite social networking site, MySpace is my third favorite social networking site, etc. Reserve your strongest, most distinct passwords for the few very important services that, if cracked, could do the most damage—your bank account, your computer, and most of all your e-mail, which often contains the keys to everything else in your life.

To be sure, this is more of a hassle than what you're doing now—but what you're doing now is going to come back to bite you. These days, we're all dishing personal information all the time; you may think that your password is totally unguessable, but your Facebook makes clear that you're a huge U2 fan and you graduated from college in 2000. Achtung2000, eh? Just go ahead and make some new passwords right now. Trust me, you'll feel better.

According to the story he gave TechCrunch, the Twitter hacker began exploiting Gmail's forgotten-password feature to get into one staffer's personal e-mail. The hacker got a bit lucky here: When he hit the forgotten-password button, Gmail gave him a hint about the secondary e-mail address that the employee had entered when he or she had set up the Gmail account: ******@h******.com. The hacker guessed that this was a Hotmail address; when he checked Hotmail for some addresses that might belong to the user, he found they were no longer active. (Hotmail, like a lot of Web e-mail services, deletes accounts that haven't been accessed in a while.) So the hacker set up the Hotmail account that Gmail thought belonged to the Twitter employee. When Gmail sent a password-reset link to the Hotmail address, it went right into the hacker's hands. (Google has recently added a feature in Gmail that occasionally prompts users to update their backup e-mail addresses.)

After rifling through the Twitter employee's Gmail in search of passwords, the hacker noticed that he seemed to use similar passwords for a lot of different sites. From there, Twitter fell like a line of dominoes: The hacker used the passwords he found in the Gmail account to get into the employee's Google Apps account, which led him to company documents that contained personal information about other Twitter employees. That information allowed him to guess those employees' passwords, which gave him even more personal information, which got him even more passwords, and so on. Eventually the hacker had access not only to documents floating around inside Twitter but also to some employees' accounts at Amazon, AT&T, and iTunes. He even got into the GoDaddy account that managed some of Twitter's domain names.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2223478/

Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:00 AM PDT

Updated: Sunday, 25 October 2009 7:20 PM PDT

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