By Marjorie Cohn
Jurist

The Bush administration has announced its intention to try six alleged al Qaeda members at Guantánamo under the Military Commissions Act. That Act forbids the admission of evidence extracted by torture, although it permits evidence obtained by cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment if it was secured before December 30, 2005. Thus, the administration would be forbidden from relying on evidence obtained by waterboarding, if waterboarding constitutes torture.

That’s one reason Attorney General Michael Mukasey refuses to admit waterboarding is torture. The other is that torture is considered a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Mukasey would be calling Dick Cheney a war criminal if the former admitted waterboarding is torture. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has said on National Public Radio that the policies that led to the torture and abuse of prisoners emanated from the Vice President’s office.

The federal government is working overtime to try and clean up the legal mess made by the use of illegal interrogation methods. In a thinly-veiled attempt to sanitize the Guantánamo trials, the Department of Justice and the Pentagon instituted an extensive program to re-interview the prisoners who have undergone abusive interrogations, this time with “clean teams.” For example, if a prisoner implicated one of the defendants during an interrogation using waterboarding, the government will now re-interrogate that prisoner without waterboarding and get the same information. Then they will say the information was secured humanely. This attempt to wipe the slate clean is a farce and a sham.

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By Michele Kort with Mary Kathomi Riungu,
reporting from Nairobi
Ms. magazine

Even as we commemorate the landmark 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade this year, U.S. reproductive health policies are having an inordinately negative effect outside of our borders. They’re causing women to die or be maimed. Harsh words, but true.

For the past 24 years, except during the Clinton presidency, U.S. administrations have maintained a global gag rule against providing counseling or referrals for abortions at U.S.-funded clinics in developing nations. It’s a rule that only thwarts safe abortions, while reducing the already limited availability of other family planning services. The global gag rule has also led to a pullback in overseas delivery of contraceptives, according to recent testimony by Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) before the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “U.S. shipments of contraceptives have ceased to 20 developing nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In some areas, the largest distribution centers for contraceptives have experienced decreased access for over 50 percent of the women they serve.”

Women’s health and rights activists in the U.S. have spent the past two decades fighting against such actions, and advocating on behalf of global reproductive health issues. But progress has come slowly. While maternal mortality has been declining at 1 percent annually, it needs to decline by 5.5 percent a year in order to be three-quarters reduced by 2015 (one of the United Nation’s Millenium Development Goals). Sounds like a lot – but it would require just about $6.1 billion more in annual funding – the price of three weeks of the Iraq war – to achieve that goal. Without that commitment, more than 500,000 women will still die annually from childbirth and its complications, with an estimated 70,000 of those deaths due to unsafe abortions.

Take, for example, the situation of women in Kenya, where abortion remains illegal unless the pregnant woman’s life is in danger (a loophole some compassionate doctors interpret liberally, as they know that desperate women will risk their lives to abort anyway). An estimated 250,000 to 320,000 abortions are carried out in the country each year, with unsafe procedures causing a shocking toll: Globally, 13 percent of maternal deaths result from abortion-related complications, but in Kenya it’s as high as 40 percent.

In public hospitals such as Kenyatta National in Nairobi, about 20,000 Kenyan women are treated each year for abortion-related complications. Nearly two-thirds of the beds in the notorious gynecological section – Ward 1D – are occupied by those patients, who suffer everything from excessive bleeding to injured organs to sepsis. Those sufferers include women such as Wangui (not her real name), who drank a boiled concoction made from trees and took several doses of an anti-malaria drug in order to abort because her impoverished household couldn’t support a fifth child. She ended up in Ward 1D because she required an urgent blood transfusion to save her life.

Women’s rights groups in Kenya have been pushing for a new national law on reproductive rights, as well as supporting a continental protocol on the rights of African women and a patients’ bill of rights. But they’re not helped in their efforts to improve reproductive health care by the global gag rule, which has forced a number of clinics to turn down U.S. funds rather than stop discussing abortion. Three clinics of the Family Planning Association of Kenya (an affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation) and two clinics of Marie Stopes International (the U.K.-based reproductive-health NGO) have been closed for loss of funds, according to a 2004 report from the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy in San Francisco.

Maternity care in general is problematic in Kenya’s public hospitals. The 2007 report “Failure to Deliver,” produced by the Federation of Women Lawyers-Kenya (FIDA Kenya) and the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, pointed out that public health facilities often suffer from lack of supplies and congestion. Claris Ogangah-Onyango, legal counsel for FIDA Kenya, points out the obvious: When the majority of beds in maternity hospitals are occupied by women with post-abortion complications, there is not enough space and care for other women.

“The government is mostly concerned with post-abortion care,” she says, “and most of the funding goes to that. But they’re not doing anything to stop [unsafe] abortions.”

“What has really affected our work in Kenya is that we have very few women in our parliament [just 18 of 222 members],” says Ogandah-Onyango. “When we take our issues to the government, they are blocked. FIDA and other women’s organizations have approached the candidates for the next parliament to sign a document that they will support gender-friendly bills. Putting more women in government would make a big difference.”

And what can women in the U.S. do to help their Kenyan sisters? “Lobby for change in the policies that govern reproductive health,” she says. U.S. women can also support the efforts of groups such as FIDA Kenya, which is now part of the Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance in Kenya.

Sisterhood is a global mission. Economics and politics and even social conscience aside, we know that only by empowering all women can we ensure the future of the world.

