Russia Calls US Nuclear Bomb Test 'Provocative'
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 International Business Times |
Russia Calls US Nuclear Bomb Test 'Provocative' Weeks After Putin Announced ...
International Business Times Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov said he disapproved of the United States' recent test of an unarmed nuclear bomb. Pictured: Antonov is shown speaking to the media during a news conference in Moscow, March 5, 2015. Reuters. America and Russia Test New Tactical Nuclear Missiles | The National Interest ...The National Interest Online (blog) Russia Considers US Nuclear Bomb Test 'Open Provocation' / Sputnik ...Sputnik International Russian Defense Ministry: New nuclear bomb test in U.S. in current situation ...Russia Beyond the Headlines all 12 news articles » |
 Stars and Stripes |
Cyberattacks? Russia? Experts differ on who - or what - is an existential ...
Stars and Stripes Joseph Dunford Jr., selected to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, testified on Thursday during his confirmation hearing that he saw Russia as the greatest threat the United States faces. He cited Moscow's aggressive actions in eastern ... General Dunford is Right about Russia, but not because of their NukesWar on the Rocks Pentagon on the Warpath: Does Russia Indeed Pose a Threat to US? / Sputnik ...Sputnik International Joint Chiefs Nominee's Alarms About Russia Have An Unaffordable And ...Forbes all 64 news articles » |
At Least 2 Are Killed in Collapse at Russian Barracksby By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Others were trapped in rubble when a portion of a concrete building fell apart at a military training center in Omsk, near the border with Kazakhstan.
War in Ukraine Ruined Russian Military Reform (Op-Ed)by By Alexander Golts
The war in Ukraine has dealt a devastating blow to Russia's armed forces, writes columnist Alexander Golts.
Encryption Debate Comes Out of the Shadowsby webdesk@voanews.com (Doug Bernard)
It’s no secret that James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is not a fan of encryption – at least not when it puts data outside the reach of the FBI. For over a year now, Comey has pressured congressional leaders and Silicon Valley executives to curb the use and spread of encryption tools for computers, tablets and mobile phones, but with little effect. Comey said he wants encryption services to create secret “back doors” and “key escrows” for their products so agencies like the FBI can get emergency access to data critical for fighting crime and protecting national security. So far, the debate has been largely low-key and one-sided, with few corporate executives eager to pick a public fight with the FBI. But now, a group of cybersecurity professionals is pushing back at the FBI, warning that what Comey wants is not only infeasible, but could make the entire Internet significantly more vulnerable to hack attacks. Encryption’s spread With high-profile cyberattacks on the increase and continuing revelations of U.S. government surveillance activities leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, encryption has become a booming business. There are literally hundreds of encryption apps and services currently available that allow users to lock away their messages, texts, pictures, contacts and other data from prying eyes, with more on the way every month. Sensing this explosive growth, industry leaders such as Apple, Microsoft and Google now offer robust encryption options for devices using their operating systems. Last September, Apple included an iOS security change that makes it nearly impossible for police agencies to unlock devices such as an iPhone without the owner’s consent. Previously, the operating system allowed Apple to unlock devices if the government provided a search warrant. One month later, at a forum hosted by the Brookings Institution, Comey delivered a caustic broadside against the spread of encryption services. Comey cautioned that law enforcement agencies like the FBI are increasingly vexed by “bad guys” using encrypted data storage and keeping nearly all their information – some of which might be evidence of illegal activity – on encrypted phones, outside the traditional access of wiretaps or database searches. Encryption, he said, is turning every electronic device into a “safe that can never be cracked.” “If the challenges of real-time interception threaten to leave us in the dark, encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place,” he warned. Since then, the FBI director has taken nearly every opportunity to warn about encryption’s spread. Just last week, while announcing the arrest of a number of individuals suspected of plotting terror attacks, Comey said that some of those arrested had been communicating with ISIS militants through encrypted message platforms. Perhaps recognizing that the encryption genie is already out of the cyber bottle, Comey is