No Simple Matter

Feeling Nervous? 3,000 Behavior Detection Officers Will Be Watching You at the Airport This Thanksgiving
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on November 24, 2009, Printed on November 24, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144101/

Here's a question to ponder the next time you're taking off your shoes at airport security: Can you spot terrorists by the look on their faces?

For the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the answer is yes. For the past few years, airports across the country have been using what many call "behavioral surveillance" to weed out potential hijackers among us, by covertly examining travelers' facial expressions and body language as they go through security. Unlike those airport employees who herd us along as we remove our shoes and relinquish all liquids over three ounces (with dubious results), this new program, named "Screening Passengers by Observational Techniques," or "SPOT," is carried out by TSA employees who have been trained to monitor travelers' faces and movements. As Americans head out of town this holiday season, more than 3,000 "Behavior Detection Officers" will be at 161 airports nationwide, watching our every move.

Tthe TSA boasts that the SPOT program is "derivative of other successful behavioral analysis programs that have been employed by law enforcement and security personnel both in the U.S. and around the world." Yet, the success of the SPOT program remains highly questionable. This month the Washington Post reported that, in 2008 alone, Behavior Detection Officers across the country pulled 98,805 passengers aside for additional screenings, out of which 9,854 were questioned by local police. 813 were eventually arrested.

The cost of the program, according to TSA spokesperson Ann Davis, was $3.1 million.

In an e-mail correspondence with AlterNet, Davis could not say how many of the 813 arrests led to convictions -- or for that matter, whether any terrorists were caught. "Many of the SPOT cases that resulted in arrests remain under active investigation by law enforcement," she said. "TSA doesn't always hear back from the investigative agencies on the outcome of the cases so we cannot track convictions."

But as Stephen Soldz, Director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis points out, "Even if the arrests are justified, they are less than 1 percent of the total singled out. What happens to more than 9,000 who are subjected to questioning and released?"

This question cuts to the heart of protests by civil liberties advocates and others who argue that, not only is the SPOT program a violation of people's privacy, but it is actually counterproductive, a wasteful exercise in false positives.

"By the math alone, rare events are impossible to accurately detect," says Soldz. "One will either miss most of what one is interested in [false negatives] or else identify many people falsely [false positives]."

ACLU attorney Jay Stanley concurs. "The problem with the SPOT program," he told AlterNet, "is that it is based on trying to stop terrorism by searching for supposed 'signs of terrorism' that are so commonplace that it results in an increase in the monitoring of individuals to no good end."

"We Need to Use Them Everywhere"

Like the Department of Homeland Security that oversees it, the SPOT program is a post-9/11 phenomenon, partly inspired by the surveillance tapes that showed the 9/11 hijackers making their way through security at Boston's Logan Airport.

According to TSA analyst Carl Maccario, each man kept his eyes low to the ground, avoiding the gaze of the airport security guards. "They all looked away and had their heads down," he told USA Today in 2005. As the federal government looked for new ways to augment its counterterror tools after the attacks, the TSA set out to develop a program that would seek to identify would-be terrorists based on this type of behavior. Like the Pentagon, FBI, and CIA, the TSA sought out an army of psychologists to lend their expertise.

Key among them was Dr. Paul Ekman, a San Francisco-based psychologist and pioneer in the study of deceit and "microexpressions" -- the subtle, involuntary ways in which our faces betray our inner emotions. Ekman received a call from Maccario in 2005. "They were really contacting everyone who was doing any kind of work in this area," he recalled, in an interview with AlterNet. Maccario asked him to come on board as an adviser to the SPOT program.

Ekman visited Logan Airport, where a pilot version of SPOT was being implemented. What he saw impressed him enough that he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2006, praising the program.

"SPOT's officers, working in pairs, stand off to the side, scanning passengers at a security checkpoint for signs of any behaviors on the officers' checklist, such as repeated patting of the chest -- which might mean that a bomb is strapped too tightly under a person's jacket -- or a micro-expression," he wrote.

Ekman argued that the 9/11 hijackers had deception written all over their faces, but that tragically, no one was in a position to detect it. "The hijackers' lies -- to visa interviewers and airport check-in workers -- succeeded largely because airport personnel weren't taught how to spot liars, he wrote. "They had to rely on their hunches. The people who might have saved the lives of many Americans were needlessly handicapped."

"Observational techniques are not a substitute for all the other techniques we now use to catch would-be terrorists," Ekman concluded. "But they add another layer to transportation security. They are now being used at fewer than one in 10 major U.S. airports. We need to use them everywhere."

Three years later, the SPOT program has been vastly expanded, going beyond airports nationwide. According to Davis, the TSA "regularly deploys SPOT-trained officers to other transportation venues, including mass transit and rail stations."

But if the 2008 data is any indication, even trained officers cannot easily differentiate between a person who is acting nervous because he or she is, say, afraid of flying, and a nervous person who is armed and dangerous. (Even Ekman's Washington Post article described a "fidgety" man, "slumped in line, staring at the ground," who was occasionally gripped with a "momentary look of anguish." He was taken aside and questioned by Boston police, who discovered that the man was no terrorist -- his brother had just died unexpectedly, and he was on his way to his funeral.)

"Real life is not like in a spy thriller where people can magically perceive the people who have something to hide," says Stanley. "When people are asked to detect wrongdoing based on overbroad signs," he adds, "the usual result is racial profiling."

Catching Bad Guys?

The TSA has not released data on the almost 99,000 people who were pulled aside by Behavior Detection Officials, last year, or the 9,854 who were questioned by police. But for the overwhelming majority, who were innocent of any wrongdoing, the result has been harassment, aggravation, and missed flights at best, a violation of their rights at worst.

Not to mention wasted time and resources by security agents and law enforcement.

TSA spokesperson Ann Davis cites the "deterrent value" of the program as something that "cannot be overstated" -- "SPOT adds another layer of security to the airport environment and presents the terrorists with yet one more challenge they need to overcome in attempt to defeat our security system" -- but the claim is fairly impossible to prove.

Also, she argues, "we may not know if the people SPOT caught in the country illegally, using fake passports or IDs or smuggling money or drugs were doing so to assist with a larger plot."

Indeed, critics point out that the relatively small number of arrests that have come out of the SPOT program have been mostly people with fake IDs and undocumented immigrants, but there's not much evidence that any of them had plans to carry out a terrorist attack. Still, the notion that there's anything wrong with detaining these people anyway strikes Ekman as odd. "I would think that the American public would not feel badly that they are catching money or drug smugglers, or wanted felons for serious crimes," he says. "I didn't think that was a bad thing."

But if the primary duty of the TSA is to keep travelers and transportation hubs safe, expending resources on ordinary crime-fighting would seem to be a distraction from weeding out actual potential terrorists.

This, argues Ekman, is just the nature of behavior surveillance. "Nature didn't design us in a way that we have a different appearance if we are a terrorist compared to a wanted rapist," he says. "You're basically catching what they call 'bad guys.' You're not catching a specific type of bad guy."

Can Anyone Be a Human Lie Detector?

One might describe Dr. Paul Ekman as a true believer, both in human capacity to detect deceit -- "Anybody can learn how to recognize concealed emotions," he tells me. "It takes about an hour" -- as well as the need for behavior surveillance in the post-9/11 era. If the TSA SPOT program is not as effective as it could be, he argues, it is because it's underfunded.

"I do not think Congress is taking it as seriously as it should," he says. "I hope we do not have to wait until there's some disaster before [spending on the program] is increased."

More money might mean more Behavior Detection Officers. But ideally it might mean more training as well. The positions require no scientific background; training in the art of lie detection takes place over the course of less than a week -- "four days of classroom instruction in behavior observation/analysis and 24 hours of on-the-job-training in an airport security checkpoint environment," according to Davis. The average Behavior Detection Officer position pays anywhere between $31,411 and $56,964 a year, depending on where they work. "Would more training be better?" asks Ekman. "Probably. But TSA operates within a budget that Congress gives them and they're doing the best they can do given that budget."

Ekman cites Israel, the country that largely pioneered the use of behavior surveillance as one place where similar programs have proven effective. The U.S. program was inspired in large part by Israel's; Ekman himself has been a consultant to the Israeli government for 20 years.

For Jay Stanley, this is nothing to be proud of. "There are real questions about whether the Israeli system is as sophisticated as its boosters say or whether in isn't truly just a system of racial profiling," he says. "\u2026 In any case, there are only 6.5 million Israelis, but 300 million Americans \u2026 it is doubtful that Israel's system could scale to the U.S. airline transportation system."