For the full article, see the Winter 2008 issue of Ms., now on newsstands and by subscription from www.msmagazine.com.

Reflections on the submerging culture
By Cecil Bothwell
Asheville, NC

A couple of weeks ago I was pleased to note that the television in the downtown Asheville post office had been removed, hopefully for good—though the clerks were unable to confirm my optimistic question.

I definitely don’t miss the constant chatter of talking heads and advertisements that used to blast down at customers waiting for service, and I have no idea how clerks could handle the onslaught throughout the day. Queried about programming choices, employees had told me they were only permitted to tune to CNN or the Weather Channel, which I guess must have been deemed by some distant bureaucrat to be content-neutral, though both channels are heavily laden with ads and therefore represent a tacit government subsidy to private business. (This point is tangential to the current subject, but I’m looking into it. Perhaps another network successfully challenged the commercial favoritism.)

The first time I was aware of that particular TV was in the week before Bush invaded Iraq. CNN was running a teaser for the upcoming war coverage which would presumably offer more of the great high-tech fireworks delivered in the first Gulf War while bodies were charred and homes and families destroyed. The teaser used a staccato repetition of Bush bringing down his arm as he intoned, “Let’s roll!”

“Let’s roll! Let’s roll! Let’s roll!”

I understood why former New York Times journalist Richard Reeves refers to America’s TV networks as PNN: The Pentagon News Network. And I had never felt more like I was being forced to attend to Big Brother. At least such propaganda wasn’t being piped into my house, since I quit watching TV at home 30 years ago.

Of course, one can’t function in modern society and entirely avoid television and its discontents. The local daily paper features front page reports on the Super Bowl, American Idol and Britney’s hijinks, and I occasionally expose myself to TV in other people’s homes. But I have noticed that banishment of the medium from my day-to-day existence has left me more sensitized to it than most other folks appear to be. I find the presence of an operating television to be extremely distracting and annoying. I find conversation difficult and the atmosphere uncomfortable.

Comfortable watching of TV is a learned activity and I have evidently unlearned it.

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Congressional Quarterly

Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday insisted that the Air Force fix what Defense Department officials described as the U.S. military’s loss of focus in safeguarding its nuclear weapons.

Senators from both parties demanded answers about an incident last August in which a B-52 bomber flew from an air base in North Dakota to one in Louisiana with six cruise missiles onboard that the crew did not know were carrying nuclear warheads, each with destructive power 10 times that of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. It took 36 hours before anyone missed the weapons.

Defense Department officials told the panel the incident reflected a waning emphasis on nuclear-weapons procedures across the U.S. military but they insisted the stockpile is nonetheless secure. Committee Republicans, while acknowledging the seriousness of the incident, emphasized the weapons were not in a condition that would have allowed them to detonate.

But Democrats stressed that if military personnel do not know they are handling nuclear weapons, they are less likely to follow procedures designed to safeguard them from terrorists. And even if a warhead could not have exploded in a nuclear reaction, Democrats said, the potentially deadly plutonium inside might have scattered in an aircraft crash.

“No breach of nuclear procedures of this magnitude has ever occurred,” said Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich).

The hearing revealed that during the August incident at least 25 different people in the Air Force did not do their jobs in failing to discover that actual warheads, as opposed to dummies, had been put on the cruise missiles.

Republicans sought to put the incident in context.

“The American public were never in danger if there had been an accident,” said John W. Warner (R-Va).

InfraGard. Coming to a SC neighborhood near you, and keeping an eye on you. To join SC InfraGard go here. Be advised, it is a bit of a secret society composed of CEOs – one of whom has to recommend you for membership.

By Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does- and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law. InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.

InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.

“Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now 86 of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.

“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its web site, which adds that “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.”

To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard,” he said. “From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

In an interview with InfraGard after the conference, which is featured prominently on the InfraGard members’ website, Mueller says: “It’s a great program.”

The ACLU is not so sanguine.

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By Jean Hardisty

Romance and marriage proposals are in the air on Valentine’s Day. Unfortunately, cupid isn’t the only matchmaker hard at work this season. An increasing number of low-income women find themselves pushed to the altar — not by their relations or suitors, but by the federal government.

“The Department of Health and Human Services is not going to run a dating service,” declared Wade Horn in the early days of the George W. Bush administration. But Horn, a leader of the rightist “fatherhood movement” during the 1990s, introduced policies promoting marriage as a cure for poverty while running HHS’ Administration for Children and Families from 2001 to 2007.

Despite his “dating service” denial, Horn saw to it that government grants powered a multimillion-dollar marriage industry made up of secular and faith-based groups which encourage low-income women — especially welfare recipients — to marry and bring a father into their families. Needless to say, the administration applies only the most narrow and traditional definition of “family.”

Grants made to marriage promotion programs have ballooned while at the same time federal benefits have been cut for all low-income families and those unable to meet their own needs. The scale of government funding for this inane and completely unproven bit of social experimentation is alarming. The 2005 Deficit Reduction Act allocated $100 million annually for marriage promotion programs and $50 million for fatherhood programs over fiscal years 2006 – 2010, or a total of $750 million. The administration’s Charitable Choice Fund — which in 2004 had a budget of $2 billion — also makes grants to promote marriage, as does its $30 million Compassion Capital Fund. Many of these millions serve to fuel the expansion of conservative evangelical organizations.

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