Undernews For 30 April 2009

UNDERNEWS
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I always feared that my own TV set or iron or toaster would, in the privacy of my apartment, when no one else was around to help me, announce to me that they had taken over, and here was a list of rules I was to obey - Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick

PAGE ONE MUST

2004 FBI EMAIL SAYS BUSH APPROVED TORTURE

Jason Leopold, Pubrecord - Senior FBI agents stationed in Iraq in 2004 alleged in an e-mail that President George W. Bush signed an executive order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation and other harsh tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees. The FBI e-mail - dated May 22, 2004 - followed disclosures about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and sought guidance on whether FBI agents in Iraq were obligated to report the U.S. military's harsh interrogation of inmates when that treatment violated FBI standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential executive order.

According to the e-mail, Bush's executive order authorized interrogators to use military dogs, "stress positions," sleep "management," loud music and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." to extract information from detainees in Iraq, which was considered a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Bush has never before been directly linked to authorizing specific interrogation techniques at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Bush has admitted, however, that he personally signed off on the waterboarding of three "high-value" prisoners.

NEW BOOK ON DC MADAM CASE

Montgomery Blair Sibley, the lawyer for DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who committed suicide a year ago, has written a book on the story, a classic tale of the injustice of criminalizing prostitution: the woman ends up dead while hundreds of high public male figures who used her services have their names protected by court order and not even the women's movement raises a peep.:

In an interview, Sibley says where some of Palfrey's clients allegedly worked without reveaing their names:

"The Archdiocese of Washington, the Army Capabilities Integration Center, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the US Army Information Systems Command, the National Drug Intelligence Center and the law firms of Jones Day Reavis and Pogue, Akin Gump Strauss, The Durst Law Firm, Patterson Belknap Webb, and Reed Smith among many others. . .

"Clients included: a Director of the Defense Contract Management Agency; a Commander of the 332rd Expeditionary Maintenance Group, Balad Air Base,. Iraq; a high ranking officer of Colonel Pipeline Company which had reached a settlement for oil spills in five states; an Environmental Protection Agency employee; a former President of National District Attorney Association; a Hewlett Packard director who made substantial contributions to U.S. Senate races; a director of the Association of Foreign Intelligence Officers; a state representative from Louisiana; a member of the Maryland Public Service Commission; a NASA astronaut; and a Special Envoy for Middle East Security appointed by Condoleezza Rice.

"Why was I silenced? Why did the government want so badly to keep these and other clients of Jeans-s escort service from being publicly identified by me?

WHAT A WORST CASE CLIMATE SCENARIO MIGHT LOOK LIKE

Doyle Rice, USA Today - Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University . . . in an opinion piece in this week's journal Nature, [looks] at the absolute "worst-case" climate-change scenario, based on an atmosphere with 1,000 parts of carbon dioxide per million by the year 2100. (Current levels are about 380 ppm.) . . .

Under this scary scenario, the Earth's average temperature would likely skyrocket by as much as 11 degrees over the next 90 years. Some of the most notable effects would be: Many unique or rare systems would probably be lost, including Arctic sea ice, mountaintop glaciers, most threatened and endangered species, coral-reef communities, and many high-latitude and high-altitude indigenous human cultures.

- Extinction of some half of known plant and animal species on Earth would become much more likely.

- A sea-level rise of up to 10 meters after many centuries from the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would be possible.

"People would be vulnerable in other ways too," writes Schneider. "Asian mega-delta cities would face rising sea levels and rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones, creating hundreds of millions of refugees; valuable infrastructure such as the London or New York underground systems could be damaged or lost; the elderly would be at risk from unprecedented heat waves; and children, who are especially vulnerable to malnutrition in poor areas, would face food shortages.". . .

He does admit that the likelihood of this worst-case scenario is small, on the order of about 5-10%.

