Janet Howell, Virginia State Senator, Attaches Rectal Exam Amendment To Anti-Abortion Bill

• Published 16:48 17.01.12
• Latest update 16:48 17.01.12

I’m not here to fight today. Most days in Israel, pages like this are a war zone, where people with hard-earned ordnance of rage and pain and ideology fire everything they’ve got at one another, all of them somehow managing to remain standing, precisely where they were and where they have resolved at all costs to remain, only to go at it again the next dawn or High Noon.

Well and good, but I’m not here to fight this week. In the place I come from, they’re marking the birth and the work of Martin Luther King. For those of the Eidah America’it, the loose, perplexed and perplexing ethnic grouping called North American Jewry, Dr. King, our single most profoundly influential sage of the last century, remains alive in our outlook, our interactions, our hopes for our country and this world. For my people, Dr. King is alive in what’s left of our better selves.

	Members of the Southpoint Seventh Day Adventist Church Adventurer and Pathfinder Clubs carry photos of Dr. King during the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.

The night before his assassination, Dr. King delivered a speech that was as much Biblical prophecy as it was literally prophetic about what would happen hours later. It was the sixties, but his words resonate with no less power in Israel, 2012:

“Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness,” he declared, in a parable about the difficult road that winds from Jerusalem down to Jericho, a memory of a drive he had once taken there with his wife and partner in civil rights work, Coretta Scott King.

With references to Jesus, the Good Samaritan, and Martin Buber, Dr. King spoke about instances in which fears and excessive attention to religious doctrine can keep the pious from doing the right thing, the basic, human, necessary thing.

There were terrible laws then, when I was small, laws and practices which sought to keep people, Dr. King’s people, from being able to vote like the rest of us, have economic opportunities like the rest of us, sit in the front half of a bus like the rest of us, even fall in love and marry and live with someone of your choosing like the rest of us.

We knew that this wasn’t the country it should have been, that it had promised to be, that it needed to be.

We were small, but we knew that millions of Dr. King’s people were stateless in places their ancestors had lived. After hundreds of years, they were refugees in the country of their birth. Their history was kept out of our schools. Their culture, their roots, were kept out of theirs.

They were different than we, and because of politics and prejudice and history and fear, we – those of us who made the laws and those of us too small or too scared or too busy or too far away to change them – were forcing them to pay for that difference. To pay in the form of their freedom, their livelihood, the walls around their dreams.

We were wrong. We can look around us, here and now, and see how wrong.

There were many in the place I grew up, who said that supremacist laws and segregationist laws were part of God’s plan, that they were meant to protect the country, to preserve its way of life, that we dared not change them, or the country itself and all that it stands for, would be destroyed. They said these laws couldn’t be changed, and wouldn’t be changed, that the people would never stand for it.

They were wrong.

There were storm warnings ahead of that speech in Memphis, but crowds came anyway, to hear Dr. King, and to support what became a fateful strike of black sanitation workers forced to endure low pay, dangerous conditions, and ingrained discrimination.

Dr. King surprised them by telling them that he thanked God that he was living in that time and place, even as he acknowledged that “the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around.”

But he was happy to be living then, he told them, because he knew that “only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Reversing the mindset that enshrined force and discrimination as a nation’s only protection, he said that the needs of survival would eventually bring people to see that “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.”

In a final prophecy, Dr. King said that he would be allowed to see that America, that promised land, only from a distance, from the mountaintop, from the Biblical Mount Nebo “which is opposite Jericho (Deuteronomy 34:1).”

There was too little light, back then, to imagine an America with a black man, a black family, in the White House. There was too much hatred, too much polarization, to conceive of a national holiday honoring Dr. King and his work.

Dr. King saw better than the rest of us. May we, here, in this sick and troubled place, come to see more like he did.

However, Israel does have reasons to be fearful of Hamas and Hezbolleh. Hezbollah has been occupying Lebanon for many years. Supported by Iran and Syria, it has built a military force that dwarfs the official military of Lebanon. And Hezbollah like Hamas refuses to recognize the legitimacy of Israel. In fact they frequently and belligerently threaten to kill all Jews and drive Israel into the Mediterranian sea.

This article is from Haaretz newspaper which is the progressive/liberal newspaper in Israel, independent of any political faction. Click on the headline for the original.

For the UN secretary general the military capacity of Hezbollah is not acceptable – for Israel, as for any other nation faced by a similar terrorist threat, it is intolerable.

By Moshe Arens

For a change, here is good news from Beirut. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon made news during his recent visit. “I am deeply concerned about the military capacity of Hezbollah and the lack of progress in disarmament,” he told a news conference in Beirut after meeting Lebanese leaders. “All these arms outside of the authorized state authority, it’s not acceptable,” he declared.

It’s about time somebody made things clear to the Lebanese.

Hasan Nasrallah could launch tens of thousands of ballistic missiles at Israel.Photo by: AP

The weapons in question are tens of thousands of ballistic missiles in addition to all sorts of additional modern weaponry that have been supplied to Hezbollah over the years by Iran and shipped to Lebanon via Syria, and are not under the authority of the Lebanese government. They are deployed all over Lebanon and aimed at Israel. The range of the ballistic missiles in the Hezbollah inventory is sufficient to cover all of Israel and rain destruction on Israel’s civilian population. They are terror weapons in the hands of a terrorist organization.

For the UN secretary general this situation is not acceptable – for Israel, as for any other nation faced by a similar terrorist threat, it is intolerable. For a number of years now Israel has been faced by the Hezbollah missile threat from Lebanon, and that threat has been growing from year to year. It is a ticking time bomb threatening stability in the Middle East, and in addition it is a violation of Lebanese sovereignty.

But the Lebanese should not forget that it also represents a threat to the physical existence of Lebanon and the people of Lebanon. The Hezbollah missiles are deployed throughout Lebanon and have been deliberately emplaced in the midst of Lebanon’s civilian population centers, in the vicinity of schools, mosques and hospitals. They will be launched against Israel whenever Nassrallah so decides, or the order is given in Teheran. They are a protective shield for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Like the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 that brought about the Cuban missile crisis and the removal of these missiles, the Hezbollah missiles will have to be removed. When the time comes for Israel to neutralize this missile threat – and that time will come sooner or later if the missiles are not dismantled – there is bound to result wholesale destruction all over Lebanon. Hezbollah’s missiles are a suicidal invitation to the destruction of Lebanon.

However, it is clear that the Lebanese government and the Lebanese army are not capable of pursuing Lebanon’s national interest by overpowering the Hezbollah militia and forcing the dismantlement of the missiles, which pose so great a threat to Lebanon itself. So the time bomb keeps ticking away.

Of course, it is preferable that the removal of the Hezbollah missiles in Lebanon be accomplished by diplomatic action rather than by military measures. The Lebanese government should be encouraged to insist on demonstrating its sovereign rights in all of Lebanon and order Hezbollah to remove the missiles. Any assistance that it would require should be provided. The international community should make it clear that the deployment of these missiles is a violation of Lebanese sovereignty and constitutes a danger to peace in the region.

