Twitter as a terrorist tool

Wired shares the news

Spy Fears: Twitter Terrorists, Cell Phone Jihadists

Could Twitter become terrorists' newest killer app? A draft Army intelligence report, making its way through spy circles, thinks the miniature messaging software could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks.

For years, American analysts have been concerned that militants would take advantage of commercial hardware and software to help plan and carry out their strikes. Everything from online games to remote-controlled toys to social network sites to garage door openers has been fingered as possible tools for mayhem.

This recent presentation -- put together on the Army's 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and found on the Federation of the American Scientists website -- focuses on some of the newer applications for mobile phones: digital maps, GPS locators, photo swappers, and Twitter mash-ups of it all.

I am going to share a secret with you: Any means of communication can be an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks. It's true that online tools like twitter (or even emails) makes it faster than old time tools like letters (or word-of-mouth), but so what?

Stopping terrorism is not done by cutting off communication between terrorist cells. It's done by removing the cause of recruitment for those terrorists, and by finding the terrorists before they strike.

I understand why the US military got to focus on these things, but I would find it much better if they tried to find the root cause of terrorism, and tried to handle that instead.

BTW, my own twitter account can be found here

Sickening story from Guantánamo

The US atrocity called Guantánamo continues to give us new sickening stories.

Salon has the latest.

The forgotten kid of Guantánamo

A teenager captured in Afghanistan and shipped to the U.S. prison remained unknown to the world for five years. Now he's being tried as an adult.

It's the story of Mohammed Jawad, who is being tried at the moment. He was picked up while a juvenile, and have been kept prisoner ever since. Now he is facing trial as an adult, after having spent the last five years in Guantánamo. No one had heard about his existence, before now.

As so many others in Guantánamo, Mohammed Jawad has been declared an "unlawful enemy combatant", however the article makes clear that he was part of a militia, and should accordingly be a proper prisoner of war according to Geneva Conventions III, article 4. If the US wants to claim otherwise, Jawad should have been tried when captured, as stated in article 5:

Art 5. The present Convention shall apply to the persons referred to in Article 4 from the time they fall into the power of the enemy and until their final release and repatriation.

Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.

Alternatively, Jawad should have been considered a criminal, and tried as such in Afghanistan - until this happens, he should be treated according to Geneva Conventions IV

Of all evil things that Bush and co. have done, I can think on none worse than creating the category "unlawful enemy combatant", claiming them outside the protection of the conventions. I have no doubt that this will come back and haunt us all.

A step further towards religious tolerance?

While debatin religion in the US, many of us forget that while atheists are considered second-rate citizens by some, they are not the only group of people who encounter religious bigotry. Wiccans regularly face relgious intolerance and discrimination. Now, there is one less such discrimination happening.

Use of Wiccan Symbol on Veterans’ Headstones Is Approved

To settle a lawsuit, the Department of Veterans Affairs has agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to a list of approved religious symbols that it will engrave on veterans’ headstones.

The settlement, which was reached on Friday, was announced on Monday by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, which represented the plaintiffs in the case.

Though it has many forms, Wicca is a type of pre-Christian belief that reveres nature and its cycles. Its symbol is the pentacle, a five-pointed star, inside a circle.

Until now, the Veterans Affairs department had approved 38 symbols to indicate the faith of deceased service members on memorials. It normally takes a few months for a petition by a faith group to win the department’s approval, but the effort on behalf of the Wiccan symbol took about 10 years and a lawsuit, said Richard B. Katskee, assistant legal director for Americans United.

The group attributed the delay to religious discrimination. Many Americans do not consider Wicca a religion, or hold the mistaken belief that Wiccans are devil worshipers.

As the article shows, it appears that President George Bush follows in the steps of his father when it comes to relgious bigotry - just look at these remarks.

“I don’t think witchcraft is a religion,” Mr. Bush said at the time, according to a transcript. “I would hope the military officials would take a second look at the decision they made.”

This is from an interview with “Good Morning America” in 1999.

I am of the opinion that if people self-identify as religious, and define their belief in a way that can be considered a religion, then who are we to say otherwise? Here I should perhaps add, that it's quite reasonable to point out that someone's self-definition contradicts common usage among other people self-identifying as belonging to that religion (e.g. lack of belief in God and Jesus when considering yourself a Christian), but that's certainly not the case with the Wiccans.