pushing tech companies to build in secret access points to their services, allowing data to be recovered without the key-holders consent. He’s also calling for “key escrows” – essentially a digital bank holding the secret encryption keys for every user. Keys, back doors, doormats While Comey has yet to score any significant concessions, his campaign to this point has been more lecture than debate, with corporate executives offering noncommittal assurances of working with the government to study the issue. Some of that may have changed, however, with the release last week of a report that pushes back against Comey and warns that his proposals would make private data even more vulnerable to hacking and theft. “Keys Under Doormats” was written by a group of 15 elite cybersecurity and cryptographic professionals and published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In brief, they argue that secret entry points into encrypted systems don’t currently exist because they simply don’t work. Moreover, they say such paths “pose far more grave security risks, imperil innovation on which the world’s economies depend, and raise more thorny policy issues than we could have imagined when the Internet was in its infancy.” Kurt Rohloff is one of the nation’s leading computer scientists working in cryptography. Before serving as professor of computer science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rohloff worked as a defense contractor at DARPA, and has long experience with encryption software. VOA spoke with Rohloff to get his perspectives on the arguments both for and against director Comey’s encryption campaign. VOA: Director Comey says encrypted devices are like safes that can never be unlocked, putting potentially life-saving information out of reach to law enforcement. Does he have a point? In point of fact, we’re pretty much there already. There are encryption technologies that can encrypt everything on a phone, or a hard drive, or even your car. It’s just not going away. In terms of making things better, I’d push back and say that his proposals would actually roll back the clock in terms of security, making us less secure. That said, I’ve worked [developing encryption software] for years, and from a personal point of view, I frankly think I fundamentally have a right to privacy. I don’t want for other folks to have access to what I consider my private information. But specifically, as for backdoors, that’s just a bad idea. That’s just another point of access for bad guys to get my private information. Beyond negotiating the privacy issues, could his proposals actually work? Or, by definition, would they make data more vulnerable? The latter. At a very basic level, it’s a math problem. Can we prove the math actually works? My understanding is that the math is only partially there, but not all the way there, and not as secure as it needs to be. And there are other problems, like implementation. It’s actually very, very hard to write crypto software – software that runs systems that are truly secure, that don’t have any bugs or any holes. There’s a reason so few people like me do this, because it’s so hard. Then there’s the liability. Suppose there’s a bug in the crypto system and there’s a resulting financial loss: Who’s going to pay for that? Is the government liable? Is the contractor that wrote the code? Another problem is actually setting up the crypto environment: How do you host it? Where do you put it? Who has access to it, manages it and where are the keys stored? These are huge issues that may make the math beside the point. So back doors and key escrows are, at their core, fundamentally insecure? Yes. Building these things in is fundamentally building insecurity into the system by putting in a back door. Look at some of the recent high-profile attacks – say the OPM breach. These kinds of attacks, the adversaries had a relatively well-distributed attack pattern. They were going after different companies and different branches of the government. But now with a key escrow or back door, you concentrate all this vulnerability into one point. It would probably lead to greater attacks on this one known vulnerability, rather than the more distributed attacks we’re seeing now. Shouldn’t law enforcement have limited access to data that could protect the nation or actually save someone’s life? This actually gets at one of the biggest issues I’ve had with the overall formulation of this debate. A lot of [Comey’s] justifications have been primarily anecdotal. I was at a talk that director Comey gave in January, and he whipped out the old saw of "protecting children from pedophiles." Yeah, it might in one or two cases, but I have yet to see any real hard statistics that there’s going to be any statistically significant advantage that we’ll get in protecting these children from abuse or worse. I just have a hard [time] justifying widespread privacy intrusion if it’s just director Comey