McChrystal, Afghanistan, and what we should do.

The United States under Barack Obama is getting ready to ramp up its commitment to Afghanistan, after years of neglect by the Bush administration. Part of that effort has resulted in the firing of General McKiernan by Obama as the head of the US efforts there, and his replacement by Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The story I've linked to notes that there are two main issues that have some people in the US concerned about McChrystal's appointment: the coverup around the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, and detainee abuse in Iraq.

The first is pretty much an internal scandal that was big in the US, as Tillman quit a pro football career in the NFL to volunteer after 9/11. When he was shot by one of his colleagues, the Bush administration decided to make propaganda lemonade by portraying his death as a heroic one in battle, similar in principle to the way they "rescued" Jessical Lynch from the hospital where she was being treated for her injuries after crashing the truck she was driving. This is interesting in the sense that it helps show the mendacity of the Bush administration in their ongoing attempts to sell the US public on a war of choice in Iraq. However, it is the second that is far more relevant to us here in Canada, as we have soldiers operating within Afghanistan, in one of its most troubled provinces.

While the NPR article only mentions detainee abuse once, it appears to be far more serious than detainee abuse would describe. Here's part of what Bloomberg has to say:

McChrystal’s background is in overseeing special forces, including counter-terrorism units such as the Army’s Delta Force. From September 2003 through August 2008, he led the Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Command, which manages units in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

He orchestrated the manhunts that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 and the air strike in June 2006 that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The Joint Special Operations Command was a special unit that was separate from the usual services (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force) in the US military. Seymour Hersh has reported on how it was organised and on where they got their orders from.

Seymour Hersh says that Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing and the head of the wing has just been named as the new commander in Afghanistan.... According to Hersh, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was headed by former US vice president Dick Cheney... On July 22, 2006, Human Rights Watch issued a report titled "No blood, no foul" about American torture practices at three facilities in Iraq. One of them was Camp Nama, which was operated by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), under the direction of then Major General Stanley McChrystal.

Camp Nama (the name is Iraqi, but the US military there have taken it to mean Nasty Ass Military Area) is particularly deserving of attention, because of the potentially terrible consequences it could have for Canada's efforts in Afghanistan. To give a general idea of what Nama was all about, I've placed an image of a placard that was known to hang there. Earlier this month, a US soldier, now retired, who served with McChrystal in Iraq had this to say:

Obviously writing from the seat of retirement, and with absolute respect and gratefulness for LTG McChrystal’s aggressive leadership, personable demeanor, and unwavering mentoring, I envy the guys that are soon to find themselves sharing the same mess hall, weight room, and helicopter as The Pope. The man is unstoppable. Demonstrably more committed than most. More open, in fact insistent, on creative and innovative ideas from his subordinates to fight the war on terror. From my perspective, our rules of land warfare, our respect for human life, and our strategic constraints handcuff us to the point that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. But, with LTG McChrystal at the helm now all bets are off.

I really like how he figures that only by removing rules of war, respect for humans, and strategic constraints can their handcuffs come off and victory be assured.

From the same article:

The black room was 12 by 12 [feet]. It was painted black floor to ceiling. The door was black, everything was black. It had speakers in the corners, all four corners, up at the ceiling. It had a small table in one of the corners, and maybe some chairs. But usually in the black room nobody was sitting down. It was standing, stress positions, and so forth. The table would be for the boom box and the computer. We patched it into the speakers and made the noise and stuff. Most of the harsh interrogations were in that room. . . . Sleep deprivation, environmental controls, hot and cold, water.

...

He was stripped naked, put in the mud and sprayed with the hose, with very cold hoses, in February. At night it was very cold. They sprayed the cold hose and he was completely naked in the mud, you know, and everything. [Then] he was taken out of the mud and put next to an air conditioner. It was extremely cold, freezing, and he was put back in the mud and sprayed. This happened all night. Everybody knew about it. People walked in, the sergeant major and so forth, everybody knew what was going on, and I was just one of them, kind of walking back and forth seeing [that] this is how they do things.