For too long has there been a conspiracy of silence about the deployment of these missiles in Lebanon. The statement made by the UN secretary general on his recent visit to Beirut has come just in time. The issue should be taken up at the UN Security Council, and the necessary diplomatic action should be taken by the U.S. and the countries of Europe and Asia. The Hezbollah missiles represent a threat to peace in the area. Ban Ki-moon has finally sounded the alarm. Better late than never.

By Tom Barry, AlterNet
Posted on January 16, 2012, Printed on January 22, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153735/dhs_pumping_money_into_drones_for_domestic_surveillance%2C_hunting_immigrants_and_seizing_pot

The Department of Homeland Security says it needs a fleet of two-dozen Predator and Guardian drones to protect the homeland adequately. Designed for military use, 10 of these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are already patrolling U.S. borders in the hunt for unauthorized immigrants and illegal drugs.

DHS is building its drone fleet at a rapid pace despite its continuing inability to demonstrate their purported cost-effectiveness.  The unarmed Predator and Guardians (the maritime variant) cost about $20 million each. Yet DHS has little to show for its UAV spending spree other than stacks of seized marijuana and several thousand immigrants who crossed the border without visas.

Aside from a continuing funding bonanza for border security, to pursue its drone strategy DHS is also counting on the Federal Aviation Administration to continue authorizing the use of more domestic airspace by the unarmed drones. And FAA seems set to comply, having approved 35 of the 36 requests by the department’s Customs and Protection agency from 2005 to mid-2010. In congressional testimony in July 2010, the FAA said it was streamlining its authorization process for drones, including the hiring of 12 additional staff to process drone airspace requests.

While DHS is leading the way, national and local law enforcement agencies, as well as private entities, are demanding that FAA open the American skies to drone surveillance. Yet neither the FAA nor the Department of Transportation has been forthcoming in informing the U.S. public about the new robotic presence in the already congested American airways. The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently filed a suit against the transportation department for allegedly withholding information about drones in our skies.  

More Predators on Border 

For decades, the Border Patrol has annually boasted of the millions of pounds of illegal drugs it has seized and the number of immigrants detained. It’s a practice that border scholar Peter Andreas aptly calls “the numbers game.”

Since the creation of the DHS, illegal immigrants and drugs aren’t just illegal, they are now classified as “dangerous people and goods.”

In fiscal year 2011 CBP reports that it seized “nearly five million pounds of narcotics.” But it fails to note that the domestic consumption of illegal drugs, especially marijuana, is steadily increasing despite these monumental numbers or that most of these “narcotics” enter the country from Mexico despite a massive buildup in border security and U.S. support for the Mexican drug war.

In its latest Predator announcement, Office of Air and Marine (OAM) tried playing the numbers game, but raised questions about the integrity of the numbers in the process:

Since the inception of the UAS program, CBP has flown more than 12,000 UAS hours in support of border security operations and CBP partners in disaster relief and emergency response, including various state governments and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The efforts of this program has led to the total seizure of approximately 46,600 pounds of illicit drugs and the detention of approximately 7,500 individuals suspected in engaging in illegal activity along the Southwest border.

One problem is the low numbers of seizures and apprehensions attributed to drone surveillance.

Another is that all the “narcotics” seizures CBP/OAM attributes to drone surveillance consist of bundles of Mexican-grown marijuana. That’s understandable since marijuana constitutes almost 100 percent of the drug seizures between the ports of entry along the southwestern border – more than 99 percent along the Arizona border. 

But is this small quantity of marijuana spotted by the Predators worth their $20 million price tag (including surveillance systems and support)? That’s not a question the congressional oversight committees have asked DHS. Nor has DHS asked itself questions about comparative costs and benefits of border control measures. 

Instead, it has poured steadily increasing budgets for border security into all three of its defined instruments of border control, what it calls the “three pillars of border security,” namely personnel or “boots on the ground,” tactical infrastructure (border fence and other physical barriers) and technology including the “virtual fence” of ground-based electronic surveillance and aerial surveillance. 

In CBP-think, all three pillars are equally important and all components of these border-security pillars are equally fundamental to protecting homeland security. 

Unimpressive Numbers

Since 2005 the Border Patrol has seized 13.5 million pounds of cannabis. This does not include the border marijuana seizures by CBP agents working at the POEs or by other federal and local law enforcement officials. 

Yet OAM, which first deployed in 2005, reports that drone surveillance has led to the seizure of a mere 46,600 pounds of marijuana. Drones, then, played a role in seizing less than one percent of the Border Patrol’s total marijuana in the past six years – to be exact only 0.003 percent.

On the “dangerous people” front, CBP reports that in the six years of the UAV program, drones have contributed to the apprehension of 7,500 suspected criminals detained. That’s small potatoes when compared to CBP’s overall number of detentions since 2005 – 5.7 million immigrants, including the 327,000 detained in 2011. Expressed as a percentage, amounts to only 0.001 percent.

Just as DHS eschews cost-benefit analysis, it also doesn’t apply risk analysis. All illegal border crossers and all contraband fall into the broad post-9/11 mission of protecting the homeland against “dangerous people and goods.” If all are dangerous, then DHS argues that all are targets, and the UAV numbers, while small, still demonstrate that these agencies are on target and on mission.  

Typically, CBP frames its UAVs as a fundamental instrument in combatting terrorism, even though no terrorists have ever been spotted or captured. 

CBP says that the Predators play a “lead role in CBP’s critical anti-terrorism mission.”

Two Predators also patrol the northern border, and Candice Miller, the Republican from Michigan who chairs the House Subcommittee on Border and Marine Security, complains that CBP is slighting northern border security. 

The northern border Predators, however, haven’t led to a single interception of an illegal border crosser in the past two years. 

Dubious Numbers

Yet another problem with OAM is that its declared numbers are carelessly formulated by the agency. What is more, it’s unclear whether the number of apprehensions and seizures CBP/OAM does disseminate are entirely attributable to UAV surveillance. CBP and OAM officials have been ambiguous about this. Most agency media releases say that Predator surveillance “has led” to the reported drug seizures and immigrant apprehensions. 

Yet other media releases and CBP statements to congressional oversight committees fudge the role of the drones, saying only that drones “contributed to” or were “involved” in the actions that led to the seizures and arrests.

Second, CBP is careless in providing its numbers of arrests, seizures, and flight hours, raising questions about the veracity of the numbers.

The Dec.  27 media release refers to the seizures and arrests during so many drone flight hours – 12,000 hours of drone flight-time since 2005.

But CBP/OAM has over the past year given the media, Congress, and this writer the same arrest and seizure numbers (46,600 pounds of narcotics and 7,500 apprehensions) for varying numbers of reported hours flight-time – for 10,000, 11,500, and mostly recently 12,000 hours of drone air time. 