Stanley argues that the SPOT program overemphasizes the capacity for people to act as human lie detectors. "Studies show that people are actually very bad at detecting lies and typically overestimate their ability to do so," he says. In an airport, he adds, "people have a million reasons to be nervous or anxious. In fact, if you're in today's airports and you're not a little crazed there's almost something wrong with you."

For his part, Ekman seems intent on popularizing the science of lie detection. He is an adviser on the new FOX drama "Lie to Me," which is is based on him and his work; Ekman is an adviser on every script and writes critiques of each episode on his website. He also markets and sells interactive kits on his website, ranging from $20 to $69, that promise to train customers in the finer points of facial and micro-expressions. The kits, he says, are "really for anybody who wants to learn how to recognize emotion: doctors, nurses, salespeople, negotiators, bargainers, suspicious spouses, law enforcement \u2026 there are tens of thousands of people who learn that."

"But," he warns, "you can't turn it off once you've learned it. I try to warn people you may not always like what you see."

Do the Ends Justify the Means?

Since 9/11, the FBI has started training all new recruits in non-verbal behavior analysis. The CIA has been conducting research on how to use computers to recognize micro-expressions. Also in the works is a new initiative by the Department of Homeland Security that "uses various ways of measuring your physiology as you walk by in the hopes of picking up signs of people who are intending to do harm." The Orwellian-named "Future Attribute Screening Technology," or FAST, would measure such things as heart rate, breathing, and body temperature. ("It's not being used because it's still in the research phase," says Ekman, "but I'm one of their advisers.") The civil liberties questions raised by such potential programs make the SPOT program look tame by comparison.

One politician who has been an outspoken critic of the TSA's SPOT program is former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr. In a recent column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, he decried the new initiatives in the works as "yet another step in [the TSA and DHS's] relentless drive to bring '1984' front and center to America's airports."

"Eager always to take advantage of the willingness of passengers to surrender all sense of privacy if made to feel safe, DHS is spending millions of our tax dollars to develop technology that would remotely monitor certain bodily functions and alert TSA employees whenever someone is exuding signs of nervousness," he wrote.

Ekman dismisses concerns that the TSA's officers are violating anyone's rights. "They don't do this in the men's room," he told AlterNet. "They look at you while you're standing in line, which is a very public place. So I don't think it's an invasion of privacy."

Regardless of these questiosn, the SPOT program continues to be expanded. In January, Behavior Detection Officers were dispatched to Tampa, Florida to "look for suspicious behavior," among spectators attending Super Bowl XLIII at Raymond James Stadium. The ACLU raised alarm over the implications. As analyst Barry Steinhardt told USA Today, "If we're going to use this at high-profile sporting events, why not start using it on streets?"

From violations of privacy to racial discrimination, or the ACLU has filed numerous lawsuits seeking to curb the ever-expanding authority of the TSA. Earlier this year, the the ACLU sued the TSA for its detaining of a traveler who was stopped and questioned by officers after he was found to be carrying some $4,700 in cash at the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport in March. The man, Steven Bierfeldt, a former treasurer for the Ron Paul presidential campaign, was taken to a room and questioned about the cash. According to the ACLU, "Bierfeldt repeatedly asked the agents to explain the scope of their authority to detain and interrogate him and received no explanation."

"Instead, the agents escalated the threatening tone of their questions and ultimately told Bierfeldt that he was being placed under arrest. Bierfeldt recorded audio of the incident with his iPhone."

In September the TSA revised its policy to emphasize that "screening may not be conducted to detect evidence of crimes unrelated to transportation security." (Soon thereafter, it added that "traveling with large amounts of currency is not illegal," among other directives.) Earlier this month, the ACLU dropped the suit.

"This new policy provides much needed clarity to TSA screeners and reflects the critical requirement that TSA agents must adhere to their important but limited mandate of protecting flight safety," said Ben Wizner, an attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "The airport is not a Constitution-free zone, and the price of traveling is not exposure to limitless government searches."

The TSA continues to vigorously defended its policies as "non-intrusive" and critical to national security. TSA spokseperson Suzanne Trevino denied that the low arrest rates from last year reflect poorly on the TSA program. Anyway, "we don't arrest people," she told AlterNet. "If we find something that we are concerned about, we will call over local law enforcement. They're the ones who do the arresting."

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and World Special Coverage. http://twitter.com/LilianaSegura
? 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144101/

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-Peter K. Niven

Don't You Think It's Time to Reinstate the Laws That Would Have Prevented the Financial Crash?
By Nomi Prins, AlterNet
Posted on November 14, 2009, Printed on November 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143942/

This week marks the tenth year anniversary of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley or Financial Services Modernization Act, marking the moment when we were royally screwed by the banking system. Thank you to all those involved.

It's amazing how downright ebullient, President Bill Clinton was at that signing ceremony on November 12, 1999. an event introduced by then Treasury Secretary (now Obama advisor) Larry Summers, successor to Robert Rubin. Those restricting, anti-competitive Depression era, laws were finally behind us. Awesome.

Fast-forward to now and must of us know how devastatingly expensive that signature was for the American public. Yet, despite our government having deployed or made available over $14.1 trillion worth of federal subsidies to fix Wall Street, the banking landscape is less stable than it was before last year's crisis. And, despite national unemployment approaching double digits, and another record quarter of foreclosures, we stand farther away from the intent of Glass Steagall than ever.

Banks weren't handled with kid gloves then. They were treated like the spoiled, reckless, destructive beings they were. After the stock market crash in 1929, the country sunk into the throes of the Great Depression, characterized by 25% unemployment, bread lines, rampant foreclosures, and general despair. In 1932, the Pecora commission examined the shady banking practices that contributed to the devastation, all of which hinged on one thing - banks had used depositor capital and loans to speculate with. Exactly like the practices going on before and since last fall's financial calamity. The result of that speculation gone wrong tanked the economy. Glass-Steagall logically sought to ensure this wouldn't happen again. It divided up the banking landscape into two parts, commercial banks and investment banks. The federal government would back commercial banks and consumer deposits through establishing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). But, it wouldn't be Wall Street's investment bank bookie and bitch.

Over the decades, the financial sector, armed with cunning lobbyists and overpaid lawyers, took many swipes at Glass-Steagall, but none as devastating as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Since then, the banking sector's powerful ate its weak, amidst a wave of massive consolidation. Nearly half of the nation's biggest bank mergers took place just before or since that Act was passed. All these mega banks can thus churn deposits and loans into debt or capital to fund speculation, risk, and create a roller coaster of an economy that is defined simply on whether those bets, or asset creations, work or not, at any given moment. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Last fall, the Federal Reserve, and to some extent the Treasury Department, not only blessed, but subsidized the mergers and moniker changes (like seriously, if Carrie Prejean's title can be stripped, certainly Goldman's behavior warrants removal of the bank holding company title), helping too big to fail to become even bigger with riskier profiles than ever before. Only this time they are floated on public assistance. This is not progress. It's expensive insanity. And, it will blow up again. It is a matter of when, not if.

Meanwhile, as reform bills from Senator Christopher Dodd's (D-CT) to Representative Barney Frank's (D-MA), to the plans from the Treasury Department and the White House, make their way from concept to draft to vote, we've got to keep one thing in mind. The beast that is today's complicated, convoluted, risk taking, federal capital sucking, and bonus paying mega-bank is still roaming around free.

As long as it remains out of its cage, creating plans to slow its movements are always going to be much harder, than putting it back in a stronger cage. Though, it's important to have a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, better derivatives regulation (if only that were on the table for real), and 'funeral plans' as Dodd's bill calls them, to put too big to fail banks to bed just before they keel over, it doesn't change the nature of the beast.

And though one way to keep some of our money out of the mouths of the most rapacious banks, would be to reduce leverage limits and increase capital requirements for the riskiest banks, or as Tim Geithner and Fed Chairman, Ben Benanke like to call them, 'the systemically important' ones so they can pay for their own clean-up - this too has a catch.

The more capital banks are required to hold, while being allowed to operate as investment banks that use hoarded capital as collateral for increasing their own borrowing and trading businesses, the less lending they will provide to ordinary citizens and small businesses. Without splitting up the banking structure to avoid the hoard to trade, not to lend, scenario, we are creating legislation to help banks bloat on risk - they will have less than no incentive to do much else.