The following is from a Human Rights Watch interview with another soldier who spent time in Camp Nama:

• HRW: Was there any discussion of the Red Cross coming?
• Yeah, they said that the Red Cross would never be able to get in there at all.
• Abuse.184 HRW: Why would somebody bring that up?
• I think because the Red Cross and a couple other agencies were going around different places around Iraq, different facilities, and they were getting access. So somebody brought it up to somebody else. I think the colonel, or somebody in charge. You know, will they come here? It was the colonel, yeah. And he said absolutely not.

Jeff explained that the colonel told them that he "had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there's no way that the Red Cross could get in." Jeff did not question the colonel further on how these assurances were given to those in command in CampNama.

He explained that they were told: "they just don't have access, and they won't have access, and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating. Even Army investigators."

Jeff said that he did see Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. Joint Special Operations forces in Iraq, visiting the Nama facility on several occasions. "I saw him a couple of times. I know what he looks like."

I'm sorry, but I don't have a link for that particular passage. I got it from Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, at The Atlantic's website. Those that know him know that he's not what you call a lefty radical... I disagree with him on a lot of things, but the simple truth that since it became clear to him that the Bush administration was using torture widely and indiscriminately in pursuit of their international and domestic political goals he broke with them... which makes him a person with whom I can both disagree and respect.

Let's make sure we're very clear on what really was going on there... stress positions, sometimes for days, waterboarding, temperature extremes (hypothermia as well as baking), and physical abuse that violated even the barest restraint enumerated in that poster (no blood no foul). Furthermore, it's also known that at least two of their prisoners died under questioning... in short, they were strung up, beaten, frozen, baked, and waterboarded until they died... they were tortured to death.

So, what are we to make of all this? Obama has basically appointed Cheney's chief torturer and executioner to helm the American war in Afghanistan. Here is what I think will have to happen.

1. Our PM must make it very clear to his counterpart in Washington that we will not tolerate those kinds of activities in a theatre of war of which we're a part.
2. He should make it very clear that at the first sign that any torture is going on, that we'll be gone... and that we'll make it very clear to the tribal leaders in Kandahar why we're leaving; that we have to leave because we've learned that the US is doing things that we cannot countenance and that we must leave to maintain our own moral standards of what we think is right.
3. We won't wait until some ridiculously high evidentiary bar is met to make that decision, nor will we wait until the Federal Court of Canada rules that our forces must leave to maintain our own obligations under the Geneva Conventions nor under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
4. Then, if we in fact find out that those techniques are being used to elicit false confessions and justify using aerial drones to kill people in villages without regard to their status in the conflict, he has to stick to it.

Any less will be a betrayal of what our (and my) ancestors fought for in conflicts in the past.

Interesting spam patterns and Tibet

I'm working for a telecommunications company specializing in email to SMS text message services. A large part of my responsibility is to help deal with the non-stop flood of spam that constantly arrives at our doorstep, hoping to snare the naive mobile customer into taking viagra three times a day at THE BEST PRICES AVAILABLE!!!!!!11!!!!1!!!111!!!.

Lately, we've been seeing a lot of spam offering low-interest loans from China. I imagine that these are more aimed at the U.S. market than they are here... but I suspect that most sub-prime lenders in China don't really see the distinctions between the Canadian and U.S. desperate-for-money markets. However, that's not what this post is really about.

One of the major techniques used to keep spam from landing in your inbox is a technique known as Bayesian filtering. It is used by many different products, both free and commercial, and it has some effectiveness at eliminating the spam. In an effort to defeat these filters, spammers have taken to including large blocks of text that aren't relevant to their message, but are likely to score low in the Bayesian filter, in the hopes that this will allow their message to make it through the filter. To give you an idea, while penis, p3nis, p3n1s, etc are all terms that score high in the filter, by including a lot of spurious text (darkly dreaming surrealism) they hope that the overall message scores low. Eventually, these messages are caught, and the filters get trained in the new terms so they become high scorers. I'm sure you've all seen these; the messages that have that block of text that make no sense whatsoever.