pointing out one or two cases that happened over the past couple of years where encryption prevented a timely investigation. Great Britain, Russia and China are also considering similar proposals for mandating access to encrypted data. Do you worry the rest of the world might get out ahead of the U.S. on this? Well, that’s an interesting analogy: A potential justification for implementing this technology is because the Chinese are doing it. They’re not exactly a paragon of freedom of speech. I would turn it around. If you look back to the '90s when the Clipper Chip was an issue, a lot of businesses actually left the U.S. and moved, for example, to Israel. Israel right now has a very vibrant cryptographic community, a vibrant cybersecurity community. That’s driven by several reasons, but among them are U.S. businesses off-shoring a lot of technological development into a more fertile environment. Rather than the world rushing ahead of the U.S., I think we would actually see more U.S. companies setting up foreign subsidiaries, giving those foreign nations the upper hand. Some cryptographers we’ve spoken with have expressed concern that Congress or the courts just don’t "get" encryption and the technological and social issues involved. Is encryption just too hard to understand? It’s a difficult subject to penetrate. I think there’s a general challenge for us in the technology community being able to properly educate decision-makers and policymakers. We’ve all seen that YouTube clip of [former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens] calling the Internet “a series of tubes.” This is a concern a lot of us should have. Of course, there are folks that have a relatively good understanding. For example, the prime minister of Estonia is a former software developer. I think Estonia actually gets it right, because they have such a large stake in pushing technology forward. So, yes, the understanding of technology is uneven across our government, but I think there’s a serious effort to correct that.
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Russia Says U.K. Closes State Media Giant’s Bank Account Over Ukraine Sanctions by support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL)
Russia says a London bank account held by its state-owned media behemoth Rossia Segodnya has been “closed” by British authorities in a move it linked to Ukraine-related sanctions imposed by the EU.
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LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron called for increased spending by the British military on remotely piloted vehicles (RPV), air surveillance assets and special forces during a Monday visit to the Royal Air Force base at Waddington, eastern England.
TMZ.com |
Donald Trump Calls in FBI Over Death Threats Involving El Chapo | TMZ.com
TMZ.com 0713-donald-trump-el-chapo-getty-AP-01 Donald Trump tells TMZ he is contacting the FBI to investigate threats just made by a man claiming to be the son of escaped Mexican drug lord El Chapo. Trump is reacting to a tweet reportedly made by El Chapo's ... Trump calls FBI over threats from Mexican drug cartel: 'I'm gonna make you ...Raw Story all 2 news articles » |
Scientist Spies by fredslibrary
Title: Scientist Spies
Author: Paul Broda
Broda, Paul (2011). Scientist Spies: A Memoir of My Three Parents and the Atom Bomb. Leicester, UK: Matador
LCCN: 2011514843
Subjects
- Nunn May, Alan, 1911-2003.
- Broda, Engelbert.
- Nunn May, Hilde, 1911-2004.
- Broda, Paul, 1939-
- Spies–Great Britain–Biography.
- Physicists–Great Britain–Biography.
- Spies–Soviet Union–Biography.
- Nuclear weapons–Great Britain.
Date Posted: July 13, 2015
Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake[1]
The VENONA decrypts made public in 1995 contained the cryptonym ERIC, which neither the Americans nor the British had been able to identify—the KGB wasn’t talking. ERIC’s true name, Engelbert Broda, and his role as a physicist in the British atomic bomb was eventually revealed in the book Spies.[2] Itwas only then that PaulBroda knew for sure that his father had been a Soviet agent.
Adjusting to the fact his father had been an atomic spy for the Soviets was not exactly a new experience for Paul. When he was 14, in 1953, his divorced mother, Hilde Broda, married British physicist Alan Nunn May after he completed his sentence for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. When death parted the couple 49 years later, Paul decided to write the story of his mother and the two spies she married.
Scientist Spies is based in part on discussions with Nunn May, his unpublished memoirs, and his death-bed statement. Paul also used MI5 documents, letters from his birth father, and interviews with family and friends. The story examines why his fathers spied for the Russians, whether they had any regrets (they didn’t), why one was caught while the other escaped, and the impact those events had on members of the family.