And as far as regulatory bodies are concerned? I dare any regulator, or for that matter human-being in Washington to come up with one single consistent risk parameter that can be used to determine exactly what percentage of each of the big bank's profits comes from speculative vs. customer driven business. Because, by virtue of how complex they all are, and have been allowed to remain, no two balance sheets are remotely similar - and I'm not talking about accounting terms, I'm talking about risk clarification ones.

Thus, whether we merge all regulators into one ginormous one, or have a council of them to deal with the hard issues of mega-collapse and crisis, or even place one inside the office of every top bank CEO, shadowing him like a probation officer (no that's not in one of the bills, it would just be fun to watch unfold), the beast remains out of the cage.

That's why we need to reinstate Glass-Steagall. Now. We need to dissect the speculative from the boring within our country's financial institutions. And yes, it's possible to achieve. Banks split off pieces of companies and move them around every day. Plus, the Glass Steagall Act didn't wave a magic wand that divided up bank divisions, it ingeniously used banks' own competitive desires against them, by giving banks a one-year period to dramatically reduce the portion of profit they made from investment banking activities to 10% of total profits. Banks were free to choose how to do this, knowing commercial banking got government backing, and investment backing didn't. Betting behaviors are more conservative when it's your own money, and not someone else's on the line. Stability follows.

We need to specifically reinstate section 16 of the Glass-Steagall Act that had restricted national commercial banks from engaging in most investment banking activities, up to a certain small percentage, coming from client directives, not their own proprietary trading. And, on the flip side, we need to reinstate section 21 that restricted investment banks from engaging in any commercial banking up to a certain percentage limit.

Doing these two things, would reduce the more systemically risky competitive desires between these two types of banks that spurs them to merge into institutions that are too big to exist without our help, or take the kinds of leveraged risks that drive short-term profits and bonuses, at the expense of long term financial system stability.

Similar to the original Glass-Steagall Act, commercial institutions would have say, eighteen months to reduce the percentage of their income derived from any type of equity, asset-backed securities, CDO or derivative products origination and trading to 10 percent, and one year to present a plan to do so.

While banks are learning to comply with these new-old laws, we should immediately reinstating lower deposit concentration limits on the banking industry to discourage further consolidation. Plus, we need to force the Fed to do its job to enforce existing limits, or give that enforcement power to the FDIC or another body that shows itself capable of performing this basic regulatory function. Today, two banks, Bank of America and Wells-Fargo are above 10 percent deposit concentration limits, and JPM Chase is close to 10 percent. Thank you for that, Fed. You're fired.

It's time to put the beast back in its cage, while taming it, by re-instating Glass Steagall, and keep it from inflicting even more danger on the rest of us. Meanwhile, we need to support all those in Washington that get this, and keep pressuring those who don't.

Nomi Prins is a senior fellow at the public policy center Demos and author of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street.

? 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143942/

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-Jim Leftwich & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

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-Peter K. Niven

Those Stories About Religious Groups Taking Over the World with Birth Rates Are for Suckers
By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on November 14, 2009, Printed on November 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143913/

"We are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species, less even by our inability to prevent it, than by our failure to discover the cause .... For all our knowledge, our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought. No wonder we both worship and resent them." -- P.D. James, Children of Men

Who needs real-time terrors like catastrophic climate change? Religious authorities and viral YouTube videos alike are bemoaning waning faith-based power by blaming something much more boring, even for scientists.

Birth rates.

"Europe is dying," complained England's chief rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks at a religious conference earlier this month. "Europe today is the most secular region in the world ... the only region in the world experiencing population decline. Wherever you turn today the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families."

Sacks' merging of religious impotence and perhaps literal impotence, in the form of population decline, is but one of many offensive outbursts disguised as defensive indignation. It's also bad math: Europe is not the only region in the world experiencing population decline. According to the CIA's Factbook, Hong Kong and Japan are worse off, so much so that the latter explains that it could lose a quarter of its population by 2050. But Sacks can be slightly forgiven for his clumsy math, given that these numbers change annually. Which is to say, they are eminently easily to manipulate for the sake of solicitation.

The same cannot be said for one of the more egregious offenses on this subject, which has come in the form of a viral YouTube video called "Muslim Demographics." It has amassed over 11 million views since it was posted in March by an amateur videographer, ironically named FriendOfMuslim. "Islam will overwhelm Christendom unless Christians recognize the demographic realities, begin reproducing again, and share the gospel with Muslims," argued the YouTube auteur, who is allegedly from Lebanon, inciting explosive feedback, a BBC debunking and an eventual shutdown of comments to its YouTube page. But for all the BBC's efforts at correcting the questionable statistics of the video, the damage, so to speak, has already been done, long ago. And not just because the statistics, in themselves, are routinely questionable.

"They are trying to scare people," explained Carl Haub, senior demographer for the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), by phone to AlterNet. "As long as migrant groups aren't enormous, usually no one worries about it. It's once the culture starts changing that you get trouble."

That trouble has lately arrived as a full-frontal assault on demographic data, where cultural and religious polemicists alike have seized upon the murky numbers of population growth and decline to make their case for fortification and resurgence. But this is a demographic process that has been replicating for millennia, long before Genesis asked true believers to "be fruitful and multiply." But now instead of being cloaked in the righteous garb of faith, the crusaders' paranoia is white-coated in the lab jacket of birth-rate data. And the devil is in the details.

"The data it is politicized," added Haub, "because there is culture shock. But there are unhappy people on both sides of migration. It's a major cultural and climatic change for immigrants as well."

That human dimension of population migration gets lost in the raw numbers, which are nearly impossible to reliably find. While birth data is compiled by the PRB, Center for Disease Control's National Vital Statistics System, U.S. Census Bureau and many more, few filter the results by religion. The category is simply too problematic when applied globally, and sometimes politically irrelevant when applied locally.

"We don't collect information about religion, because most of the issues we ask about in our surveys refer to government policy on some level," explained Tom Edwards, spokesperson for the U.S. Census Bureau, by phone to AlterNet. "I'm not sure it quite fits into the scheme, if you will. There's not really a policy objective to asking people about their religion."

"Past surveys do contain demographic information but to this point, they've not been conducted in a way that would allow us to make projections about future populations of religious groups," added Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life spokesman Robert Mills via email. "The field of religion research is large. There may very well be a research organization or scholar that has this information and we're just not aware of it. You've managed to stump us!"

Edwards' assertion that the Census -- which has been lethally politicized by the recent death of its worker Bill Sparkman -- has no political need for such data perhaps comes as a surprise to religious adherents and others who consider demographics to be part of the faith-based arsenal. The political capital of the evangelical Christians that helped the Republicans into power after the turn of the century believe in no such separation of church and state, as we have come to learn. The express purpose of their cultural mandate is to use the demographical imperative of "be fruitful and multiply" to subjugate what they perceive to be the type of secular governance that gives even rabbis like Sir Jonathan Sacks nightmares of impotence. By enhancing procreation for the purpose of survival, adherents have found the science is perhaps strong than their solicitations.

"Demography is critical to explaining the rise of the religious right in America," wrote Erik Kaufman for Britain's contrarian Prospect Magazine in 2006. We may be bearing, he added, "witness not to spiritual revival, but to a religious reconquista based, ironically, on the nakedly this-worldly force of demography."

Confirming such assurances is harder than it sounds, which makes them much less reassuring. Simply put, the data is inherently inconclusive. It is imperiled by the cultural, religious and political divisions of its widely ranging regions, starting with our own.

"Since our birth data is collected from birth certificates we collect no data whatsoever about religion," explained the CDC's National Vital Statistics System public affairs officer Krystal Gatling via email.

"It's not really asked in industrailized nations, as it's considered to be an invasion of privacy," said Haub. "But in some developing countries, they don't take offense to it. If you go into a house in India, you often don't need to ask about religion. It's pretty obvious right off the bat. In developing countries, they still go to door to door. Most of our surveys here are now done by mail or by phone."

Haub's preferred resource for our purposes was USAID's Measure DHS project, which collects and disseminates data on fertility, child health, gender and more. But we were only able to crunch birth rates by religious affiliation in some regions, and none nearby. We found out that Indian Hindus averaged around 2.6 children per mother, spawning more than Christians at 2.4 but less than the much-feared Muslims at 3.4. That's much less than the 8.1 that "Muslim Demographics" claimed is currently infesting France, but probably more than America's respective rate. Building scenarios of power and paranoia around the data proved to be more exciting than the data itself, which is the point of exercises like "Muslim Demographics" or other natalist alarmism. That includes those who claim that the low birth rates of atheists will eventually remove them from geopolitical influence.