CBP/OAM’s numbers game also includes variations of the numbers of arrests and seizures for the same number of flight hours. Celebrating reaching 10,000 hours of drone air time in June 2011, CBP/OAM released a press statement asserting that 10,000 hours of “UAS Predator operations have resulted in the apprehension of 4,865 undocumented aliens and 238 smugglers; the seizure of 33,773 pounds of contraband.” 

Setting aside questions about why CBP/OAM can’t get its current numbers straight, the integrity and value of the drone program are also called into doubt by the unimpressive rate in the increased number of drug seizures and immigrant apprehensions reported by the agencies since 2006. 

As more Predators are added to the CBP/OAM fleet, the rate of arrests and seizures has dropped dramatically.

Crash and Burn

CBP deployed its first Predator drone in October 2005. Manufactured by General Atomics in the San Diego area, the Predator drone also came with a General Atomics technical team and pilot to operate the drone.

If evaluated against the total numbers attributed to the border Predators since 2005, the quantity of marijuana seized and the number of immigrants apprehended during the first six months of border drone surveillance are outstanding.

When announcing that it was purchasing its second Predator, CBP said that “during its operational period” its first Predator flew 959 hours and supported 2,309 arrests, contributed to the seizure of four vehicles, and the capture of 8,267 pounds of illegal drugs. 

That operational period was from October 2005 to April 2006, when the Predator crashed in the Arizona desert near Nogales. 

Crash investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board found that the contract pilot shut off the drone’s engine when he thought he was redirecting the drone’s camera. As Major General Michael Kostelnik, who directs OAM, explained to the Border and Marine Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee, “There was a momentary loss link that switched to the second control” — and the Predator fell out of the sky.

The safety board issued CBP 17 safety recommendations to address deficiencies in OAM’s drone program. 

CBP/OAM has not, however, estimated the cost of this strategy. Nor have the agencies reported on the cost of the program thus far. A review of DHS purchasing reveals that the department spent $242 million in drone contracts with General Atomics. 

The crash didn’t deter CBP/OAM, which has steadily increased the homeland security drone fleet – which now includes seven Predators and two more expensive maritime variants called Guardians, also manufactured by General Atomics. By 2016 CBP hopes to deploy a fleet of 24 Predators and Reapers protecting the homeland. 

A recent report by the Government Accounting Office on CBP’s high-tech border-security programs noted that the UAVs have “significant infrastructure costs with the highest cost risk.” Yet DHS continues to burn through its ever-expanding border security budget without apparent concern for cost-effectiveness or aptness in pursuing the DHS counterterrorism mission. 

Declining Numbers as Predators Increase

Border state politicians like governors Jan Brewer and Rick Perry together with an array of congressional Democrats and Republicans – notably the leadership of the homeland security oversight committees (including Michael McCaul, Henry Cuellar, and Candice Miller) insist that the increased deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles is fundamental to securing the border.

But as Predator drones have increased, the number of marijuana seizures and arrests of illegal border crossers attributed to drone surveillance has dropped precipitously.

During the six months of operation of the ill-fated first border Predator (which crashed in the Arizona desert in April 2006), the drone accounted for nearly a third of the total 2005-2011 drone-related apprehensions and nearly one-fifth of total drug seizures.  

At congressional hearings since 2005, OAM officials routinely report on the drone program with anecdotes and tributes to the wondrous technological capacities of the UAVs. Facts and figures, costs and benefits, and impact evaluations compared to other border security programs are, however, not routinely reported. 

At the July 15, 2010 hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, then chairman Democrat Bennie Thompson insisted that OAM provide the committee with specific data. 

CBP complied and later submitted that since the inception of the program in October 2005 through July 2010, OAM had flown drones 6,979 hours over the southwestern border, with 7,173 illegal immigrants apprehended and 39,049 pounds of narcotics (all marijuana, according to the July 2010 CBP report) seized. 

In the four years since the crash of the first Predator, the border drone fleet had increased to five UAVs. Total UAV flight-time increased seven-fold the hours reported during the October 2005-April 2006 period, yet total drone-related apprehensions were only up three-fold while total drug seizures were up four-fold.

As the number of CBP/OAM drones rise, the productivity – measured by the traditional performance measures of immigrants detained and drugs seized – of the UAV program has dropped precipitously. 

The most recent CBP numbers, cited in the agency’s Dec. 27 media release, raise new questions about the cost-benefit of the drone program.  

Flight time rose to approximately 12,000 hours. Yet the roughly 5,000 recent hours (since July 2010) of drone surveillance contributed, according to CBP’s own reporting, to only 325 new apprehensions and 7,000 pounds of marijuana. 

To give some perspective on the drug haul attributed to UAV surveillance, in Arizona alone CBP seizes on average 3,500 pounds of marijuana every day – making a marijuana seizure every 1.7 hours. In the past couple of years the Border Patrol has seized approximately 2.5 million pounds of marijuana along the southwestern border.

CBP/OAM hails its “eyes in the sky” drone program has being “cost effective” and a “force multiplier.” 

Setting aside the up-front costs of the $20 million drones and the additional maintenance expenses and contractor services fees, and counting only the hourly operational costs, CPB/OAM has spent $17.5 million keeping its drones flying about 5,000 hours over the past year and a half.

In an October media release announcing the acquisition of another Predator for border-security duty in Texas, CBP declared that it “has continued to leverage the Predator B to unprecedented success.”

CBP routinely describes its various border security operations as “unprecedented” success stories. Yet the never agency never cites the precedents involved or even attempts to explain how these precedents in border control have been surpassed by its new initiatives and spending.

If evaluated, as none of the DHS agencies do, in terms of costs and benefits, then the CBP UAV program spent (only in flight costs) $54,846 for every illegal immigrant identified (and later apprehended by Border Patrol teams) on the drone cameras and $2,500 for every pound of marijuana. That’s without factoring in the estimated $20 million that DHS spends for its Predators.

CBP Explains the Numbers Game

CBP has answers to the apparent inconsistencies and errors of its statistics for drone-related drug seizures and immigrant apprehensions.

In response to a request to clarify the confusing and ostensibly errant numbers, CBP warned “it would be unfair to categorize UAS [unmanned aerials systems] by only using drug interdiction or border crossing metrics.”

Yes, ideally CBP would measure progress in securing the homeland by achievements by other measures, such as its role in countering terrorism and keeping the homeland secure – whatever that means. 

The border agency further explains that:

CBP deploys and operates the UAS only after careful examination where the UAS can be most responsibly aid in countering threats of our Nation’s security. As threats change, CBP adjusts its enforcement posture accordingly and may consider moving the location of assets.

Then, the agency trots out the old force-multiplier assertion: 

The UAS can stay in the air for up to 20 hours at a time-something no other aircraft in the federal inventory can do. In this manner it is a force multiplier, providing aerial surveillance support for border agents by investigating sensor activity in remote areas to distinguish between real or perceived threats, allowing the boots on the ground force to best allocate their resources and efforts. 