Lately, the large number of Chinese "borrow money now" spams have included text that are politically relevant, if not relevant to usury. They are including text from wire news reports about the Dalai Lama and the protests in Tibet... and I have, as I have to, been training them into the new spam filters. However, there is a fairly predictable side-effect of doing this; it can lead to legitimate messages about buddhism, the Dalai Lama, Tibetan buddhism, and the current protests in Tibet and around the world as it follows the Olympic torch being caught in spam filters. As an information warfare technique, it is certainly interesting, and it's also interesting that these are being promulgated by parties that don't appear to be state actors... though I have to admit that I'm skeptical that the use of this new technique isn't being motivated by state actors.

It certainly looks to me that the Chinese government is attempting to extend the Great Firewall of China to the rest of the world's email system by exploiting an unintended consequence of the Bayesian techniques of spam filtering.

A problem for the Republican candidate for president of the U.S.?

I've noticed that the United States is claiming that constitutional protections for persons (you know, quaint things like fair trials and security of the person) don't apply to the "detainees" at Guantanamo Bay because they are not on United States territory, despite the fact that they are housed on a U.S. military base, because the base is located in another country.

If this is so, it would seem to indicate that John McCain is not eligible to run for the U.S. presidency, since he was born on a military base in Panama, and therefore is not a person born in the U.S., which is a requirement for the job... a very hard requirement, seeing as it was included in the very first drafts of the U.S. constitution.

So... which is it boys, do the detainees get their rights protected by the U.S. constitution, or is John McCain ineligible for the job of President of the United States?

U.S. Administration tries to spread the blame

Recently, ex-CIA operative Michael Scheuer suggested that Canada was complicit in the extraordinary rendition of Maher Arar to Syria. This strikes me as a gross oversimplification of what happened. Until such time as he is willing to say who was complicit and what they did, we cannot take his words seriously; without concrete details, it is only an attempt to spread the stain around in the hopes that people won't notice it where it's darkest.

I would like to encourage him to name names, so that we may prosecute those responsible to the fullest extent of the law, for participating in such an act is clearly a crime in Canada, regardless of their position. I'd also like to take some of the newspapers of record in this country to task for dismissing his claims out of hand. Instead, they should be calling on Mr. Scheuer to tell us who in the Canadian government and/or security services participated in Mr. Arar's extraordinary rendition so that we can expose them and drag them and their actions out of the shadows and into fresh air and sunlight so they may decompose.

In the meantime, it is hard to take him (and his former agency, and his country) seriously when they continue to hold another one of our citizens, taken as a child soldier, prisoner under conditions that are clearly in contravention of Western norms of justice, not to mention the certainty of daily torture, in Guantanamo Bay. Even ignoring the fact that the "special" court system set up by the U.S. at Guantanamo clearly fails to meet even token requirements for a legitimate trial, the falsification of the evidence against him makes any attempt by the U.S. to portray his trial as having any legitimacy no more than a gossamer veil over the empire's naked paunch.

Name names and say what happened, Mr. Scheuer.

Moderate muslims and family ties

I just finished reading this article by Robert Fisk, a well-known journalist who writes for The Independent in the United Kingdom. It's called The Fearful Lives in a Land of the Free, and demonstrates why it's a good idea for all interested citizens of any grouping to actively seek out and find perspectives from outside their own sphere... as I like to argue to my friends in the United States 'we are your best friends, whether you realise it or not; when we start telling you something is a bad idea (like the idea of invading Iraq was a bad idea) it's not smart to just reject it out of hand.' At the same time, it behooves us as Canadians to also think carefully about what others say about life and situations here.

I have heard many people in our media through articles, columns, and letters to the editor complain about why they don't hear "moderate muslims" excoriate the leadership of jihadist organisations for their positions and actions. This article goes a long way to explaining this in the context of our multicultural country. It is actually quite complimentary of Canada, except for certain institutions: in particular, CSIS and the RCMP. This article contains some very serious food for thought about how we are handling our responsibilities to our citizens in the Global War on Terror, in particular our intelligence agency's credulous reactions to information sourced from the secret police of anti-democratic corporatist regimes from the Middle East, and considering the West's wider support for many of these regimes because of how they help some of our institutions I am forced to ask what and how we are to react.