But politicizing demographics is a pointless game, if you're talking to demographers. Although what reliable statistics are available are about the birth of life, they are in the end lifeless numbers, playthings to be shaped by self-appointed futurists who see whatever they want to see in their religious and cultural endgames. They ignore reams of other data, including everything from mortality rates and the often low birth rates of many migrants ' homelands to policies on population control and more, to make their reactionary cases. They're loathe to share power and resources, and have no problem perverting inert data to paint a picture of imminent doom. But it's mostly smoke and mirrors, and is often easily countered.

"When I give presentations in Germany," Haub admitted, "they're often amazed to see that most of their migrants are reasonably well-educated and from lower fertility groups, averaging two children or less per mother. And let's remember, Benjamin Franklin used to call Germans things that were not close to politically correct."

In other words, takeover postponed. Reality and history have a way of expanding the focus, if not the discourse, of these type of prejudices. And when it comes to global immigration, the trends may be shifting in unpredictable directions.

"A lot of migrants are going home because of the economy," said Haub. "Meanwhile, Europe, which has an extremely low birth rate, is truly going to have a dearth of labor unless it gets its numbers up. Some in Japan are admitting that they have to change their attitudes toward foreigners. And as local economies develop, there will be much less desire to move."

And, circling back to catastrophic climate change, there are going to be even more unpredictable changes ahead. The London School of Economics recently reported that using contraception to fight climate change is nearly five times more valuable than low-carbon technology. Many of the regions experiencing explosive birth rates, much of them populated by Muslims and Christians, are in climate-sensitive areas in Africa, the Middle East and similarly compromised territories. Mother Nature, not Jesus or Mohammed, could end up solving the population endgame without any assistance from the natalists.

But whatever happens, falling sway to demographically convincing data about cultural or religious data is a sucker's game. The science is far from established. The data is malleable and inconclusive, while the argument is full of holes. Let's hope we're rewarded for our skepticism not with the infertile dystopia of P.D. James' Children of Men, but the optimistic science-hero futurism of Star Trek, where faith is assimilated as but one component of public and political life.

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.
? 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143913/

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-Peter K. Niven

How the U.S. Funds the Taliban
By Aram Roston, The Nation
Posted on November 13, 2009, Printed on November 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143898/

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime's ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat's right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal's cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals' private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan's enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. "It's a big part of their income," one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts--hundreds of millions of dollars--consists of payments to insurgents.

Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which "private security" ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren't ambushed by insurgents.

A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings. Like the Popals' Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan.

What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghanistan's current defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Hamed Wardak has plunged into business as well as policy. He was raised and schooled in the United States, graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown University in 1997. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and interned at the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. That internship was to play an important role in his life, for it was at AEI that he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, although the firm may have operated in Afghanistan before then. It made sense to set up shop in Washington, because of Wardak's connections there. On NCL's advisory board, for example, is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as "a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer." It is not every defense contracting company that has such an influential adviser.

But the biggest deal that NCL got--the contract that brought it into Afghanistan's major leagues--was Host Nation Trucking. Earlier this year the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named one of the six companies that would handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.

At first the contract was large but not gargantuan. And then that suddenly changed, like an immense garden coming into bloom. Over the summer, citing the coming "surge" and a new doctrine, "Money as a Weapons System," the US military expanded the contract 600 percent for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: "service members will not get food, water, equipment, and ammunition they require." Each of the military's six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360 million, or a total of nearly $2.2 billion. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10 percent of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defense minister's well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold.

Host Nation Trucking does indeed keep the US military efforts alive in Afghanistan. "We supply everything the army needs to survive here," one American trucking executive told me. "We bring them their toilet paper, their water, their fuel, their guns, their vehicles." The epicenter is Bagram Air Base, just an hour north of Kabul, from which virtually everything in Afghanistan is trucked to the outer reaches of what the Army calls "the Battlespace"--that is, the entire country. Parked near Entry Control Point 3, the trucks line up, shifting gears and sending up clouds of dust as they prepare for their various missions across the country.

The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: "The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money." That is something everyone seems to agree on.

Mike Hanna is the project manager for a trucking company called Afghan American Army Services. The company, which still operates in Afghanistan, had been trucking for the United States for years but lost out in the Host Nation Trucking contract that NCL won. Hanna explained the security realities quite simply: "You are paying the people in the local areas--some are warlords, some are politicians in the police force--to move your trucks through."

Hanna explained that the prices charged are different, depending on the route: "We're basically being extorted. Where you don't pay, you're going to get attacked. We just have our field guys go down there, and they pay off who they need to." Sometimes, he says, the extortion fee is high, and sometimes it is low. "Moving ten trucks, it is probably $800 per truck to move through an area. It's based on the number of trucks and what you're carrying. If you have fuel trucks, they are going to charge you more. If you have dry trucks, they're not going to charge you as much. If you are carrying MRAPs or Humvees, they are going to charge you more."

Hanna says it is just a necessary evil. "If you tell me not to pay these insurgents in this area, the chances of my trucks getting attacked increase exponentially."

Whereas in Iraq the private security industry has been dominated by US and global firms like Blackwater, operating as de facto arms of the US government, in Afghanistan there are lots of local players as well. As a result, the industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. "Every warlord has his security company," is the way one executive explained it to me.

In theory, private security companies in Kabul are heavily regulated, although the reality is different. Thirty-nine companies had licenses until September, when another dozen were granted licenses. Many licensed companies are politically connected: just as NCL is owned by the son of the defense minister and Watan Risk Management is run by President Karzai's cousins, the Asia Security Group is controlled by Hashmat Karzai, another relative of the president. The company has blocked off an entire street in the expensive Sherpur District. Another security firm is controlled by the parliamentary speaker's son, sources say. And so on.

In the same way, the Afghan trucking industry, key to logistics operations, is often tied to important figures and tribal leaders. One major hauler in Afghanistan, Afghan International Trucking (AIT), paid $20,000 a month in kickbacks to a US Army contracting official, according to the official's plea agreement in US court in August. AIT is a very well-connected firm: it is run by the 25-year-old nephew of Gen. Baba Jan, a former Northern Alliance commander and later a Kabul police chief. In an interview, Baba Jan, a cheerful and charismatic leader, insisted he had nothing to do with his nephew's corporate enterprise.

But the heart of the matter is that insurgents are getting paid for safe passage because there are few other ways to bring goods to the combat outposts and forward operating bases where soldiers need them. By definition, many outposts are situated in hostile terrain, in the southern parts of Afghanistan. The security firms don't really protect convoys of American military goods here, because they simply can't; they need the Taliban's cooperation.

One of the big problems for the companies that ship American military supplies across the country is that they are banned from arming themselves with any weapon heavier than a rifle. That makes them ineffective for battling Taliban attacks on a convoy. "They are shooting the drivers from 3,000 feet away with PKMs," a trucking company executive in Kabul told me. "They are using RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] that will blow up an up-armed vehicle. So the security companies are tied up. Because of the rules, security companies can only carry AK-47s, and that's just a joke. I carry an AK--and that's just to shoot myself if I have to!"

The rules are there for a good reason: to guard against devastating collateral damage by private security forces. Still, as Hanna of Afghan American Army Services points out, "An AK-47 versus a rocket-propelled grenade--you are going to lose!" That said, at least one of the Host Nation Trucking companies has tried to do battle instead of paying off insurgents and warlords. It is a US-owned firm called Four Horsemen International. Instead of providing payments, it has tried to fight off attackers. And it has paid the price in lives, with horrendous casualties. FHI, like many other firms, refused to talk publicly; but I've been told by insiders in the security industry that FHI's convoys are attacked on virtually every mission.

For the most part, the security firms do as they must to survive. A veteran American manager in Afghanistan who has worked there as both a soldier and a private security contractor in the field told me, "What we are doing is paying warlords associated with the Taliban, because none of our security elements is able to deal with the threat." He's an Army veteran with years of Special Forces experience, and he's not happy about what's being done. He says that at a minimum American military forces should try to learn more about who is getting paid off.

"Most escorting is done by the Taliban," an Afghan private security official told me. He's a Pashto and former mujahedeen commander who has his finger on the pulse of the military situation and the security industry. And he works with one of the trucking companies carrying US supplies. "Now the government is so weak," he added, "everyone is paying the Taliban."