That’s true. The Predators are called out when ground sensors signal movement. But as OAM’s Major General Michael Kostelnik explained at the July 15, 2010 Border and Marine Security subcommittee hearing:

At a standard 15 sensor activations, 12 of them might just be the wind. Two might be animals. One might be a group of migrants, and one might be a big group carrying drugs.

If there is a plausible explanation as to why there has been no increase in the number of drug seizures and immigrant apprehensions despite a jump from 10,000 to 12,000 hours of drone flights, it may be, as CBP wrote in response to the request to clarify its numbers, that:  

UAS is not exclusive to the border security mission. CBP OAM leverages the Predator-B and Guardian UAS as a force multiplier during National Special Security Events and emergency and disaster response efforts, including those of the U.S. Secret Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, USCG, and other Department of Homeland Security partners.

In other words, the border Predators haven’t been on the border but have been deployed elsewhere on homeland security missions. 

Which, would mean, that despite the increased number of Predators and Guardians assigned for border security duty, the drones aren’t patrolling the border and coasts – a scenario, if true, would likely upset all the border security hawks who insist that these drones are needed to secure the border. 

It’s more likely, however, that CBP/OAM has from beginning been cooking the books and manipulating — and that no one has called them on the inconsistencies. 

Asked in the same query to show how CBP/OAM disaggregated the drone-related numbers from overall seizure and apprehension data and for the documentation to support its UAV flight-time declarations, CBP/OAM had no response.

The Larger Threat Picture

Asked at Border and Marine Security subcommittee hearing if the Predators were worth the expense, Major General (Ret.) Kostelnik redirected the question away from actual achievements to the larger threat picture of protecting the homeland against unknown future threats. Kostelnik told the congressional oversight committee: 

I think the UAVs in their current deployment are very helpful in terms of the missions we apply it for. I believe we are building a force for a threat and an experience we really haven’t seen yet. It is something that is in the future.

Major General Kostelnik summarized his support for DHS strategy to deploy two dozen drones, telling the oversight committee: “So not only are they ongoing force multipliers for the agents and troops on the ground, but they are unique capabilities in unique circumstances.”

Members of the DHS oversight committees also cite national security threats as the rationale for their drone boosterism, and like the major general are equally vague about the specific character of the threats that would justify the billions of dollars needed to continue the CBP/OAM drone strategy. 

Henry Cuellar, former chairman and currently ranking member of the Border Security and Marine Subcommittee, has become one of the most prominent boosters of DHS drone acquisition. The Democrat from South Texas and co-chair of the House Unarmed Systems Caucus, explained his enthusiasm for the Predators on the border in his opening statement to the July 15, 2010 subcommittee hearing:

UAVs are one more tool for us to stay steps ahead and leaps  above the threats that we face, and they can help deter and  prevent illegal activity and threats to terrorism against the United States. In the event of a National crisis, they will provide critical eyes in the sky for what we can’t see or do from the ground.

DHS does not measure the progress and achievements of the program by the number of terrorists seized, drug lords and lieutenants captured, or “transnational criminal organizations” broken by its border security operations. 

Instead, border security programs  — whether traditional patrolling, the border fence, the “virtual wall” of SBInet, traditional air surveillance, or unmanned aerial surveillance — continue to be measured by traditional border-control benchmarks: how many immigrants are captured and how many pounds of illegal drugs are seized. 

It is a costly numbers game that has done little or nothing to resolve the country’s immigration policy challenges or the failures of its drug control policy. 

Tom Barry is the author of Border Wars (Boston Review Books). He blogs at http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153735/

From the Guardian, UK comes this column by Joseph Stiglitz.

Joseph Stiglitz is professor of economics at Columbia University. His most recent book, co-authored with Linda Bilmes, is The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict. He was the recipient of the 2001 Nobel prize in economics.

Many Americans gave up hope last year – 2012 will be worse

Friday 13 January 2012 

The chance of realising the American dream is receding for millions as jobs are lost, savings run out and houses are repossessed. Middle-aged people who thought they would be unemployed for a few months have realised that they were, in fact, forcibly retired.

5 Things You Should Know About the FBI’s Massive New Biometric Database

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet
Posted on January 8, 2012, Printed on January 12, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153664/5_things_you_should_know_about_the_fbi%27s_massive_new_biometric_database

The FBI claims that their fingerprint database (IAFIS) is the “largest biometric database in the world,” containing records for over a hundred million people. But that’s nothing compared to the agency’s plans for Next Generation Identification (NGI), a massive, billion-dollar upgrade that will hold iris scans, photos searchable with face recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos.

Ambitions for the final product are candidly spelled out in an agency report: “The FBI recognizes a need to collect as much biometric data as possible within information technology systems, and to make this information accessible to all levels of law enforcement, including International agencies.” (A stack of documents related to NGI was obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights and others after a FOIA lawsuit.) 

It’ll be “Bigger — Better — Faster,” the FBI brags on their Web site. Unsurprisingly, civil libertarians have concerns about the privacy ramifications of a bigger, better, faster way to track Americans using their body parts.

“NGI will expand the type and breadth of information FBI keeps on all of us,” says Sunita Patel of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “There should be a balance between gathering information for law enforcement, and gathering information for its own sake.”

Here are 5 things you should probably know about NGI:

1. Face Recognition

This month, the FBI is giving police departments in 4 states access to face recognition technology that lets them search the agency’s mugshot database with only an image of a face. Police can repay the favor by feeding the FBI mugshots they collect from local arrests, bulking up the agency’s database with images of more and more people.

The face recognition pilot program is supposed to expand to police departments across the country by 2014. When it’s fully operational, the FBI expects its database to contain as many records of faces as there are fingerprints in the current database — about 70 million, reports Nextgov.com. The agency’s optimism seems warranted. If most local police departments are agreeable about information-sharing NGI can vacuum up images from all over the country.

The problem with that, civil libertarians point out, is that anyone’s picture can end up in the database, regardless of whether or not they’ve committed a crime. Mug shots get snapped when people are arrested, and unlike a fingerprint — which requires either arrest or consent to a background check — a face could potentially be captured and fed into a database from anywhere.

“Anybody walking around could potentially be entered,” Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells AlterNet. “Just the fact that those images can be taken surreptitiously raises concerns. If someone takes your fingerprints, you know. But in the face recognition context, it’s possible for law enforcement to collect that data without knowledge.” The millions of private and public security cameras all over the country would certainly provide a fruitful source for images, Lynch points out.

Going out in public naturally entails the risk that someone will see what you’re doing or take your picture. Law enforcement officials angling for looser surveillance rules often deploy the argument that what people do in public is inherently not private. (It’s also been used in recent debates over whether it’s legal for police to put a GPS tracking device on someone’s car without a warrant.) But privacy advocates counter that modern surveillance technology goes so far beyond the human eye, which obviously has neither the capacity to track someone’s location for days (GPS) or store their image in a database (video surveillance, face recognition) that traditional distinctions between public and private don’t really apply.