The explanation offered by some of Mr. Fisk's companions on his trip to Canada call the prosecution of some of our own "home-grown jihadis" into serious question, and the secrecy shrouding their prosecutions beg some questions... if in fact the majority of the evidence against them has been sourced from the secret police of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia (an autocratic military state and an autocratic monarchy, respectively), how are we to know that this evidence does not originate in a regles des comptes from within their own communities in Canada?

One of the basic foundational ideas of our justice system is that justice must be done, and that justice must be seen to be done; it is the basic idea behind some of the oldest and most important of our civil rights such as habeus corpus, and the transparency of our justice system. With such important proceedings being kept from the eyes of the public due to the oft-cited importance of national security, how are we as citizens to judge that our institutions have lived up to their own stated ideals?

Reflections on World Autism Day

Well, the first World Autism Day has come and gone, and there are some thoughts I've had about the coverage and what it indicates about how poorly we are prioritizing those things that need to be done about the rising rates of autism in the west.

The coverage was almost entirely devoted to the medical dimensions of autism, with a large part of it devoted to the question of thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in vaccines. I find this problematic in certain ways.

The first and most significant way this is problematic is because it is completely slanted to only one dimension of the issue that faces us; it only looks to causes, and not at what to do with the autistic people among us. It gets people to think about autism in strictly medical terms, when in fact the more important aspect of autism has to do with the educational aspects of treatment. To put it simply, the only thing that we know helps autistics deal effectively with the world is education. However, dealing with the educational aspects of autism is not something that pleases the large corporate entities, because it's not possible to rake in tons of dough for companies like Pfizer and Eli Lilly by educating people. They want to come up with a pill instead.

Another reason why the emphasis on vaccines is problematic is because it ignores many of the other potential chemical triggers that could be behind the rise in rates of autism. A little bit of background is in order, so to begin...

It's quite certain that autism has a genetic component. In short, it runs in families. However, it's also equally certain that there are many groups of genes at play, and the genes that create the potential for autism in one individual are completely different from the ones that create it in another. Furthermore, the presence of these genes do not automatically mean the presence of autism. If genetics were the sole cause, autism rates would be expected to hold basically steady. However, they're not; they're rising, and rising fast. This indicates that there is also an environmental component. The current literature basically indicates that the genetics create the potential for autism, and that environmental factors (particularly at critical stages of brain development in early life) can greatly exaggerate their manifestation.

Mercury is a well-known neurotoxin, of course, and its introduction into vaccines was at best extremely shortsighted, and possibly mendacious, but let's leave that aside for the moment. Thimerosal has not been used in vaccines in Canada for a few years now, and yet rates continue to rise. Now, this could be due to children being diagnosed some years after the fact, but I'd like to point out some other neurotoxins that are pervasive, persistent, and pernicious.

One is the family of brominated flame retardants, including chemicals like polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and so on: a veritable alphabet soup of chemicals used to make products less likely to burst into flames. They are in almost everything that we buy and use, including goods like computers, stereos, furniture, and clothing. These chemicals are persistent and bioaccumulate, with studies in Canada showing growing levels in dairy products, meat, and fish. Many of these chemicals are also known neurotoxins.

Another is that antibacterial soap, shampoo, and toothpaste that have become so popular. You know that tartar-fighting Crest and Colgate? It contains a substance called triclosan (along with a host of other consumer cleaning and kitchen products), which is also a known neurotoxin, and which breaks down to (among other chemicals) dioxin. It is persistent and pervasive, with the CBC show Marketplace taking a sample of rainwater from a farmer's field and finding triclosan.