To Afghan trucking officials, this is barely even something to worry about. One woman I met was an extraordinary entrepreneur who had built up a trucking business in this male-dominated field. She told me the security company she had hired dealt directly with Taliban leaders in the south. Paying the Taliban leaders meant they would send along an escort to ensure that no other insurgents would attack. In fact, she said, they just needed two armed Taliban vehicles. "Two Taliban is enough," she told me. "One in the front and one in the back." She shrugged. "You cannot work otherwise. Otherwise it is not possible."

Which leads us back to the case of Watan Risk, the firm run by Ahmad Rateb Popal and Rashid Popal, the Karzai family relatives and former drug dealers. Watan is known to control one key stretch of road that all the truckers use: the strategic route to Kandahar called Highway 1. Think of it as the road to the war--to the south and to the west. If the Army wants to get supplies down to Helmand, for example, the trucks must make their way through Kandahar.

Watan Risk, according to seven different security and trucking company officials, is the sole provider of security along this route. The reason is simple: Watan is allied with the local warlord who controls the road. Watan's company website is quite impressive, and claims its personnel "are diligently screened to weed out all ex-militia members, supporters of the Taliban, or individuals with loyalty to warlords, drug barons, or any other group opposed to international support of the democratic process." Whatever screening methods it uses, Watan's secret weapon to protect American supplies heading through Kandahar is a man named Commander Ruhullah. Said to be a handsome man in his 40s, Ruhullah has an oddly high-pitched voice. He wears traditional salwar kameez and a Rolex watch. He rarely, if ever, associates with Westerners. He commands a large group of irregular fighters with no known government affiliation, and his name, security officials tell me, inspires obedience or fear in villages along the road.

It is a dangerous business, of course: until last spring Ruhullah had competition--a one-legged warlord named Commander Abdul Khaliq. He was killed in an ambush.

So Ruhullah is the surviving road warrior for that stretch of highway. According to witnesses, he works like this: he waits until there are hundreds of trucks ready to convoy south down the highway. Then he gets his men together, setting them up in 4x4s and pickups. Witnesses say he does not limit his arsenal to AK-47s but uses any weapons he can get. His chief weapon is his reputation. And for that, Watan is paid royally, collecting a fee for each truck that passes through his corridor. The American trucking official told me that Ruhullah "charges $1,500 per truck to go to Kandahar. Just 300 kilometers."

It's hard to pinpoint what this is, exactly--security, extortion or a form of "insurance." Then there is the question, Does Ruhullah have ties to the Taliban? That's impossible to know. As an American private security veteran familiar with the route said, "He works both sides... whatever is most profitable. He's the main commander. He's got to be involved with the Taliban. How much, no one knows."

Even NCL, the company owned by Hamed Wardak, pays. Two sources with direct knowledge tell me that NCL sends its portion of US logistics goods in Watan's and Ruhullah's convoys. Sources say NCL is billed $500,000 per month for Watan's services. To underline the point: NCL, operating on a $360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister's son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company owned by President Karzai's cousins, for protection.

Hamed Wardak wouldn't return my phone calls. Milt Bearden, the former CIA officer affiliated with the company, wouldn't speak with me either. There's nothing wrong with Bearden engaging in business in Afghanistan, but disclosure of his business interests might have been expected when testifying on US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After all, NCL stands to make or lose hundreds of millions based on the whims of US policy-makers.

It is certainly worth asking why NCL, a company with no known trucking experience, and little security experience to speak of, would win a contract worth $360 million. Plenty of Afghan insiders are asking questions. "Why would the US government give him a contract if he is the son of the minister of defense?" That's what Mahmoud Karzai asked me. He is the brother of President Karzai, and he himself has been treated in the press as a poster boy for access to government officials. The New York Times even profiled him in a highly critical piece. In his defense, Karzai emphasized that he, at least, has refrained from US government or Afghan government contracting. He pointed out, as others have, that Hamed Wardak had little security or trucking background before his company received security and trucking contracts from the Defense Department. "That's a questionable business practice," he said. "They shouldn't give it to him. How come that's not questioned?"

I did get the opportunity to ask General Wardak, Hamed's father, about it. He is quite dapper, although he is no longer the debonair "Gucci commander" Bearden once described. I asked Wardak about his son and NCL. "I've tried to be straightforward and correct and fight corruption all my life," the defense minister said. "This has been something people have tried to use against me, so it has been painful."

Wardak would speak only briefly about NCL. The issue seems to have produced a rift with his son. "I was against it from the beginning, and that's why we have not talked for a long time. I have never tried to support him or to use my power or influence that he should benefit."

When I told Wardak that his son's company had a US contract worth as much as $360 million, he did a double take. "This is impossible," he said. "I do not believe this."

I believed the general when he said he really didn't know what his son was up to. But cleaning up what look like insider deals may be easier than the next step: shutting down the money pipeline going from DoD contracts to potential insurgents.

Two years ago, a top Afghan security official told me, Afghanistan's intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, had alerted the American military to the problem. The NDS delivered what I'm told are "very detailed" reports to the Americans explaining how the Taliban are profiting from protecting convoys of US supplies.

The Afghan intelligence service even offered a solution: what if the United States were to take the tens of millions paid to security contractors and instead set up a dedicated and professional convoy support unit to guard its logistics lines? The suggestion went nowhere.

The bizarre fact is that the practice of buying the Taliban's protection is not a secret. I asked Col. David Haight, who commands the Third Brigade of the Tenth Mountain Division, about it. After all, part of Highway 1 runs through his area of operations. What did he think about security companies paying off insurgents? "The American soldier in me is repulsed by it," he said in an interview in his office at FOB Shank in Logar Province. "But I know that it is what it is: essentially paying the enemy, saying, 'Hey, don't hassle me.' I don't like it, but it is what it is."

As a military official in Kabul explained contracting in Afghanistan overall, "We understand that across the board 10 percent to 20 percent goes to the insurgents. My intel guy would say it is closer to 10 percent. Generally it is happening in logistics."

In a statement to The Nation about Host Nation Trucking, Col. Wayne Shanks, the chief public affairs officer for the international forces in Afghanistan, said that military officials are "aware of allegations that procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups, but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is occurring." He added that, despite oversight, "the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent."

In any case, the main issue is not that the US military is turning a blind eye to the problem. Many officials acknowledge what is going on while also expressing a deep disquiet about the situation. The trouble is that--as with so much in Afghanistan--the United States doesn't seem to know how to fix it.

Aram Roston is an Emmy Award-winning investigative producer at NBC News and the author of The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi (Nation Books), from which this article is adapted.
? 2009 The Nation All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143898/

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How Catholic Bishops Threw the Health Care Debate into Turmoil with Anti-Abortion Maneuver
By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet
Posted on November 12, 2009, Printed on November 12, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143858/

It was a bold power play -- one that caught progressive members of the Democratic caucus off-guard, and one that has sown distrust and dissension among House Democrats.

With a major assist from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, two members of Congress -- both members, as well, of a secretive, right-wing religious group -- made it impossible for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to pass an historic health care reform bill without the attachment of anti-abortion amendment that, if signed into law, could set women's rights back decades.

While few think the amendment's draconian language will find its way into a final bill, its passage last weekend as part of the Affordable Health Care For Americans Act set the stage for a battle that could determine whether health care reform legislation ever makes it to the Senate floor for a vote.

The amendment, spearheaded by Bart Stupak, D-Mich., goes far beyond the standard prohibition on the use of federal dollars for abortion services known as the Hyde Amendment; Stupak's would prohibit the purchase, through the health insurance exchange the bill would create, of even private health insurance plans that cover abortion -- even for women who were not eligible for government-subsidized premiums.

The cumulative effect of the Stupak amendment is it would likely kill abortion coverage in nearly all health insurance plans, whether purchased through the exchanges or not, since the exchanges will come to constitute the bulk of the market for policies purchased by individuals.

It would also affect the coverage offered employees of the federal government -- one of the nation's largest employers -- who already choose from among a range of insurance packages offered in the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan.

"This is a very serious development here," said Kate Michelman, the former president of NARAL. "Women across the country -- Democratic women in particular -- but women, I would argue, all across the country, as they are learning about this, are really, really upset. And this isn't only the result of the bishops; this is the party, as well, not really standing up for women and allowing a group of conservative Democrats, who they recruited and helped elect, rule the day in the House." (Michelman has an essay on this topic, co-authored with Frances Kissling, on the op-ed page of today's New York Times.)