An agency powerpoint presented at a 2011 biometrics conference outlines some of the sophisticated technology in the FBI’s face recognition initiatives. There’s software that distinguishes between twins; 3-D face capture that expands way beyond frontal, two-dimensional mugshots; face-aging software; and automated face detection in video. The report also says agencies can ID individuals in “public datasets,” which privacy advocates worry could potentially include social media like Facebook.

Meanwhile, existing laws are rarely up to speed with galloping technological advances in surveillance, say privacy advocates. At this point, “You just have to rely on law enforcement to do the right thing,” Lynch says.

2. Iris Scans

Iris-scanning technology is the centerpiece of the second-to-last stage in the roll-out of NGI (scheduled for sometime before 2014). Iris scans offer up several advantages to law enforcement, both in terms of identifying people and fattening up databases.

The pattern of an iris is so unique it can distinguish twins, and it allegedly stays the same throughout a person’s life. Like facial recognition, iris scans cut out the part where someone has to be arrested or convicted of a crime for law enforcement to grab a record of their biometric data.

“This capability has the potential to benefit law enforcement by requiring less interaction with subjects and will allow quicker acquisition,” reads a CJIS report to the White House Domestic Policy Council. 

In fact, being in the same place as a police officer equipped with a mobile iris-scanning device is all it takes. Last fall, police departments across the country got access to the MORIS device, a contraption attached to an iPhone that lets police collect digital fingerprints, run face recognition and take iris scans. (Over the summer, the FBI also starting passing out mobile devices to local law enforcement that lets them collect fingerprints digitally at the scene, according to Government Computer News.)

3. Rap-Back System

A lot of the action in the FBI’s fingerprint database is in background checks for job applicants applying to industries that vet for criminal history, like taking care of the elderly or children, hospital work, and strangely, being a horse jockey in Michigan. As Cari Athens, writing for the Michigan Telecommunications and Law Review points out, if a job applicant checks out, the FBI either destroys the prints or returns them to the employer. But that’s no fun if the goal is to collect vast amounts of biometric data!

Through the “Rap-Back” system, the FBI will offer employers another option: the agency is willing to keep the fingerprints in order to alert the employer if their new hire has run-ins with the law at any point in the future.

“The Rap-Back Service will provide authorized users the capability to receive notification of criminal and, in limited cases, civil activity of enrolled individuals that occurs after the initial processing and retention of criminal or civil fingerprint transactions,” reads the FBI site.

4. Data Sharing Between Agencies

The roll-out of NGI advances another goal: breaking down barriers between databases operated by different agencies. One of the directives of the billion-dollar project is to grease information swapping between the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense. The DOJ and DHS have worked toward “interoperatibility” between their databases for years. In 2009, the Department of Defense and DOJ also signed on to an agreement to share biometric information.

All of these agencies have been busy ramping up their collection of data. The Department of Defense’s ABIS database has archived fingerprints, images of faces, iris scans, and palm prints in Iraq and Afghanistan and have started collecting voice recordings. They claim to have 5.1 million records, with 49 percent coming from Iraq, but efforts in Afghanistan are ramping up, according to a DoD powerpoint. (Biometric information gathered in Iraq will not be relinquished with our pull-out, as Spencer Ackerman reported.) The Department of Homeland Security biometric database (IDENT) grabs the fingerprints and a photo (searchable with facial recognition) of visitors to the US through a program called US-Visit. Through the Secure-Communities program, meant to reveal the immigration status of people booked in local jails, (more on that below) both IDENT and the FBI collected biometric information from local law enforcement.

A DHS powerpoint about Secure Communities promises that “Under NGI, law enforcement agencies will have the option to search multiple repositories.” FBI reports detail how NGI will promote smoother swapping of more and more detailed biometric information: “NGI will increase information processing and sharing needs of the more than 18,000 local, state, federal, and international agencies who are our customers.” It’s not clear which international agencies will be able to tap into NGI.

The advantages of collaboration are clear, but it’s not without some potentially nasty consequences. When that information includes private identifying data, like the unique pattern of an iris, fingerprint or face , civil liberties advocates see likely privacy breaches.

“With more people having access to data, you don’t know where data is going, who’s using it against you.” says EFF’s Lynch. “Particularly when you’re talking about surreptitious collection like facial recognition, the government has the ability to track you wherever you go. Data sharing between agencies presents the possibility for constant surveillance.”

Sunita Patel points out that cases of mistaken identity can be infinitely complicated when the information flows through multiple government agencies. If you’re mistakenly flagged by one agency, she says, how would you go about scrubbing the false record whenever your fingerprint or Iris scan gets pinged by a different one?

5. NGI and Secure Communities (S-Comm)

One recent test run in interagency data-sharing has not gone particularly well: Secure Communities, a DHS program that lets local law enforcement officials run the fingerprints of people booked in jails against the IDENT database to check their immigration status and tip off ICE to undocumented immigrants.

Like many policies targeting America’s immigrant population, Secure Communities (S-Comm) — pitched as protection against violent criminals – devolved into dragnets and mass deportations, with people getting dragged in for minor offenses like missing business permits and even for reporting crimes. In one incident a woman called the police about a domestic violence incident, only to be ensnared in deportation proceedings herself. As Marie Diamond points out in Think Progress, DHS’s immigration databases have so many errors that the program “routinely flags citizens as undocumented immigrants.”

To complicate matters: activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights argue that the documents they obtained after an FOIA request and lawsuit show that the FBI saw the program as a great opportunity to start beefing up NGI and pushed reluctant local police departments to participate in the program.

An CJIS/FBI guide instructing officials how to pitch S-Comm to local law enforcement explains that, “Ultimately, LEA participation is inevitable because SC is simply the first of a number of biometric interoperatability systems being brought online by the FBI/CJIS ‘Next Generation Identification’ initiative.”

The document lays out strategies for dealing with resistant police departments, including, “Deploy to as many places in the surrounding locale, creating a ‘ring of interoperatability’ around the resistant site.”

“It’s a way of operationalizing wide-sweeping intelligence gathering,” Sunita Patel of CCR tells AlterNet.

What could possibly go wrong? 

Advancements in the collection of biometric data are double-edged: there’s the threat of a massive government surveillance infrastructure working too well — e.g., surveillance state – and there are concerns about its weaknesses, especially in keeping data secure.

A breach of a sophisticated, multi-modal biometric database makes for a nightmarish scenario because the whole point of biometric data is that it offers unique ways to ID people, so there’s no easy fix — like a password change — for compromised biometric data. Pointing to the dangers of identify theft of biometric data, Patel observes that, “Unlike a password, the algorithm of an iris can’t be changed.”

Tana Ganeva is AlterNet’s managing editor. Follow her on Twitter or email her at tana@alternet.org.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153664/

Okay, it’s not a conspiracy, just that all of these benefit, not the 1%, but 1/10th of 1%, the ultra-rich and hurt the 99%.

And to protect themselves from vocal opposition and peaceful protest, they are expending more and more to militarize the police. This is the stuff of some of the most bizarre futurist movies–like Minority Report.

This article comes from AlterNet.