SOME FUCKING HISTORY

Time - First printed in a Scottish poem in 1503, the ancient and awesomely powerful "F-Bomb" continues to mystify lexiconographers. Rumors persist that legal acronyms spawned the obscenity ("Fornication Under Consent of the King" or the Irish police blotter inscription "booked For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge"), though the modern-day phrase has been traced to a number of etymological origins: Middle Dutch (fokken), Germanic (ficken), English (firk), Scottish (fukkit). Even the Latin terms futuerre ("to copulate") and pungo ("to prick") bear a striking resemblance to the four-letter word. . .

Comedians, perhaps not surprisingly, have led the way in broadcasting profanity. "Four-letter comedian" Lenny Bruce took part in some of the nation's first indecency trials by saying things like: "Take away the right to say "f---" and you take away the right to say "f--- the government." Such adult language has tongue-tied even the most articulate attorneys. In 1963, one Chicago prosecutor opened his case against Bruce with, "I don't think I have to tell you the term, I think that you recall it . . . as a word that started with "F" and ended with "K" and sounded like truck." Another judge in Maine declared during a 1981 indecency trial that "no obscene words should be uttered in court," stipulating instead that the sexually charged phrase should be referred to as "The Word," lending the entire trial, according to The New Yorker, a sort of Biblical ring.

READER COMMENTS

Excerpts from reader comments

SEARCHING FOR INFORMATON ON THE FLU

Our biggest daily-circulation paper in Argentina (actually, in all of Latin America, I believe still), Clarin, puts out a large book called Esperando al Doctor - Waiting for the Doctor - and it basically consists of a long series of 'decision trees' - for instance, one page is about headaches. You start with something like: Is the pain continuous or pulsating? Depending on which answer, you then follow to the next question, say, are you also nauseous?. It's super simple to use and powerfully directs you to the answers you need. - PJD

CAN I SELL YOU A NEW CAR TODAY?

"Worker-ownership" need not necessarily mean worker-control. Nor worker-participation for that matter. The Employee Stock Option Program was set up by the Feds years ago to create a situation where workers could purchase stock in their workplaces. But this stock ownership didn't automatically mean voting stock. And where it does (ESOPs have varying By-Laws) the voting block of workers is established as a permanent minority block. Much better is a system of true worker participation. And while there are a few ESOPs that are set-up as democratic enterprises, the most obvious example of democratic control by workers are worker-cooperatives. For more info see the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives - AZ

TOUGH TIMES FOR LOCAL MUSICIANS

I've been a professional musician for over 40 years. There was a time I could play five or six nights a week without traveling more than 100 miles from home, (north central West Virginia). No more. The once a month rule seems to apply here also. - Larry Rogers

SPECTER'S SWITCH ANOTHER SIGN OF DEMOCRATIC COLLAPSE

The famous, hugely-successful copywriter Jerry Della Femina was once hired to write political copy for Specter. But he found it impossible to get time with Specter and finally in frustration asked the campaign director just what it was that Specter stood for, so that he could get started writing. The dead-serious response by the CD? "He stands for getting elected." Della Femina promptly quit. - Mairead

As a young attorney, Spector was credited with creating the ludicrous "single bullet theory" that the preposterous Warren Commission cover-up was based upon. The fact that one of the architects of the cover-up of the coup against President Kennedy has now been welcomed as a Democrat is a good reason why I'm glad not to be a Democrat. It's like watching a train crash in slow motion.

OBAMA WOULD END EXTRA COCAINE PENALTY FOR CRACK

Washington Post - Justice Department officials yesterday endorsed for the first time a plan that would eliminate vast sentencing disparities between possession of powdered cocaine and rock cocaine, an inequity that civil rights groups say has affected poor and minority defendants disproportionately. Lanny A. Breuer, the new chief of the criminal division, told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that the Obama administration would support bills to equalize punishment for offenders convicted of possessing the drug in either form, fulfilling one of the president's campaign pledges. Breuer explicitly called on Congress to act this term to "completely eliminate" the sentencing disparity.

EFFING FLUVIA

UPI - Since January more than 13,000 people have died of complications from seasonal flu, officials said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's weekly report said no fewer than 800 flu-related deaths were reported in any week between Jan. 1-April 18, the most recent week for which figures were available. Seasonal flu is expected to keep killing hundreds of people every week for the rest of the year.