Stupak and Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., the co-sponsor of his amendment, are members of The Family, the stealthy religious group exposed by journalist Jeff Sharlet in his book of the same name. In both houses of Congress, members of The Family have been working for months to defeat health care reform. Although the anti-choice views of both men are said to be rooted in their religion, it's hard not to suspect their amendment of being a poison pill intended to kill health care reform entirely. After all, the bill already contained language restricting the use of federal money for abortion.

How Stupak Happened

As members prepared last weekend for the vote on landmark health care reform legislation, House leaders thought they had forged a compromise, after days of negotiation with anti-choice members of Congress, that would assure conservaDems that no public monies would be disbursed through the federally administered health insurance program the bill would create.

Then, at the 11th hour, the compromise fell apart. The Catholic bishops weren't buying in, and that was enough to scuttle the deal. Stupak said he wouldn't vote for the health care bill unless his amendment saw a vote, and Pelosi needed his vote and the votes of members he claimed to represent.

But in order for Stupak to get a vote for his amendment, Pelosi would need Republican votes for the rule that would allow the amendment to move to the floor. That's when the language of the amendment turned ugly, according to Politico.

Members from heavily Catholic districts wouldn't sign on until the bishops gave their blessing on the language, Republicans wouldn't vote for the rule until the National Right to Life Committee signed off. Pelosi assessed her risk, apparently calculating that the Stupak language would be stripped out of the bill that is eventually sent to the president's desk.

Few were more dismayed by the Stupak amendment than Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a key member of the "whip team" that Pelosi put together as a kind, arm-twisting, cajoling, Dem-whispering corps charged with bringing in the votes of any reluctant colleagues.

At first, DeLauro explained, House leaders thought they might have won a compromise weeks ago with a change to the bill's language offered in the Energy and Commerce Committee by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., that made it more explicit how public monies would be separated from private dollars used to purchase health coverage through the exchange.

"[Y]ou had pro-life, pro-choice members, come together, forge a compromise -- a very good compromise," DeLauro told AlterNet, "[of] how to deal with the segregation of the funds ..." When the Capps language failed to satisfy the anti-choice contingent led by Stupak, it was "further strengthened, or clarified, if you will, by Congressman Brad Ellsworth.

"Now, that was an excellent compromise -- one, again, that was forged by pro-life, pro-choice members. It didn't come out of the blue. And what happened was is that that compromise -- where we moved for common ground, found it -- wasn't acceptable to Congressman Stupak and to others."

That left House leaders and vote-counter DeLauro in a very tough spot -- either allow the Stupak amendment to come to floor, or almost certainly lose the vote on the health care bill, which was ultimately won by a two-vote margin.

DeLauro voted for the rule that allowed Stupak to come to the floor, while Rules Committee Chairman Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., boycotted her own committee's proceedings. DeLauro voted against the amendment when it came up for its vote, delivering a passionate speech from the floor condemning the measure.

Bill Giveth With One Hand, Taketh Away With the Other

In her interview with AlterNet, DeLauro rattled off a number of substantial improvements for women's health care contained in the bill: The proscription on excluding people from coverage will mean no more denial of coverage for such "pre-existing conditions" as being the victim of domestic violence, or a prior pregnancy. Gender discrimination in premium costs is prohibited under the bill.

"Today, women pay 48 percent more for health care coverage than men," DeLauro said. "Very strong for women, a lot to gain here. Now the goal all along, as I said, was to move health care reform. On the issue of abortion in the discussion, that has always been that we maintain current law -- that no public funding is available for abortions services, except the Hyde exceptions."

Michelman told AlterNet: "I agree that there are some positive, positive aspects for women in the bill. However, having said that, any health care reform bill that leaves women, millions of them, worse off in terms of their ability to obtain health care -- necessary health care -- than they were before health care reform is unacceptable. It's wrong!

"You know, I don't think we should ... take one advance and trade it for moving back in the area of major health care for women."

"It does seem really clear to me," Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., said, "that [Speaker Pelosi] did what she had to do ... in order not to sabotage this effort for health care reform. But at the end of the day, when our House and Senate bills are merged, and we send a bill on to the president for his signature, it will not contain -- it cannot contain -- this language that constrains what women are able to do legally and constitutionally."

AlterNet contacted Pelosi's office for comment, but as of press time, we had not heard back.

Pro-Choice Dems Demand Meeting With Obama

Still, on Tuesday, Edwards -- along with 89 other Democrats -- signed a letter (PDF) initiated by Pro-Choice Caucus co-chairwomen Slaughter and Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., requesting a meeting with President Barack Obama to discuss the status of reproductive health issues in the bill.

"Health care reform must not be misused as an opportunity to restrict women's access to reproductive health services," the letter reads. "The Stupak-Pitts amendment ... represents an unprecedented restriction on a woman's access to health insurance coverage of reproductive health services."

The amendment would permit women in the exchanges to purchase, on their own dime, supplemental coverage for abortion services -- coverage that few would likely buy since no one really plans for an unplanned pregnancy.

Plus, there are privacy concerns involved in any abortion-insurance scheme. At least one elected official, former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, sought the medical records of abortion clinics for a case against the clinics that was ultimately dismissed -- a move critics condemned as a means of intimidation against women who had had abortions.

Fears abound that the impact of the Stupak amendment would go far beyond the letter of the restrictions written into the bill. Edwards believes the measure would influence insurance policies offered outside the exchanges. Michelman decries the message it sends, separating abortion from other health care procedures, further stigmatizing it.

Beyond the immediate issues of the Stupak amendment is its larger impact within the Democratic caucus and in the women's movement. Many feminists embraced Obama only after Hillary Rodham Clinton lost her bid for the presidential nomination, and not a few were suspicious of his commitment to women's reproductive rights. The statement the president made yesterday to Jake Tapper of ABC News has heartened some and disheartened others.

"You know, I laid out a very simple principle, which is this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill," Obama said. "And we're not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.

"And I want to make sure that the provision that emerges meets that test -- that we are not in some way sneaking in funding for abortions, but, on the other hand, that we're not restricting women's insurance choices, because one of the pledges I made ... was to say that if you're happy and satisfied with the insurance that you have, that it's not going to change."

"Well, I'm not comfortable with what has happened here at all," said Michelman, who supported Obama in the presidential primaries. "I really expect the president to step up to this challenge and say, this was wrong. This is health care for women, and we cannot allow a bill to damage the prospects of health care for women ... I need my president to do that. And of all the people, this is a man with great vision, and I had mixed feelings about the way he talked about the bill."

However, Donna Edwards, who also supported Obama's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, found some comfort in the president's words and said she feels good about the state of the Democratic caucus.

"I was very heartened by the president's statement after [the health care bill] passed," she told AlterNet. "And although he is pleased that we are able to move the ball forward, move health care reform forward for the first time that we've been able to in decades, that his position is that he supports the status quo -- that is, that federal funds wouldn't be used for abortion. That is what the pro-choice groups signed off on -- that language."

The restrictions of the Stupak amendment go beyond the status quo, which is the decades-old Hyde amendment.

Fight Moves to the Senate

The president seemed to imply that the abortion language could get fixed as the Senate takes up the bill: "I think everybody understands that there's going to be work to be done on the Senate side," he told Tapper.

"I think there is a shot, a chance for the Senate to rectify this situation," Michelman said, "[but] you never know what obstacles along the legislative path you're going to run into. And you gamble when you do that; in this case, you're gambling with women's health, and we're gambling with women's rights."

On Tuesday, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., told Sam Stein and Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post that a Stupak-like amendment would never get through the Senate.

"If someone wants to offer this very radical amendment, which would really tear apart [a decades-long] compromise, then I think at that point they would need to have 60 votes to do it," Boxer said. "And I believe in our Senate we can hold it."

But before the day was out, Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., told TPM's Brian Beutler that he would filibuster a Senate bill that didn't contain language similar to that in the Stupak amendment -- meaning he would prevent the health care bill from seeing a final vote. (Rachel Maddow reported that, like Stupak and Pitts, Nelson is associated with The Family.)

DeLauro and Edwards agree that for a final bill to pass muster with the majority in the Democratic Caucus, the Stupak language will need to be ditched.

"You know, I don't like to make threats," Edwards said. However, she added, "I would not be able to support a final bill that has this onerous kind of provision in it and that says to women, we're going to reach into your wallet and into your handbag and tell you what you can do with your own money."