Tanks, SWAT Teams, Surveillance Helicopters: Cities Already Turning Into Mini-Police States for the Political Conventions

By Rania Khalek, AlterNet
Posted on January 10, 2012, Printed on January 12, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153730/tanks%2C_swat_teams%2C_surveillance_helicopters%3A_cities_already_turning_into_mini-police_states_for_the_political_conventions

Two cities have their hands full preparing for the upcoming Republican and Democratic National Conventions later this year. As officials in Tampa, Florida, make plans to manage an estimated 15,000 protesters expected to descend on the city during the four-day Republican gathering in August, their counterparts in Charlotte, North Carolina, are ramping up crowd-control training in the run-up to the DNC.

With the parties gathering just seven months from now, Tampa and Charlotte will spend the next half-year transforming their cities into mini-police states to manage the thousands of protesters who will carry on a long tradition of dissent at the major parties’ nominating conventions.

Tampa Gears Up for RNC With Tanks and Digital Surveillance Helicopters

Last week, the Tampa City Council voted on how to spend some of the $50 million federal grant to secure Tampa for the 2012 RNC. The grant is paying for what the Tampa Bay Times describes as “the first in a series of police upgrades” that will include an armored SWAT truck and a high-tech communication system.

Security planning has been underway as far back as May 2011, just two months after the RNC announced the location of the convention.

The city council agreed to spend nearly $237,000 on a Lenco BearCat armored vehicle, which will be used in conjunction with two aging armored vehicles the city acquired through the military surplus program. Tampa Assistant Police Chief Marc Hamlin told the Tampa Bay Times that the trucks are strictly for the purpose of protecting officers from potential gunfire, not for day-to-day patrolling and crowd control.

Although the vote was unanimous, City Council Vice Chairwoman Mary Mulhern expressed alarm about the purchase. Mulhern told AlterNet, “I didn’t even know that our police force had a tank and Hamlin made a convincing argument that it’s been used to save a life. I would’ve voted no if we didn’t already have one — it’s chilling that the police have a tank.” She fears these types of purchases could “militarize” Tampa’s police force.

Despite Mulhern’s respect for the Tampa Police Department, she expressed concern about the potential use of this new equipment against future peaceful protests. “I think the police department is using Occupy as training ground for the convention,” she told AlterNet, noting that the local occupiers had posted a photo of an armored vehicle police had displayed at the Occupy Tampa site.

Tampa’s fleet of armored vehicles will be joined by a dozen others borrowed from neighboring departments.

City officials plan to deploy anywhere between 3,000 to 4,000 officers to establish a “security corridor” around the RNC. Since the Tampa police and Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office have only 2,100 officers combined, up to two-thirds of the federal grant will pay, feed and house thousands of officers from surrounding jurisdictions.

Another $1.18 million is going toward new digital video communication technology that will allow police helicopters to transmit video to cops on the ground equipped with handheld receivers. Various news outlets report that an additional $2 million was requested to ramp up surveillance with the installation of 60 surveillance cameras in downtown Tampa, far more than the five traffic cameras the city currently has. Mulhern tells AlterNet the council has yet to vote on that request. She fears that if the cameras are installed, they would remain after the convention is over.

Tampa authorities initially requested 238 new cameras. In October, Richard Danielson reported in the St. Petersburg Times that the city’s list of desired toys for the convention included 164 high-resolution traffic cameras mounted to light posts; two aerial surveillance drones; “20 helmet cameras with 2 1/2 hours of recording time to document crowd disturbances”; “Six trailer-mounted mobile cameras on booms that rise 20 feet or more, six more breadbox-sized cameras for covert use around high-risk activities, and four cameras that could read license tags in six lanes of traffic at speeds of 100 mph.” Less than a week later the list was revised and the drone request dropped, not because of constitutional concerns about privacy but rather due to the high price tag.

Mulhern suggested that the city divert a portion of the federal grant toward much-needed services for the homeless, since they will be most affected by a recently passed panhandling ban. She told AlterNet the convention was the “underlying push” behind the law. “A lot of the business community and citizens were saying we have to get them off the street before the convention comes here. It’s an image thing,” she said. But, according to the Tampa Bay Times, Mayor Bob Buckhorn is vehemently opposed to the idea.

“We can’t be diverted from what the appropriate use of that money is, and that is to provide a safe environment for the convention. It’s not to be used for pet projects or things totally unrelated to security,” Buckhorn told the Tampa Bay Times. “I’m not putting my reputation or the city’s reputation on the line to do anything other than what we’re supposed to do.”

Charlotte Police Receive Lessons In Riot Control

In Charlotte, North Carolina, preparations began less than a week after the DNC’s host city was revealed in February, again boosted by a $50 million federal grant to help pay for police training and equipment upgrades. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Rodney Monroe wasted no time. He immediately met with city officials in Denver and Pittsburg, which hosted the last two conventions, for tips on how to manage the crowds.

In August, the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Domestic Preparedness began offering Charlotte police a three-day course described by the Charlotte Observer as “special crowd control training” (video of the training can be seenhere). The DNC is expected to attract 35,000 attendees. In order to accommodate their security needs and manage demonstrators, an extra 2,400 to 3,400 officers from around the state and country will join Charlotte’s 1,700-strong police force.

City officials also proposed enacting a new set of crowd control ordinances, modeled after those passed in Denver, to the Charlotte city council.

The Associated Press reports that the ordinances would ban demonstrators from camping on city property and make it illegal to carry a number of items including body armor, gas masks, chains, padlocks, and lumber. Another ordinance would add more obstacles to obtaining a permit to protest:

Demonstrators would be required to apply for a permit during an “extraordinary event” when “a large-scale special event of national or international significance” promises to attract large numbers of protesters. Groups selected through a lottery process would be allowed to protest the DNC.

While most of the ordinances are clearly meant for stifling protests, others are simply bizarre:

Another change would outlaw possession of any “noxious” substance like garbage, trash, animal parts, manure or urine with the intent to use it to interfere with a lawful assembly or with those entering or leaving a place.

The ACLU warns that if passed, the ordnances would give police too much leeway to harass otherwise law-abiding demonstrators.

North Carolina ACLU legal director Katy Parker told the Associated Press, “Even though the provisions look pretty innocuous, it looks to me like the ordinances are set up to allow the police to do just about anything they want at any time.” Parker cites the fact that “officials can wait 20 days before deciding whether to grant a protest permit, decide how many police are needed to oversee the assembly and then charge demonstrators for police and fire costs.” An ordinance that charges grassroots activists potentially enormous sums of money could render the right to protest obsolete for those unable to afford the tab.

Citizens are not taking the proposals lightly. At a public hearing this week, angry Charlotte residents faced down members to demand that they vote no on January 23. But if the ordinances pass, the implications will probably be seen much sooner than September – an ordinance that would ban sleeping, erecting temporary shelter, or keeping personal items on city property would likely lead police to disband the Occupy Charlotte encampment.

