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Daily Archives: 2 May 04
‘Mission Accomplished’ Dept, ‘Dark Angels of Hell’ Office:
Juan Cole has an interesting roundup of Arab reactions to the prison torture scandal. It isn’t pretty.
Conflict Map
On the occasion of the centennial of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee offers this map of twentieth-century armed conflicts (requires Shockwave). As you slide a slider along the timeline from 1900 to 2000, you can watch the conflagrations that erupted at any given point flare up on the world map.
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Illustrated Complete Summary [via Incoming Signals]
Annals of National Security
Seymour Hersh on the Abu Ghraib torture::
“Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, ‘Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude??’ “
So, indeed, it may have been ‘only following orders’ after all. Hersh describes a longstanding pattern of illegal cooperation by the forces guarding the military prisons both in Afghanistan and Iraq and OGAs — other government agencies, their euphemism for military intelligence — in “setting favorable conditions for subsequent interviews”, if you know what that means. An earlier Army investigation of MP practices either softpedaled or covered up the level of abuse. Of the current investigation leading to Article 32 proceedings against six enlisted GIs and their commander, Hersh says:
As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.
The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.” — New Yorker [via walker]
"Doctors Without Borders"
Why you can’t trust medical journals anymore: “…(W)here the debate over conflict of interest in medical journals stands: Should research scientists who have financial stakes in the products they are writing about be forced to disclose those ties? To which the average person might reasonably respond, of course they should. But the more pertinent question is why scientists with financial stakes in the outcome of scientific studies are allowed anywhere near those studies, much less reviewing them in elite journals.
The answer to that question is at once both predictable and shocking: For the past two decades, medical research has been quietly corrupted by cash from private industry. Most doctors and academic researchers aren’t corrupt in the sense of intending to defraud the public or harm patients, but rather, more insidiously, guilty of allowing the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to manipulate medical science through financial relationships, in effect tainting the system that is supposed to further the understanding of disease and protect patients from ineffective or dangerous drugs. More than 60 percent of clinical studies–those involving human subjects–are now funded not by the federal government, but by the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. That means that the studies published in scientific journals like Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine–those critical reference points for thousands of clinicians deciding what drugs to prescribe patients, as well as for individuals trying to educate themselves about conditions and science reporters from the popular media who will publicize the findings–are increasingly likely to be designed, controlled, and sometimes even ghost-written by marketing departments, rather than academic scientists. Companies routinely delay or prevent the publication of data that show their drugs are ineffective. The majority of studies that found such popular antidepressants as Prozac and Zoloft to be no better than placebos, for instance, never saw print in medical journals, a fact that is coming to light only now that the Food and Drug Administration has launched a reexamination of those drugs.” Washington Monthly
High-Tech Mindreading
“Brain fingerprinting uses a headband with sensors to measure brain waves, which promoters say can help authorities determine the truth by detecting information stored in the brain.
An example is that a murder investigation could be aided if showing a picture of a murder scene to a suspect reveals brain wave measurements that indicate familiarity with the scene. The brain waves are fed through an amplifier into a computer that uses software to display and interpret them.
The hope is the results will become widely accepted as scientific and legal evidence, such as DNA tests.
Results from a test in 2000 on a man convicted in a 1977 Iowa murder showed his brain didn’t hold specific knowledge of the crime but did contain details about the night of the murder that were consistent with his alibi.” — Seattle Post-Intelligencer
And Here is a link to the Brain Fingerprinting website.
"Doctors Without Borders"
Why you can’t trust medical journals anymore: “…(W)here the debate over conflict of interest in medical journals stands: Should research scientists who have financial stakes in the products they are writing about be forced to disclose those ties? To which the average person might reasonably respond, of course they should. But the more pertinent question is why scientists with financial stakes in the outcome of scientific studies are allowed anywhere near those studies, much less reviewing them in elite journals.
The answer to that question is at once both predictable and shocking: For the past two decades, medical research has been quietly corrupted by cash from private industry. Most doctors and academic researchers aren’t corrupt in the sense of intending to defraud the public or harm patients, but rather, more insidiously, guilty of allowing the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to manipulate medical science through financial relationships, in effect tainting the system that is supposed to further the understanding of disease and protect patients from ineffective or dangerous drugs. More than 60 percent of clinical studies–those involving human subjects–are now funded not by the federal government, but by the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. That means that the studies published in scientific journals like Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine–those critical reference points for thousands of clinicians deciding what drugs to prescribe patients, as well as for individuals trying to educate themselves about conditions and science reporters from the popular media who will publicize the findings–are increasingly likely to be designed, controlled, and sometimes even ghost-written by marketing departments, rather than academic scientists. Companies routinely delay or prevent the publication of data that show their drugs are ineffective. The majority of studies that found such popular antidepressants as Prozac and Zoloft to be no better than placebos, for instance, never saw print in medical journals, a fact that is coming to light only now that the Food and Drug Administration has launched a reexamination of those drugs.” Washington Monthly