"Look," DeLauro said, "I've always approached these things in an affirmative, in a positive way. What we do is to try to achieve the same goals as we move forward ..." Those goals, she says, include peeling back the Stupak language to not exceed standard of current law prohibiting the public funding of abortion. "We move to achieve those goals in long run. And I'm gonna -- that is where I'm gonna spend my time and my energy over the next several weeks."

"This is a wake-up call," Michelman said of the Stupak amendment, "and Democrats have to look themselves square in the eye here and say, is our power and our majority more important than protecting and defending women's rights and protecting their health? And you can't trade off here. This is not acceptable."

Michelman did see one silver lining, though.

"It's also an opportunity for the women's rights community ... to moblilize women, to activate women on behalf of protecting and defending women's health from bishops and from anti-choice legislators."

Adele M. Stan AlterNet's Washington bureau chief.
? 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143858/

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-Peter K. Niven

Ugly Truth: Most U.S. Kids Sentenced to Die In Prison Are Black
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on November 11, 2009, Printed on November 11, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143776/

This is the second in a two-part series on juvenile life without parole. Read Part One here.

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court heard two cases that could have major implications for the way juvenile offenders are treated in our criminal justice system. Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida both involve men who are serving life without the possibility of parole for crimes they were convicted of as teenagers -- crimes in which no one was killed.

Joe Sullivan was only 13 years old when he was accused of sexually assaulting a 72-year-old woman in her Pensacola, Fla., home, hours after he and a group of older teenagers robbed her house. Sullivan, who reportedly suffers from mental disabilities, insisted that, while he participated in the robbery, he did not commit the rape. But his co-defendants, 15-year-old Michael Gulley and 17-year-old Nathan McCants, 17 pinned the crime on him. Both were tried as juveniles; Sullivan was tried as an adult.

Sullivan is African American, a fact that was stressed repeatedly at trial. The victim, Lena Bruner, testified that her assailant was "a colored boy" with "kinky hair" -- "he was quite black, and he was small," she said. Bruner admitted that she "did not see him full in the face," but she remembered him saying, "If you can't identify me, I may not have to kill you."

According to the New York Times, "at his trial, Mr. Sullivan was made to say those words several times." ("'It's been six months,' the woman said on the witness stand. 'It's hard, but it does sound similar.' ")

Sullivan had shabby representation -- his lawyer didn't bother making an opening statement and later lost his license to practice in Florida -- and his one-day trial should have cast serious doubts about his guilt. "The only physical evidence was a fingerprint lifted from a plaque in the bedroom, which could have been made during the burglary," wrote Amy Bach in Slate last week. "The clothing and other evidence have been destroyed and couldn't be tested for DNA." Nevertheless, he was found guilty, and at 14, Sullivan became the youngest person in the country to be sentenced to life without parole.

"I'm going to send him away for as long as I can," the judge said.

Today, Sullivan is one of some 109 prisoners in the country whose non-homicide crimes have condemned them to leave prison only in a coffin. No fewer than 76 of those prisoners are behind bars in Florida. (Until last month there were 77, but 29-year-old Travis Underhill, sentenced to life in 1999 for armed robbery, "collapsed while playing basketball at a Palm Beach County prison on Oct. 8 and died," according to the Miami Herald.) The vast majority -- 84 percent, in Florida -- are African American. On a national level, according to Human Rights Watch, African American youths are serving life without parole at a rate of about 10 times that of white youths.

Monday's oral arguments covered a lot of ground, including whether life-without-parole is comparable to the death penalty (which has been banned for juveniles); whether the purpose, ultimately, is about deterrence or retribution -- "What is the State's interest in keeping ... the defendant in custody for the rest of his life if he has been rehabilitated and is no longer a real danger?" -- whether, for sentencing purposes, there's any practical difference between a 13-year-old or a 10-year-old -- or, for that matter, an 18-year-old and a 17-and-11-month-old ("the line has to be drawn somewhere.") At points, it got downright philosophical ("Why does a juvenile have a constitutional right to hope, but an adult does not?" asked Justice Kennedy.) But at the center of the argument was the question of whether children -- and their potential for rehabilitation -- should be judged by the same standards as that of grown-ups. "To not recognize the difference between a child and an adult is cruel and unusual," defense attorney Bryan Stevenson told Justice Antonin Scalia.

Conspicuously absent from the oral arguments, however, was any discussion of race. The one time Stevenson attempted to mention it, as one of the "arbitrary features" of the distribution of life-without-parole sentences -- these prisoners are "disproportionately kids of color," Stevenson said -- he was interrupted by Justice Alito, who questioned the reliability of his statistics. ("What is your response to the State's argument that these statistics are not peer-reviewed?" he asked.)

It can be tricky to pin down exact numbers when it comes to specific prison populations from state to state, particularly given the differences between sentencing statutes across the country. And states have not traditionally kept track of how many juveniles are in their adult prisons. But when it comes to juvenile lifers, there are some figures that have been widely accepted (and not contested by the state of Florida.)

"There are 73 children 14 and younger who have been imprisoned for life without parole," Stevenson told the Court. "...For the age of 13 and younger, there are only nine kids, and that's including both kids convicted of homicide and non-homicide. For non-homicide, there are only two. They are both in Florida and Joe Sullivan is one of them."

What he did not get to say is that of the vast majority of kids who are sentenced to die in prison are black.

This is unfortunate. Racism has been central to the policies that led to the rise in life sentences for juveniles in the first place -- and not just in Florida. The Supreme Court may rely on legal precedents to make their decisions -- but that does not mean it necessarily considers history.

The Myth of the "Superpredator"

The crime that led Joe Sullivan to life in prison took place in 1989. It was the same year that would see notorious serial killer Ted Bundy executed at the Florida state prison in Starke -- an exceptional case that would capture the mood of the locals when it came to dealing with would-be-murderers. (The St. Petersburg Times reported that year, "Across Florida, radio stations bade 'Bye, Bye, Bundy,' while next door to the Chi Omega sorority, where Bundy killed two young women, a campus bar was offering 'Bundy fries' and 'Bundy fingers' -- actually, french fries and strips of alligator meat.")

Florida serial killers aside, 1989 was also the year that a young, blond investment banker from Manhattan brutally assaulted in New York's Central Park, a horrible crime that the cops, the press and even people who lived nowhere near New York City declared solved within days. The rapists, it was decided, were five young black and Latino teenagers from Harlem. All of then would turn out to be innocent (a fact that came out only after each lost years of their lives in prison.) But in the eyes of many commentators at the time, these teenagers were the worst kind of monsters:

"They were coming downtown from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance," New York Post columnist Pete Hamill wrote in the days after the crime. "They were coming from a land with no fathers. \u2026 They were coming from the anarchic province of the poor."

And driven by a collective fury, brimming with the rippling energies of youth, their minds teeming with the violent images of the streets and the movies, they had only one goal: to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white.

So the country was introduced to the new urban "superpredator," as Princeton University Professor John DiIulio would brand this new prototype of youth crime. These twisted teenage thugs -- described in New York as traveling in "wolf packs" that hunted innocent people upon whom to inflict their mob violence ("wilding") -- were a whole new breed of criminal, he said, and existing laws were no match for their evolving standards of brutality.

DiIulio would spend the next few years spreading the gospel of the superpredator, warning that "Americans are sitting atop a demographic crime bomb."

"On the horizon ... are tens of thousands of morally impoverished juvenile superpredators," he wrote in The Weekly Standard in 1995. "They are perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons."

The difference between teen criminals in decades past, he argued in his book, Body Count, amounted to "the difference between the Sharks and the Jets of West Side Story and the Bloods and the Crips."

"It is not inconceivable that the demographic surge of the next 10 years will bring with it young criminals who make the Bloods and the Crips look tame."

But how real was this so-called superpredator or the terrifying crime wave to come? Although the country saw a spike in juvenile crime in the early 1990s, it wasn't entirely clear what was behind it.

Some cited crack cocaine, others cited the country's changing demographics (with baby boomers' offspring entering adolescence), and others pointed to high unemployment. But in the years to come, one thing became clear: The teenage crime wave so ominously predicted by DiIulio and his political affiliates was pure fiction.

Owning up to this fact is none other than DiIulio himself, who pulled a fairly stunning 180 a few years ago, when he admitted that his influential theory of urban superpredators was wrong.

"If I knew then what I know now, I would have shouted for prevention of crimes," he told the New York Times in 2001. Indeed, crime among teenagers -- particularly violent crime, hit a historic low in recent years, with arrest rates of juveniles falling a whopping 49 percent between 1994 and 2004.