Police Overkill Is Not the Answer

At a time when cities and states are facing budget cuts and deficits, it seems careless for the federal government to spend $100 million on intense security preparations for party conventions. The Tampa Bay Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security considers national party conventions to be “national special security events” like a G-20 summit or a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), events that also attract thousands of protesters.

Meanwhile, many officials cite the past actions of a few black-hooded anarchists to justify police overkill, yet few if any acknowledge that it’s the media’s 24/7 coverage that draws demonstrators. Perhaps this pattern of protest against the televised gatherings of powerful decision-makers should provoke discussion about why such events attract the ire of thousands willing to put their bodies on the line to have their voices heard.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153730/

This article is from Alternet

7 Reasons America’s Mental Health Industry Is a Threat to Our Sanity

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on January 6, 2012, Printed on January 8, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153634/7_reasons_america%27s_mental_health_industry_is_a_threat_to_our_sanity

Why do some of us become dissident mental health professionals?

The majority of psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals “go along to get along” and maintain a status quo that includes drug company corruption, pseudoscientific research and a “standard of care” that is routinely damaging and occasionally kills young children. If that sounds hyperbolic, then you probably have not heard of Rebecca Riley, and how the highest levels of psychiatry described her treatment as “appropriate and within responsible professional standards.”

When Rebecca Riley was 28 months old, based primarily on the complaints of her mother that she was “hyper” and had difficulty sleeping, psychiatrist Kayoko Kifuji, at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, diagnosed Rebecca with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Kifuji prescribed clonidine, a hypertensive drug with significant sedating properties, a drug Kifuji also prescribed to Rebecca’s older sister and brother. The goal of the Riley parents—obvious to many in their community and later to juries—was to attain psychiatric diagnoses for their children that would qualify them for disability payments and to sedate their children making them easy to manage.

By the time Rebecca was three years old, again based mainly on parental complaints, Kifuji had given Rebecca an additional diagnosis of bipolar disorder and prescribed two additional heavily sedating drugs, the antipsychotic Seroquel and the anticonvulsant Depakote.

At the age of four, Rebecca was dead.

At the time of her death, Rebecca had a life-threatening amount of clonidine—enough to kill her—in her body, according to the former director of the Massachusetts toxicology lab and the medical director of a regional poison control center. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy concluded that Rebecca died from intoxication of clonidine, Depakote and two over-the-counter cold and cough medicines that led to heart failure, lungs filled with bloody fluid, coma, and then death. Rebecca’s abusive parents went to prison for the over-drugging that led to their daughter’s death.

Kifuji’s fate? The psychiatric establishment rallied around Kifuji, enabling her to return to Tufts Medical Center practicing child psychiatry without any restrictions, penalties or supervision. After Rebecca’s death, Tufts-New England Medical Center defended Kifuji. A Tufts spokesperson told “60 Minutes” in 2009, “The care we provided was appropriate and within responsible professional standards.”

Apparently, psychiatric care that is considered appropriate and within responsible professional standards includes diagnoses of ADHD for a two-year-old and bipolar disorder for a three-year-old when the symptoms of those disorders are normal behaviors for those ages; prescribing three heavily sedating drugs that have not been approved by the FDA for child psychiatric treatment; ignoring the warnings from a school nurse about over-dosages for Rebecca; and making diagnoses based almost entirely on the reports of Rebecca’s mother, who herself was diagnosed with mental illness and heavily medicated to the point of falling asleep in Kifuji’s office.

Long before the Rebecca Riley tragedy hit the headlines, I was embarrassed by the mental health profession for seven major reasons:

1. Corruption by Big Pharma

How did it become within responsible professional standards for a two-year-old to get an ADHD diagnosis, for a three-year-old to get a bipolar diagnosis, and for toddlers to be prescribed multiple heavily sedating drugs? The short answer is drug company corruption of the mental health profession.

Congressional hearings in 2008 revealed that psychiatry’s “thought leaders” and major institutions are on the take from drug companies.

On June 8, 2008, the New York Times reported about psychiatrist Joseph Biederman: “A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007.”

Due in large part to Biederman’s influence, the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003. Pediatrician and author Lawrence Diller notes about Biederman, “He single-handedly put pediatric bipolar disorder on the map.” In addition to his popularization of bipolar disorder for children, Biederman is one of the most significant forces behind the expanding numbers diagnosed with ADHD; and congressional investigators also discovered that Biederman conducted studies of Eli Lilly’s ADHD drug Strattera that were funded by National Institute of Health at the same time he was receiving money from Lilly.

Not only does the drug industry have influential psychiatrists such as Biederman in their pocket, virtually every major mental health institution is financially interconnected with Big Pharma. Congressional hearings also exposed the American Psychiatric Association psychiatry’s premier professional organization, as being on the take from drug companies. In 2006, the drug industry accounted for about 30 percent of the APA’s $62.5 million in financing. Most relevant here, the APA is the publisher of the psychiatric diagnostic bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and thus the APA is the institution responsible for creating mental illnesses and disorders.

2. Invalid Illnesses and Disorders

Psychiatry’s first DSM (1952) and its DSM-II (1968) listed homosexuality as a mental illness. Only because of a fierce political fight waged in the 1970s by gay activists did the APA abolish homosexuality as an illness and eliminate it from its DSM-III (1980). Gay activists’ fight was not only a victory for themselves but a service for everyone else, as it made public the important scientific problem of psychiatric disorder invalidity. Specifically, are psychiatric disorders scientifically valid illnesses, or are they simply behaviors that create discomfort for some authorities at a given moment in time?

While psychiatry lost homosexuality as a mental illness in the 1980 DSM-III, the APA found other groups it could pathologize, groups that could not mobilize and resist, most notably children, who are now routinely given psychiatric diagnoses for behaviors that many of us view as normal for their ages.

Psychiatry sees it as within responsible professional standards to diagnose three-year-olds such as Rebecca Riley with bipolar disorder. The symptoms of bipolar disorder include irritable and rapidly changing moods, severe temper tantrums, defiance of authority, agitation and distractibility, sleeping too little or too much, poor judgment, impulsivity and grandiose beliefs.

Psychiatry also sees it as within responsible professional standards for Rebecca Riley to have been diagnosed at 28 months old with ADHD. The symptoms of ADHD are inattention (easily distracted and bored, difficulty organizing and completing tasks, losing things, not seeming to listen, not following instructions); hyperactivity (fidgeting, talking nonstop, having trouble sitting still, difficulty with quiet tasks), and impulsivity (impatience, blurting out inappropriate comments, interrupting conversations).

Today, children and teens are also diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), the symptoms of which include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” and “often argues with adults.”

The standard for a medical disorder should not be whether or not an individual causes friction.

3. Scientifically Unreliable Diagnoses

Even if you believe that bipolar disorder for three-year-olds, ADHD for two-year-olds, ODD for teenagers, and all the other DSM diagnoses are valid disorders, there is still the scientific issue of diagnostic unreliability—the lack of diagnostic agreement among professionals examining the same person.