Military investigates Salon's allegations

As I have mentioned before, Salon recently wrote an article about how medically unfit soldiers were sent to war.
The article in question was written by Mark Benjamin, who uncovered the Walter Reed scandal as far back as 2003, and wrote about it in Salon in 2005. In other words, the writer has shown very good investigative skills in the past, and should certainly not be dismissed out of hand.

Today, Salon writes that the army has promissed to look into the allegations from the article: Army pledges to investigate injured troop charge

Top Army officials pledged during a Senate hearing Wednesday to investigate whether a brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division is dispatching injured troops to Iraq as part of the so-called surge into Baghdad, Iraq. Pete Geren, the acting Army secretary, told a Senate panel that the Army was troubled by such charges, raised in a March 11 Salon article. "These allegations are serious and any allegations of that sort, I can assure you, we are going to follow up on and investigate," Geren told Washington Democrat Sen. Patty Murray.

I'm glad to hear that they take such allegations seriously, but the Army secretary's remarks rings a little hollow when they ignored the Walter Reed conditions mentioned in Benjamin's articles for four years, until the articles in Washington Post forced them to take action.

I hope they also investigates the allegations made by The Hartford Courant, about the army keeping mentally unfit soldiers in combat zones.

Unfit soldiers forced to fight

There have been a lot of debate about the Walter Reed problems, but now there are other bad stories about wounded soldiers coming out.

In Salon, Mark Benjamin is writing about how the US military is ordering injured soldiers to Iraq.

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

This story should be investigated, and if true, the people in charge should be prosecuted. And if true, the surgeons in question should be held morally responsible - what is described goes against everything doctors should stand for.

I am obviously not the only one who feels that way.

That is what worries Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, who has long been concerned that the military was pressing injured troops into Iraq. "Did they send anybody down range that cannot wear a helmet, that cannot wear body armor?" Robinson asked rhetorically. "Well that is wrong. It is a war zone." Robinson thinks that the possibility that physical profiles may have been altered improperly has the makings of a scandal. "My concerns are that this needs serious investigation. You cannot just look at somebody and tell that they were fit," he said. "It smacks of an overstretched military that is in crisis mode to get people onto the battlefield."

And of course, it's not just people with physical injuries that are used in situations where they shouldn't. The Hartford Courant reports on how mentally unfit soldiers are kept in combat.

The U.S. military is sending troops with serious psychological problems into Iraq and is keeping soldiers in combat even after superiors have been alerted to suicide warnings and other signs of mental illness, a Courant investigation has found.

Despite a congressional order that the military assess the mental health of all deploying troops, fewer than 1 in 300 service members see a mental health professional before shipping out.

Once at war, some unstable troops are kept on the front lines while on potent antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, with little or no counseling or medical monitoring.

And some troops who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq are being sent back to the war zone, increasing the risk to their mental health.

And it has real life effects.

The Courant's investigation found that at least 11 service members who committed suicide in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite exhibiting signs of significant psychological distress. In at least seven of the cases, superiors were aware of the problems, military investigative records and interviews with families indicate.

Again, an investigation should be conducted into this.

I was against the war in Iraq because I felt it was the wrong war at the wrong time. However, I have nothing but support for the soldiers who fight the war, and to see their life and health be misused in such a way fills me with anger.

Why is this accepted? What kind of people are willing to do these things?

Who or what is SAIC?

Vanity Fair has a quite interesting article about SAIC, a company I had never heard about before.

Washington's $8 Billion Shadow

Mega-contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel supply the government with brawn. But the biggest, most powerful of the "body shops"—SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war.

The article goes on to describe SAIC, and their less than stellar record. The article also touches on why such companies exist.

It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS.

This is hardly a new trend. In his 1980 book, Fat City, Donald Lambro describes much the same going on. It goes without saying that this is not a cost effective way of running things, and that it creates problems with oversight and conflict of interest, as the article also explains.

In Washington these companies go by the generic name "body shops"—they supply flesh-and-blood human beings to do the specialized work that government agencies no longer can. Often they do this work outside the public eye, and with little official oversight—even if it involves the most sensitive matters of national security.

[....]

SAIC's relative anonymity has allowed large numbers of its executives to circulate freely between the company and the dozen or so government agencies it cares about. William B. Black Jr., who retired from the N.S.A. in 1997 after a 38-year career to become a vice president at SAIC, returned to the N.S.A. in 2000. Two years later the agency awarded the Trailblazer contract to SAIC.

I highly recommend the article - go read it, and see what the US taxpayers' money is really used on.