The researchers looked at deaths in the 122 largest U.S. cities with about 9 out of 10 of the deaths among people age 65 or older, the reports said.

Worldwide annual death from seasonal flu is estimated between 250,000 and 500,000, the CDC report said.

Los Angeles Times - As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.

"Let's not lose track of the fact that the normal seasonal influenza is a huge public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands around the world," said Dr. Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist who studies swine flu at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine in Madison. . .

Flu viruses are known to be notoriously unpredictable, and this strain could mutate at any point -- becoming either more benign or dangerously severe. But mounting preliminary evidence from genetics labs, epidemiology models and simple mathematics suggests that the worst-case scenarios are likely to be avoided in the current outbreak.

"This virus doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to kill like the 1918 virus," which claimed an estimated 50 million victims worldwide, said Richard Webby, a leading influenza virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

Unsilent Generation - In certain ways, the world"™s experience with Avian flu may actually have rendered it less, rather than more, prepared for a new outbreak. The Daily Telegraph (UK) reported earlier this week on a meeting of scientists held in Austria back in February, before the swine flu had surfaced. There, Harvard professor Thomas Monath warned that because so much attention had been focused on bird flu, if another strain popped up, "we would be screwed." The Telegraph's medical editor writes:

"He warned vaccine manufacturing capacity is insufficient, meaning that if a pandemic strain of flu emerged now it would be impossible to make enough for the world's population in time."

The scientific community had become "complacent" about a new flu pandemic because the avian influenza strain H5N1 has been around for 13 years without spreading around the world. . .

A second unlearned lesson has to do with the way we treat our livestock. Here, again, explicit warnings have been ignored. In an excellent piece on Huffington Post, David Kirby . . . cites a 2008 report by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which "included research on emerging forms of avian-swine-human influenza viruses." The report warned of a scenario much like one that has emerged in Mexico, where "patient zero" is thought to be a boy living in a rural hamlet near a factory hog farm owned by Smithfield Foods. . .

RAMPANT SELF PROMOTION

Mike Palecek interviewed your editor for his site, the New American Dream. Click here and then scroll down to New American Dream Interview to find it. Here's an except:

NAD: Why have you done all this?

SAM SMITH: So what else was I meant to do?

NAD: Why are you so interested?

SAM SMITH: My college roommates used to make fun of me because I would run out the door whenever I heard a nearby fire engine. I guess it must be genetic. . .

NAD: Was there a "moment" you can recall that made you want to do something about it?

SAM SMITH: I don't know if there was a moment. The better question would be: was there ever not a moment? From junior high on I was more of a fan of journalists like Ed Murrow and Elmer Davis than I was of sports figures.

NAD: What's it like to do what you do?

SAM SMITH: I love it. I feel like every morning I get to go fishing. . . only for news rather than for trout.

NAD: Is there a God?

SAM SMITH: I'm a Seventh Day Agnostic.

I don't think it matters because if there is a god I can't imagine him being worth worshipping if he holds it against people for not knowing whether he exists or not.

That would be a pretty rotten attitude - sort of like favoring the likes of Sarah Palin and Rick Warren. Who needs a god like that?

On the other hand, if it helps people to believe in God or things on key chains, that's fine.

It only becomes a problem when they want to punish others for failing to live up to their misinterpretation of some sacred book and start wars and things like that.

I'm an existentialist and believe our existence is defined by what we do and say. You can't blame it on God.

BREVITAS

RECOVERED HISTORY: WHAT KIND OF MAN OWNS HIS OWN COMPUTER?
OBAMALAND

Of the 204 officials Obama has named to date and who require Senate confirmation, 20 are Hispanic, 9.8 percent. At the end of the first year of the George W. Bush administration, of 608 positions, 34 went to Hispanics, 6 percent, while with Bill Clinton of 670 appointments 30 were Latino, 4 percent. Twenty six Hispanics work inside the White House in a variety of roles.

Cato - President Obama promised on the campaign trail that he would have the most transparent administration in history. As part of this commitment, he said that the public would have five days to look online and find out what was in the bills that came to his desk before he signed them. . . He has now signed 11 bills into law and gone, at best, 1 for 11 on his five-day posting promise.