A generation ago, psychiatrists admitted that their diagnoses were unreliable and agreed that this was a major scientific problem. So in 1980, in an attempt to eliminate this embarrassment, they created the DSM-III with concrete behavioral checklists and formal decision-making rules, but they failed to correct the problem. Psychiatric diagnoses remain unreliable, but now psychiatry no longer talks about the unreliability problem.

If a measurement is a reliable one, then clinicians trained with it should be in high agreement on the diagnosis. A major 1992 study, conducted at six sites with 600 prospective patients, was done to examine the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses. Experienced mental health professionals were given extensive training in how to make accurate DSM diagnoses. Because of the extensive training, one would expect that diagnostic agreement would be much higher than in typical clinical settings. Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk summarize the study in Making Us Crazy (1997):

What this study demonstrated was that even when experienced clinicians with special training and supervision are asked to use DSM and make a diagnosis, they frequently disagree, even though the standards for defining agreement are very generous. . . . [For example,] if one of the two therapists made a diagnosis of Schizoid Personality Disorder and the other therapist selected Avoidant Personality Disorder, the therapists were judged to be in complete agreement of the diagnosis because they both found a personality disorder—even though they disagreed completely on which one! So even with this liberal definition of agreement, reliability using DSM is not very good.

Kutchins and Kirk conclude: “Mental health clinicians independently interviewing the same person in the community are as likely to agree as disagree that the person has a mental disorder and are as likely to agree as disagree on which of the over 300 DSM disorders is present.”

4. Biochemical Imbalance Mumbo Jumbo

Just as nothing was more important in selling the Iraq war in 2003 than the Bush administration’s certainty that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, nothing has been more important in selling psychiatric drugs than psychiatry’s certainty of biochemical brain imbalances as the cause for mental illnesses.

Prior to psychiatry’s proclamation that depression was caused by too little of the neurotransmitter serotonin, few Americans were taking antidepressants. But by declaring that depression was caused by a serotonin imbalance analogous to diabetes and an insulin imbalance, depressed Americans became far more receptive to serotonin-enhancing drugs such as the “selective-serotonin-reuptake inhibitors” (SSRIs) Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft.

SSRIs can make some depressed people feel better; however, alcohol makes some shy people less shy, but that’s not enough evidence to say that shyness is caused by an alcohol imbalance. The truth is—and scientists have known this for quite some time—that serotonin levels are not associated with depression.

Researchers have used a variety of methods to test the serotonin imbalance theory of depression, including comparing serotonin metabolites in depressed and nondepressed people, and depleting serotonin levels through a variety of means and then observing whether this resulted in depression. Elliot Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, reviewed the research in his book Blaming the Brain (1998) and reported that it is just as likely for people with normal serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormal serotonin levels, and that it is just as likely for people with abnormally high serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormally low serotonin levels. Valenstein concluded, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.”

In 2002, the New York Times reported: “Researchers knew that antidepressants seemed to raise the brain’s levels of messenger chemicals called neurotransmitters, so they theorized that depression must result from a deficiency of these chemicals. Yet a multitude of studies failed to prove this precept.”

Yet even now, many psychiatrists and other mental health professionals continue to promulgate the serotonin imbalance theory of depression, and polls show that the majority of Americans continue to believe it.

5. Pseudoscientific Drug Effectiveness Research

There are multiple tricks that psychiatric drug manufacturers and their researcher psychiatrists and psychologists use to make their drugs look more effective than they really are. One of the most common depression measurements used by researchers paid by drug companies is the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression. In the HRSD, researchers rate subjects, and the higher the point total, the more one is deemed to be suffering from depression. On the HRSD, there are three separate items about insomnia (early, middle and late) and one can receive up to six points for difficulty either falling or remaining asleep; however, there is only one suicide item, in which one is awarded only two points for wishing to be dead. The HRSD is heavily loaded with items that are most affected by drugs, and it is therefore especially damning for antidepressants that even with such measurement dice-loading, these drugs routinely fail to outperform placebos—even dice-loaded placebos.

Proper drug research requires that neither subject nor experimenter knows who is getting the drug and who is getting the placebo (a true double-blind control). Drug company antidepressant researchers use inactive placebos such as sugar pills (which don’t create side effects). Independent research on inactive placebos show that many subjects in antidepressant and other studies can guess if they are getting the actual drug or not, which changes their expectations and subverts the double-blind control. In order to make it more difficult to guess correctly, an active placebo (which creates side effects) should be used. In 2000, a Psychiatric Times article concluded: “In fact, when antidepressants are compared with active placebos, there appear to be no differences in clinical effectiveness.”

Dice-loading depression measurements and placebos are just two of many techniques drug company researchers use to make antidepressants look more effective than they really are. But even with such dice-loading, antidepressants have not fared well, at least when one examines all the studies.

Drug companies try to ensure that those studies showing antidepressants to be no more effective than placebos are not published; however, all studies must be submitted to the FDA. So independent researcher Irving Kirsch and his research team at the University of Connecticut used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to all data, and analyzed 47 studies that had been sponsored by drug companies on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa, and Serzone. Kirsch discovered that in the majority of the trials, the antidepressant failed to outperform a sugar pill placebo (and in the trials where the antidepressant did outperform the placebo, the advantage was slight).

6. Psychotropic Drug Hypocrisy

Chemists consider psychiatric prescription drugs and illegal mood-altering drugs all to be psychotropic or psychoactive drugs. Cocaine and ADHD drugs such as Adderall and other amphetamines affect the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine; and antidepressants used in combination also affect the same neurotransmitters. Not only are prescription psychotropics and illegal psychotropics chemically similar, they are used by people for similar reasons, including taking the edge off their discomfort so they can function. The hypocrisy surrounding illegal and prescription psychotropic drugs is harmful to society in at least two ways.

At one level, because people are being misinformed about the realities of prescription psychotropic drugs, they are more likely to gulp them down and to give them to their children. This has helped create a tragic phenomenon detailed by investigative reporter Robert Whitaker in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic(2010). Psychiatric drug use turning mild and episodic conditions into severe and chronic ones has helped create a huge increase of Americans with severe mental illness, especially among children.

At a second level, this psychiatric-illegal psychotropic drug hypocrisy allows for unfair criminalizing and incarceration of people using illegal psychotropics.

7. Diversion from Societal, Cultural and Political Sources of Misery

When we hear the words disorder, disease or illness, we think of an individual in need of treatment, not of a troubled society in need of transformation. Mental illness expansionism diverts us from examining a dehumanizing society.

In addition to pathologizing normal behavior, the mental health profession also diverts us from examining a society that creates the ingredients—helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, and isolation—that cause emotional difficulties. We are diverted from the reality that many emotional problems are natural human reactions to loss in our society of autonomy and community. Thus, the mental health profession not only has financial value for drug companies but it has political value for those at the top of societal hierarchies who want to retain the status quo.

Today, a handful of dissident mental health professionals do challenge and resist their profession’s dehumanizing standard practicies. I know several of these dissidents, and they are the only psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health professionals that I have any respect for.

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite  (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net.