But the damage was already done: Throughout the 1990s, the country arrested teenagers -- many of them first-time offenders -- in record numbers, slapping them with long sentences previously reserved for hardened criminals.

Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, wrote in 2005 that in the years that followed the hysteria over superpredators, "More than 40 states made it easier to transfer children to adult criminal courts. Educators enacted 'zero-tolerance' policies to make it easier to expel youngsters from school, and numerous communities adopted youth curfews. Many jurisdictions turned to metal detectors in public schools, random locker searches, drug tests for athletes and mandatory school uniforms.

The panic was bipartisan. Every crime bill debated by Congress during the Clinton administration included new federal laws against juvenile crime. Paradoxically, as Attorney General Janet Reno advocated for wider and stronger social safety nets for vulnerable families, President Bill Clinton joined congressional leaders demanding tougher treatment of juvenile felons, including more incarceration in both the adult and youth correctional systems.

Paving the way was the Sunshine State. "Florida led the country in transferring juveniles into the adult courts," says Stephen K. Harper, a University of Miami professor who teaches juvenile law. At the same time, adult sentences were getting longer. In 1983, Florida abolished parole for most crimes, and in 1995, it got rid of parole altogether. "Adolescents were being transferred into the adult system, while simultaneously the adult system was becoming more punitive," Harper told AlterNet.

Today, the results are a bit perverse. According to Florida State Law Professor Paolo Annino, "Florida takes the lead in placing the youngest children in the adult prison system."

"The most recent Florida data shows, there is 1 inmate who was 10, 4 inmates who were 11, 5 inmates who were 12, and 31 inmates who were 13 years old at the time of their offense."

Annino and Harper both point to what Harper calls the "unintended consequences" of Florida's rush to incarcerate juveniles. "In 1983 and 1995, the Florida Legislature did not contemplate that hundreds of children would be sent to adult prison in the last two decades," Annino wrote earlier this year. But before the Court, Florida Solicitor General Scott D. Makar defended Florida's large juvenile lifer population, suggesting that the state knew exactly what it was doing. "I believe Florida is very balanced," he told Scalia during oral arguments in Graham v. Florida.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum agrees. In his brief filed in Graham, McCollum argues that it was Florida's brand of tough-on-crime legislation that led to falling crime rates in the late 1990s -- a claim that law professors Jeffrey Fagan and Franklin E. Zimring call "as phony as last decade's crime scare."

"As a member of Congress in the 1990s," they wrote, "[McCollum] promised the United States a 'coming storm' of superpredators as a result of a population surge of kids from fatherless homes."

This, of course was the claim pushed by John DiIulio, the only difference being that, more than a decade later, McCollum still seems determined to believe it.

The "superpredator" myth -- and the racism that breathed life into it -- has been a driving force behind the rush to incarcerate youths of color across the country for years. That the human effects would go undiscussed by the Court may come as no surprise given the justices' routine upholding of other laws that disproportionately affect people and families of color. But in a country with 2.3 million prisoners, leaving race completely out of the decision would not just be willful ignorance; it would amount to what Bryan Stevenson has called an "appalling silence."



*The original version of this piece contained a statistical error in the headline and text, which stated that all 73 juveniles sentenced to life without parole are black. AlterNet regrets the error.

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and World Special Coverage. http://twitter.com/LilianaSegura
? 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143776/

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10 Suicides a Month at Ft. Hood -- War Stress Is Taking Soldiers to the Brink
By Dahr Jamail, Asia Times
Posted on November 10, 2009, Printed on November 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143837/

Editor's Note: This Tuesday, President Obama attended a memorial service for the shootings at Ft. Hood last Friday. He called the attack "incomprehensible," when in fact it's quite easy to comprehend. Obama would do well to consider that the war policies he's continuing, extending the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, are the underlying cause of acts of madness and desperation by soldiers at Ft. Hood. As Dahr Jamail illustrates in the article below, this one military post alone is averaging 10 suicides a month so far this year.

PHOENIX, Arizona - While investigators probe for a motive behind the mass shooting at the Fort Hood military base in Texas last Thursday, in which an army psychiatrist killed 13 people, military personnel at the base are in shock as the incident "brings the war home".

"We're all in shock," said Specialist Michael Kern, an active-duty veteran of the Iraq war, told Inter Press Service (IPS) by telephone. Kern, who is based at Fort Hood, served in Iraq from March 2007 to March 2008. "Every single person that I've talked to is in shock," Kern added.

"I'm surprised this hits so close to home, but at the same time, I knew something like this was going to happen given what else is happening - the war is coming home, and something needs to be done. Innocent civilians are being wounded and killed here at home by soldiers, and this is completely unacceptable," he said.

The gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, entered a Soldier Readiness Center (SRC), where troops get medical evaluations and complete paperwork just prior to being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, and opened fire with two non-military issued handguns.

Hasan killed 13 people, 12 of them soldiers, and wounded over 30 others, before being shot four times by a civilian police officer. Hasan is now in stable condition in a local hospital, where he is in the custody of military authorities.

Colonel John Rossi, a spokesman at Fort Hood, told reporters that Hasan was "stable and in one of our civilian hospitals". Rossi added, "He's on a ventilator."

Hasan, 39, joined the army just out of high school. He had counseled wounded war veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, and was transferred to Fort Hood in April. He had recently received orders to deploy to Afghanistan.

His cousin, Nader Hasan, has said in media interviews that Hasan was very reluctant to be deployed overseas and had agitated not to be sent. "We've known over the last five years that was probably his worst nightmare," he said.

Responding to the allegations in the media that the attack was based on his Muslim faith, Kern told IPS that he did not know of anyone on the base who felt this was the case.

"We all wear the same uniform here, it's all green. I've seen the news, but most folks here assume it's just a soldier that snapped," Kern explained. "I have not talked to anyone who thinks what he did has anything to do with him being a Muslim. There are thousands of Muslims serving with dignity in the US military, in all four branches."

Fort Hood, located in central Texas, is one of the largest US military bases in the world. It contains up to 50,000 soldiers, and is one of the most heavily deployed to both occupations.

Tragically, Fort Hood has also born much of the brunt from its heavy involvement in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Fort Hood soldiers have accounted for more suicides than any other army post since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This year alone, the base is averaging over 10 suicides each month - at least 75 have been recorded through July of this year alone.

In a strikingly similar incident on May 11, 2009, a US soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counseling center at a US base in Baghdad.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon at the time that the shootings had occurred in a place where "individuals were seeking help".

Mullen added, "It does speak to me, though, about the need for us to redouble our efforts, the concern in terms of dealing with the stress ... It also speaks to the issue of multiple deployments."

Commenting on the incident in nearly parallel terms, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the Pentagon needs to redouble its efforts to relieve stress caused by repeated deployments in war zones that is further exacerbated by limited time at home in between deployments.

The condition described by Mullen and Gates is what veteran health experts often refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

While soldiers returning home are routinely involved in shootings, suicide and other forms of self-destructive violent behaviors as a direct result of their experiences in Iraq, we have yet to see an event of this magnitude on a base in the US.

To many, the shocking story of a soldier killing five of his comrades did not come as a surprise considering that the military has, for years now, been sending troops with untreated PTSD back into the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver Post in August 2008, more than "43,000 service members - two-thirds of them in the army or army reserve - were classified as non-deployable for medical reasons three months before they deployed" to Iraq.

In April 2008, the Rand Corporation released a stunning report revealing that, "Nearly 20% of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all -- report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment."

President Barack Obama, speaking during an event at the Department of the Interior in Washington, said that the mass shooting at Fort Hood was a "horrific outburst of violence". He added: "It is horrifying that they [US soldiers] should come under fire at an army base on American soil."

Victor Agosto, an Iraq war veteran who was discharged from the military after publicly refusing to deploy to Afghanistan, has had first-hand experience with the SRC at Fort Hood, where he too was based.

"I knew there would be a confrontation when I was there, because the only reason to do that process is to deploy," Agosto, speaking to IPS near Fort Hood, explained.

Agosto was court-martialed for refusing an order to go to the SRC to prepare to deploy to Afghanistan.

"I was court-martialed for refusing the order to SRC in that very same building. I didn't enter the building, but I didn't go in because I was refusing the process," Agosto continued. "It's a pretty important place in my life, so it's interesting to me that this happened there."

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who reports from Iraq.
? 2009 Asia Times All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143837/

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