JUSTICE & FREEDOM

Asian Journal - In a press conference in LA, Multi-ethnic Immigrant Workers Organizing Network and Pilipino Workers Center announced that a $13M settlement has been won in their lawsuit against the Los Angeles City government for the inhumane police actions of the LAPD against the MIWON march and rally on international workers day two years ago. All of the peaceful demonstrators that suffered from the wrongful police actions on May 1st, 2007 at the MIWON march and rally will be eligible to receive compensation for the violation. . . The march had a multi-ethnic mix of participants, including a significant contingent from the Filipino-American community. When the police began to disperse the crowd, the Filipinos there were also forced to fl ee, which violated their rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. "We never heard a warning. Suddenly the police were firing tear gas and rubber-bullets into the crowd," stated Strela Cervas, active volunteer of Pilipino Workers Center.

ECO CLIPS

Reuters - An area of an Antarctic ice shelf almost the size of New York City has broken into icebergs this month after the collapse of an ice bridge widely blamed on global warming, a scientist said. "The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released," Angelika Humbert, glaciologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, said of European Space Agency satellite images of the shelf. Humbert told Reuters about 700 sq km (270.3 sq mile) of ice -- bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the size of New York City -- has broken off the Wilkins this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs.

John Vidal, Guardian - Extensive climate change is now affecting every form of life in the Arctic, according to a major new assessment by international polar scientists. In the past four years, air temperatures have increased, sea ice has declined sharply, surface waters in the Arctic ocean have warmed and permafrost is in some areas rapidly thawing. In addition, says the report released at a Norwegian government seminar, plants and trees are growing more vigorously, snow cover is decreasing 1-2% a year and glaciers are shrinking. . . In northern Alaska, temperatures have been rising since the 1970s. In Russia, the tree line has advanced up hills and mountains at 10 meters a year. . . The most striking change in the Arctic in recent years has been the reduction in summer sea ice in 2007. This was 23% less than the previous record low of 5.6m sq kilometers in 2005, and 39% below the 1979-2000 average. . . The Greenland ice sheet has continued to melt in the past four years with summer temperatures consistently above the long-term average since the mid 1990s. . . Melting lasted 20 days longer than usual at sea level and 53 days longer at 2-3,000m heights. . . In 2007, some ice-free areas were as much as 5C warmer than the long-term average

Observer, UK - A third of the world's oceans must be closed to fishing if depleted stocks are to recover, scientists and conservation groups have warned. Such a measure could "set the clock back 200 years" and reverse the decline in fish populations, after which responsible fisheries management could regenerate the industry. Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York, has reviewed 100 scientific papers identifying the scale of closure needed. "All are leaning in a similar direction," he says, "which is that 20 to 40% of the sea should be protected."

MID EAST

Guardian - Obama's signature campaign slogan, Yes We Can, has been replicated by the Iranian president in a promotional video issued for Iran's presidential poll on 12 June, when Ahmadinejad is seeking re-election. The video features a cover picture of Ahmadinejad wearing his trademark white jacket and pointing to the Farsi phrase Ma Mitavanim (We Can) on a blackboard. The film is aimed at students and capitalizes on his former status as a university lecturer.

Phil Leggiere, Mondo Globo - A tenured professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Robinson said that his critics have crossed lines of fairness by equating his criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and that the faculty judicial system is crossing lines that are supposed to protect academic freedom by investigating him. His critics say that he crossed a line of professionalism by sending e-mail to all of the students in one of his courses material about "parallel" images of Nazi and Israeli attacks. Some students view the material as anti-Semitic, and they quit the course and filed a grievance against him. Faculty members are in the process of selecting a panel that will consider the charges against Robinson and determine whether to recommend that a standing faculty panel conduct a full investigation of the incident. . . Robinson is consulting with lawyers and may sue to block the coming proceedings.