The MI5 documents revealed that Austrian physicist Engelbert Broda, or Berti as he was called, was a communist when he arrived in Britain in 1938 with his wife Hilda. Berti was active in the Austrian Centre, a social club for communists that had been penetrated by MI5. As a result, he was interned for two periods at the beginning of the war. In late 1941, at the request of fellow physicists, he was cleared by MI5 to accept a position in the Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge University to work on the atomic bomb project. He was joined a few months later by his friend and fellow communist, Nunn May. In 1942 Berti contacted another communist friend, Edith Tudor Hart-the KGB spotter that introduced Kim Philby to his recruiter-and offered his services. They were promptly accepted. (pp. 150-51) Berti met with his handler every two or three weeks until 1946, when he returned to Austria. Though suspected of spying and subjected to periodic surveillance, he was never caught.
Nunn May was less fortunate and his case is well known. He was caught because the GRU defector, Igor Gouzenko, produced documents that incriminated him. Paul reveals that Nunn May was frequently asked whether he regretted his spying and his response was that the only thing he regretted was getting involved with atomic research.
Paul Broda presents a sympathetic account of life in the 1930s when communism was popular. He makes clear that his fathers never changed their political views but does not explain how they rationalized their beliefs while remaining in the West. Scientist Spies fills another niche in the story of the atomic spies so captivated by communism that they betrayed their country and never came to regret it.
[1] Hayden Peake, in Intelligencer (19, 1, 2012, p. 117). Hayden Peake is the curator of the CIA Historical Intelligence Collection. He is a frequent contributor to AFIO’s journal and other publications. Most of his reviews were previously released in the unclassified edition of CIA’s Studies in Intelligence.
[2] Haynes, John Earl (2009), Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev. Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 65
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Iran is already making preparations for a major celebration declaring the looming nuclear deal a success for the Islamic Republic, Iranian news agencies reported Monday as negotiators met in Vienna to work out final details.
But in the U.S. opposition to the apparent deal was already building, with lawmakers on ...
Following the deadly standoff in Western Ukraine's Mukachevo, Right Sector's spokesman threatened to bring fighters to Kiev while the country's security forces say that they do not intend to negotiate.
Kiev says two of its soldiers have been killed and five others wounded in heavy fighting in eastern Ukraine.
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 WND.com |
Ex-CIA chief: Iran deal worse than worthless
WND.com The ex-CIA director noted that when the current round of negotiations began, “We had some very solid objectives to get [Iran] away from having a nuclear infrastructure.” This included not letting Tehran enrich uranium, and to allow inspections to be ... |
How The FBI's Dysfunctional Search Systems Keep Information Out Of FOIA ...
Techdirt FBI deals with the release (or lack thereof) of videotapes containing footage of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Four days of oral testimony has at least partially exposed the search methods used by the FBI, which the agency uses as convenient ... |
Who's an existential threat to the US? In Washington, it depends who's talking.
Washington Post Joseph F. Dunford Jr., selected to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, testified on Thursday during his confirmation hearing that he saw Russia as the greatest threat the United States faces. He cited Moscow's aggressive actions in eastern ... and more » |
The APA Scandal by David Luban
This post is the latest installment of our “Monday Reflections” feature, in which a different Just Security editor examines the big stories from the previous week or looks ahead to key developments on the horizon.
Last Friday, James Risen published an article describing an independent investigation of the American Psychological Association (APA) by a team of lawyers at Sidley Austin, headed by former prosecutor David Hoffman. The APA commissioned Sidley to investigate the conduct of its own leadership in connection with the role of psychologists in the torture of detainees. To put it mildly,the Hoffman Report is damning. It provides a detailed account of something unparalleled: the corruption of an esteemed professional organization through coziness with the government, when the government has decided to torture.
This is different from the much-discussed role of the “torture lawyers,” which was bad enough. Here, the issue is a major organization engaging in a decade of duplicity to permit its members to participate in abusive interrogations while seeming to forbid it. For those of us who have long argued that the torture debate should focus on torture’s corrupting effect on real institutions rather than on imaginary ticking bombs, seeing it in action is a bitter vindication.