Another chemical found everywhere is bisphenol A. This chemical is completely safe for adults; you can literally take a bath in the stuff. However, it mimics estrogen, and at key points in the development cycle tiny quantities can have profound effects. This chemical started to be noticed in the eighties (!) when zoologists started finding tremendous numbers of hermaphroditic fish and reptiles in certain areas, especially the Everglades.

The last one I'm going to mention is polytetrafluoroethylene, better known to most people by it's use in non-stick frying pans and on certain conservative US presidents under the name of Teflon. Highly persistent, millions of tons of the stuff has been produced, and while it itself is chemically inert, when heated above app. 315° C, it fumes off some very toxic chemicals, including carcinogens and yep, you guessed it, neurotoxins.

Now, studies have indicated that there is no statistical correlation between thimerosal and autism... and this may very well be true. Those studies are undertaken under carefully controlled conditions, and can easily show that in fact thimerosal does not cause a rise in autism. However, the way chemicals are studied for safety leaves out the question of synergistic effects; just like a mickey of scotch and four valium separately will get one wiggly or mellow, but together can quite easily see you off, the effects of these (and other similar chemicals) taken together may have much stronger effects than any one of them taken individually... and yet these interactions are not studied, especially here in North America.

There has been a movement to cause these studies to be done via institutions like Health Canada and the FDA in the US, but so far the lobbying efforts of the drug and chemical industries has managed to stymie them. In Europe, their efforts to do so have failed, and Europe has recently instituted a regulatory regime that requires such testing, including testing for chemicals that were approved under older, less strict regimes. The current strategy for the chemical industries in North America as they see markets disappear has been to institute a case before the WTO claiming unfair trade practices. Nice. All I can say is, considering some of the recent lack of action on the part of Health Canada about certain revelations (like the recent announcement by the British health services that Bisphenol A exposure to infants is to be strenuously avoided) to study the issue makes it very clear to me who the people in those agencies work for... and it ain't us.

Now, on to the other aspect that is sorely missing or under-emphasized from most of the coverage... that is, the educational dimensions of dealing with autism. To be blunt, most of the money earmarked for autism should be directed at our educational systems. There are no medical treatments that have any effect on autism whatsoever. That's not surprising, because nobody really knows what causes it, and anybody who says they do beyond broad generalities (it runs in families, and the rise must be due to environmental effects) is either delusional or lying. That may (and hopefully will) change in the future, but at the moment, the medical industry are as cavemen in their understanding of autism. However, educational treatments do work, and can work quite well, especially when they are undertaken early. However, where is all the money going? It's all going to research for the causes of autism, because only that kind of research can lead to a pill upon which some large institutional shareholders of the right pharmaceutical company is going to get rich. Diagnosis gets short shrift (waiting times for diagnosis range from six months to over TWO YEARS), but this is good because it means that if you can put 'em off for long enough you can avoid having the state pay for educational treatment via the medical system. The problem with this is that it shouldn't be delivered through the medical system at all; it should be delivered through our educational systems, seeing as that's where one finds all the educators who actually, you know, do the work. I don't understand why it is that I can't take my son to a school, tell them he's autistic, and have the school automatically make the resources he needs for a successful education made available to him. It's not like it won't pay off for the society in the long run... results of early education are dramatic. However, the problem is that it's not going to make anybody rich... so there's no resources made available to our boards of education to properly deal with this dimension of autism.

So, the two main things that were driving the coverage in the media for World Autism Day mean that the real issues were avoided; the drive for a profitable treatment and the drive to avoid having to possibly impair the profitability of broad swathes of our modern industrial economy (who after all are the same entities that own the media that spent the day talking about it). If we want to improve the situation, we can do it right now before we find a magic bullet to make it all go away... proper regulatory regimes for our chemical industries with good regression testing of both new and existing chemicals in the marketplace examining not only singular but synergistic effects of these chemicals, and a proper emphasis and resourcing for the only known effective treatment of autism: education.

Music up on my band's MySpace page.

If anyone wants to check it out, you can find them there. They're from a taping of one our shows at the Tir Nan Og, on Ontario St. in Kingston, Ontario.