ITALY

Reuters - Italy's first family soap opera was back on the front pages after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's wife said his party's selection of women to run in European elections was a "shamelessly trashy" process. Veronica Berlusconi, who has publicly lamented her husband's eye for younger women in the past, also accused him of going to the birthday bash of an 18-year-old woman in Naples but not attending the coming-of-age-parties of his own children. Veronica, 52, who rarely appears with her husband, said she agreed with Italian newspapers' descriptions of her husband's party's choice of female candidates as "entertainment for the emperor," in what newspapers saw as a reference to him.. . . Her 72-year-old husband, speaking to reporters during a trip to Warsaw, said he was sorry his wife had apparently believed "what she read in the papers" and added that it was all "a campaign (against him) hyped by the leftist press."

ART

Guardian, UK - A group of volunteers clearing graffiti from the walls and bus stops in their home town have inadvertently painted over a modern masterpiece - and cost its owner L5,000. The work, attributed to street artist Banksy, depicted Paddington Bear with the caption "Migration is not a crime" and was painted on to a wall owned by Julian Chatt in Glastonbury, Somerset. But well-meaning volunteers painted over the artwork as part of the council's drive to rid the area of graffiti. Chatt said he had struck a deal to sell the piece for about L5,000 and had agreed with the council that it would not be removed. "I'd spoken to the town council in the past and asked them not to paint over the artwork," Chatt told the Western Daily Press.

JUST POLITICS

Dave Lindorff, Counterpunch - With Specter switching his party affiliation to Democrat, the Democrats will finally have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate, and an already solid majority in the House. There will, at that point, be no more excuse for Democrats to duck progressive, liberal, pro-worker, pro-ordinary person issues, using their old-standby excuse of needing to compromise and win over Republican votes. . . So the way I see it, it's time for progressives, for the union movement, for the peace movement, for the environmentalist movement, the single-payer health care reform movement, indeed for all progressive elements in the US, to pour on the pressure to get Congress and President Obama to pass real, progressive legislation in this Congress.

HEALTH & SCIENCE

Politico - The Obama administration declared a "public health emergency" Sunday to confront the swine flu - but is heading into its first medical outbreak without a secretary of Health and Human Services or appointees in any of the department's 19 key posts. President Barack Obama has not yet chosen a surgeon general or the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His choice to run the Food and Drug Administration awaits confirmation.

FROM THE FATAL CONSEQUENCES OF MASTURBATION, 1844

TEN TOP OPPONENTS OF SINGLEPAYER

GREAT THOUGHTS OF MICHELE BACHMAN

GOP Rep. Michele Bachman calls it an "interesting coincidence" that last two swine flu outbreaks occurred under Democratic presidents. In fact, leaving aside whether Democrats wash their hands properly before taking office, the last swine flu outbreak actually occurred when Gerald Ford was president.

INDICATORS

National Women's Law Center: Women are far more likely to live in poverty than men. Women working full-time, year-round are paid only about 78 cents for every dollar earned by men. African-American women earn 69 cents and Latinas earn 59 cents for every dollar paid to men.

POLICE BLOTTER

UPI - Police said a man was selling ice cream from his Blue Bunny van in Suffolk about 8:30 p.m. Saturday when two men approached him with guns and ordered him to exit the vehicle and strip down to his underwear. The driver followed the music still playing from the truck to where the vehicle had been abandoned by the thieves only a few blocks away, police said.

Morning Call, PA - To most people, Elizabeth Marie Grube, 70, and her sister, Elaine Volkert, 65, seemed to be nice, friendly women who lived modest lives in their mobile home park just outside Stroudsburg. But authorities said each sister sold about $10,000 of heroin a week from their trailers tucked off Route 611 in Stroud Township. Investigators believe an Allentown man, Julio Cesar Checo, 28, of 33 S. 17th St., recruited them to sell the heroin and split the profits. . . Volkert's neighbor, Sandy Hunter, said she was fooled. "I never expected this, really," Hunter said. "I couldn't believe it. I never would have expected that from her because she's a nice person." Other neighbors said the women drove older-model vehicles and lived in narrow trailers that rent for about $600 a month. Authorities said the sisters got large shipments of heroin that they packaged into bags that sold for $10 to $20.

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