An episode from the Hoffman Report provides a window into the problem.
A Moment of Moral Insanity
The Report describes a by-invitation-only “Ethics and National Security Forum” that APA organized in 2004. Participants included APA staff and “representatives of the FBI, CIA, and DoD.” The APA’s ethics director, lawyer-psychologist Stephen Behnke, hoped to discuss a vexed question: the “goodness of fit” between the organization’s ethics code and “the situations with which many professionals struggle during their practice in national security settings” (p. 200). Much of the discussion indeed revolved around this issue (p. 201). A CIA psychologist complained that
“the current [ethics] code does not apply at all [to] the national security investigation situations—it’s not mental health we’re concerned with, but national security; we are supposed to exploit and manipulate the interrogatees to gain crucial information.” He later emphasized that “beyond [torture], we have no ethical duty to the interrogatee” (p. 201).
Some might think that if bedrock ethical principles like “do no harm” prohibit participating in coercive interrogations, psychologists should comply, rather than retooling their principle. That is not how the group saw matters:
Some participants raised the idea of “relative ethics,” such that there was a “continuum of coercion from benign to not at all benign, depending on how high the stakes are.” Shumate invoked the “ticking bomb scenario,” and queried how the ethics standards applied in practice “in the context of competing duties and oaths,” such as the oath to protect and defend. Behnke seemed to agree with this “relativist” position, stating that “there are exceptions to each rule in the code, where some other value or goal trumps another” (p. 202).
But it seems that not all rules have exceptions:
Another consistent concern was the lack of empirical data available to assess risk, and the inability to conduct the necessary research because it would be unethical (p. 202).
A remarkable conclusion: Studying the risks abusive interrogation tactics pose to detainees would be unethical. Devising the tactics would not.
This is a moment of moral insanity. The organization has turned ethics upside down.
A lot has been written about the panic among national security officials in the summer of 2002, when the possibility of an anniversary attack by Al Qaeda seemed very real. It was at that point that DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel produced the first torture memos, and the torture program began. (Later, OLC’s director Stephen Bradbury would appeal to post-9/11 panic to excuse the excesses of several legal opinions from that time period.)
But the APA “ethics” forum was not in the summer of 2002. It took place in July 2004, mere weeks after the Abu Ghraib revelations and the leak of the original torture memo. In other words, just at a moment of national soul-searching about torture, the APA’s ethics director was guiding a conversation about “the risk … that mental health professionals will stay away from this work, out of a concern of exposing themselves to legal and ethical liability” (p. 200). Instead of asking whether to put the brakes on psychologist participation, the aim was to explore “how APA … can serve as a resource for psychologists and mental health professionals who participate in these investigations” (p. 198). Even in the wake of Abu Ghraib, APA still hoped to be an enabler.
The Ethics Director and the Presidents
The Report portrays Behnke, the APA’s ethics director, as the impresario of the organization’s campaign to depict itself as a human rights champion, while quietly permitting its members to engage in coercive interrogations and shielding them from ethics complaints. The APA presidency is a one-year position; Behnke was the institutional memory. His triple status as psychologist, lawyer, and ethics expert positioned him to write interrogation-friendly rules that only looked like real prohibitions:
[T]he key APA official who drafted the report (the APA Ethics Director) intentionally crafted ethics guidelines that were high-level and non-specific so as to not restrict the flexibility of DoD in this regard, and proposed key language that was either drafted by DoD officials or was carefully constructed not to conflict with DoD policies or policy goals (p. 12).
One key maneuver was to build permissive U.S. legal definitions into ethics prohibitions. Another was to fend off requests for concrete guidance by promising that the rules and the APA’s ethics report (the so-called PENS report) would soon be followed by a casebook, which in fact would never be written. Behnke was also instrumental in ensuring that the PENS Task Force would be stacked with DOD-friendly members; and he played a large role in APA’s media strategy, described by Hoffman this way:
[the APA would] emphasize that PENS said that psychologists could not engage in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and claim PENS as a strong, pro-human-rights document. The principal purpose of PENS—to state that psychologists could in fact engage in interrogations consistent with the Ethics Code—was relegated to the sidelines…. And of course, the principal motivation for Behnke and other APA officials in drafting PENS the way they did—pleasing DoD—remained fully concealed (pp. 320-21).
But Behnke did not act alone, and the Hoffman Report features a bewilderingly large cast of characters. Notably, some APA presidents and past presidents were fully on board with the agenda. In 2002, former president Joseph Matarrazo approached one psychologist who would later serve on the PENS Task Force and said, “In this environment, things are different, and the CIA is going to need some help. Things may get harsh. We may need to take the gloves off” (p. 160); Matarrazo also advised a CIA psychologist that sleep deprivation by itself is not torture.
The 2005 president, Ronald Levant, features prominently in the Hoffman Report. And Gerald Koocher, 2006 APA president, played a larger and more disturbing role on several issues. One was the processing of ethics complaints against psychologists involved in enhanced interrogations.
In an email exchange …, Koocher pointedly suggested that APA would never be able to obtain any “hard data” about whether psychologists were committing abuses at Guantanamo Bay, and therefore as a matter of strategy, APA should simply continue to issue public statements saying it was “concerned” and would look into the matter as soon as such hard data became available (knowing that it never would). Behnke responded that he agreed…. Koocher responded, “Right! We should probably simply [r]epeat same until ‘evidence’ of anything becomes public in 2055” (p. 216).
Another important issue that confronted the APA is whether its ethics standards should incorporate international law, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, and human rights standards. DoD members of the PENS committee vehemently opposed it (see pp. 174-77 of the Hoffman Report). Koocher’s reaction, in an email to a private listserv, was blistering. “I have zero interest in entangling APA with the nebulous, toothless, contradictory, and obfuscatory treaties that comprise ‘international law’” (p. 326). (In another email, Koocher confessed to being addicted to the TV show “24”, “in which non-psychologist terrorist hunter Jack Bauer routinely inflicts painful injury on suspects as he attempts to stop a terrorist caused nuclear disaster”).
Koocher’s low point was his effort to silence the most vocally dissenting PENS committee members, Jean Maria Arrigo. After she appeared on Democracy Now! he publicly dismissed her objections as symptoms of her own “troubled upbringing” and the trauma of her father’s purported suicide (pp. 25, 267, 342-43). The Hoffman Report comments:
Koocher was incorrect in his letter when he stated that Arrigo’s father had committed suicide. Arrigo’s father was alive during the time of PENS. Koocher has insisted that Arrigo lied during the meeting about this fact, and Arrigo has insisted she never stated her father was deceased or that he committed suicide.
Our interviews on this issue strongly support Arrigo’s position (p. 343).
Among his other credentials, Koocher is the founder and editor of the journal Ethics and Behavior.
This was not the only APA attack on critics. Stephen Soldz and Steven Reizner are psychologists who for the past decade have spearheaded the national effort to remove psychologists from abusive national security interrogations. In comments they delivered last summer to the APA’s Board about the Hoffman Report, they highlighted “the vicious personal attacks upon PENS Task Force member and national hero Jean Maria Arrigo,” but added:
Other critics have been banned from state psychological association listservs; been attacked by an APA president in the official Monitor on Psychology as “opportunistic commentators masquerading as scholars;” been threatened with possible libel suits and ethics complaints; been disinvited from speaking to and writing for state psychological associations; been surreptitiously recorded by APA staff when having a private conversation with reporters; had venues where they were speaking criticized and even implicitly threatened with loss of accreditation; and called “clowns” in a national psychological newspaper by an individual given numerous awards by APA and its divisions and who is often in APA governance. … These actions were all undertaken against those who sought to uncover the collusion that was denied by Association leadership, including this Board and the current CEO only a few months ago.
What Went Wrong?
Given the large cast of characters, it would be facile to suppose the APA’s massive institutional failure was the handiwork of a few bad apples. Facile, and very likely unfair. I’ve heard Behnke, for instance, described as morally aware, idealistic, and fully cognizant of the post-Nuremberg literature on the cooptation of health professionals—at least before he was hired at the APA in 2000. (In the wake of the Hoffman Report, Behnke has resigned.) And while some might slap their heads to learn that Koocher founded an ethics journal (my own first reaction was “nfw!”), nobody takes on such editorial burdens without a genuine concern about ethics.
Can the descent of the organization be explained by individual conflicts of interest? The Hoffman Report, and media coverage, highlights conflicts involving Matarrazo, Behnke, and an APA Practice Directorate chief. With due respect, I think this is a minor issue. It is inconceivable that things would have gone differently at APA if those conflicts of interest didn’t exist. The individual conflicts of interest are revealing, to be sure: the fact that no one in the APA appeared to be concerned about them speaks volumes about how uncritical the officials had become about the organization’s relationship with DoD. But the conflicts came as a result of compromised ethics—they were not its cause. To repeat: individual sin is real, but it is not the most important problem with the APA. That problem is institutional. As Soldz and Reizner emphasize:
This years-long collusion was accompanied by false statements from every Board and every elected President over the last decade denying the existence of the collusion described in such detail by Mr. Hoffman.
At the heart of the problem is an institutional conflict of interest, which the Hoffman Report describes succinctly: “In some ways, DoD is like a rich, powerful uncle to APA, helping it in important ways throughout APA’s life” (p. 72). A large APA constituency works, directly or indirectly, for DoD. And DoD has conferred benefits on APA members, most notably by granting APA members prescription-writing privileges within DoD and in other locales, crucial in competing with psychiatrists. The Hoffman Report doubts the prescription privilege was a key financial issue in 2005 (see p. 69). But the bare fact that DoD had been the organization’s patron at one crucial juncture meant that every top official in APA had a mandate to make sure the relationship was a smooth one.
This was less a function of APA seeking something concrete with regard to a specific contract or program (like prescription privileges), but more a function of APA knowing very concretely how willing and able DoD was to provide large-scale support to psychology as a profession—now and perhaps in the future in unknown ways (p. 69).
APA is a professional guild. Like all professional guilds, it exists to enhance the incomes and prestige of its members. It shouldn’t surprise us to read this:
[then-APA President] Levant told Sidley that a goal of his trip to Guantanamo Bay in October 2005 … was to give a good impression of psychology to DoD officials, which aided his long-term goal of expanding the scope of psychology (233).
Exactly.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a guild acting to advance the interests of its members—including by developing relationships with government agencies. The problem, however, was that the virtually uniform, unswerving devotion to this aspect of the organization’s mission demagnetized the moral compass of virtually all APA officials—including those whose jobs were to ensure ethical conduct, even when it might mean fewer professional opportunities for the membership. This makes the moral clarity of psychologists like Arrigo, Soldz, Reizner, Steven Miles, Ken Pope, and others too numerous to name all the more remarkable.
Why this, why now?
The APA has issued a public apology:
“The actions, policies and the lack of independence from government influence described in the Hoffman report represented a failure to live up to our core values. We profoundly regret, and apologize for, the behavior and the consequences that ensued. Our members, our profession and our organization expected, and deserved, better.”
It promises to take action to right itself. Yet there is reason to be skeptical. The same document speaks of “deeply disturbing findings that reveal previously unknown and troubling instances of collusion.”
Previously unknown to whom? Not to the APA itself—the whole point of the report is that countless officials, including the Presidents, were very self-conscious about what they were doing. Unknown to the current Board members? In fact, nearly everything in the Report that matters has been known for years. The role of psychologists in torture was reported by Jonathan Marks and my Georgetown colleague Gregg Bloche in 2005, and independently a few days later by Jane Mayer. Further light was shed by Mark Benjamin in 2006 and by Katherine Eban and Benjamin in 2007. Arrigo revealed the APA machinations in her 2007 appearance on Democracy Now! and Bloche exposed them in detail in The Hippocratic Myth (2011). By the time of Risen’s 2014 Pay Any Price, APA Board members and officials must have been alone in their ignorance – alone in being shocked, deeply shocked to discover that gambling is going on in this establishment.
As recently as last fall, APA was still trying to “refute” Risen. The reforms it now promises are weaker than those recommended by Soldz and Reizner – and they don’t begin to tackle the fundamental problem of how to get the organization out from under the sway of its rich, powerful uncle. As for the tragic way a decade’s worth of leaders lost their moral compass – well, that is a question psychologists could shed some light on.
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 Energy Collective |
Cyberattack on US Power Plants Could Cause $1T in Economic Damage
Energy Collective “Usually, the control systems are separated from the general communications systems of the outside world by a firewall; places where information needs to transfer between the outside world and the control system are heavily screened and policed.” Even ... |
 BuzzFeed News |
Russia Penalizes A Local NGO After Its Leader Lectured At U.S. Universities
BuzzFeed News The recent campaign against NGOs has been accompanied by a strong whiff of anti-Americanism. Last month, Russian state TV ran a documentary exposing what it said were U.S. attempts to use NGOs to overthrow the Russian government. LGBT activist ... |
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 Washington Post (blog) |
It's not just OPM: Cybersecurity across the federal government is pretty awful
Washington Post (blog) According to the Government Accountability Office, 19 of 24 major agencies have declaredcybersecurity a "significant deficiency" or a "material weakness." Problems range from a need for better oversight of information technology contractors to ... |
KIEV (Reuters) - President Petro Poroshenko ordered Ukraine's security services and police on Monday to disarm "illegal groups", saying they threatened to further destabilize a country fighting separatists in its east.
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Pope Francis defended himself against critics who accuse him of preaching class warfare, saying that he's just applying Catholic teachings to an economic system that is highly polarized between the rich and poor.
MEXICO CITY — The place where drug lord Chapo Guzman popped out of the ground stands alone in rolling farmland roughly equidistant from a military base and the penitentiary where he began his escape.To build the roughly one-mile tunnel 30 feet below Mexico's highest-security prison, his rescuers would have needed to haul away 379 truckloads of earth, Mexican newspapers have calculated, and used excavating power tools that would have been difficult not to hear.Read full article >>
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Super-Pac money catapults Cuban-American senator into centre ring
As controversy mounts ahead of "Go Set a Watchman," publisher gives insight into what the "To Kill a Mockingbird" author was thinking
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Francis acknowledges U.S. criticism of his anti-capitalist stance and is calling for dialogue before his high-profile trip in September
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Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto urged his security forces on Sunday to recapture drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, calling his prison escape an "affront to the state."
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Russia protests closing of main state news agency's bank account in Britain
Federal investigators are reading into every aspect of Joaquin ???El Chapo??? Guzman???s latest prison break as they intensify their search for the Mexican drug lord.
In America, same-sex marriage is legal across all 50 states. In Russia, a gay couple cannot walk down the street in the nation's capital without being heckled and even facing physical abuse.
Anticorruption prosecutors said premier has been indicted on charges including tax evasion, money laundering, conflict of interest and making false statements.
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WorldViews: The many brazen ways drug lords escape from prison by Adam Taylor, Ishaan Tharoor
The dramatic escape of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman over the weekend sounds almost too elaborate to be true.The Mexican drug lord, leader of the notorious Sinaloa cartel, is said to have escaped from the maximum security Altiplano prison through a tunnel that was more than a mile long. The tunnel was not only tall enough for Guzman to stand in, it had lighting and ventilation, and was even equipped with "an adapted motorcycle-on-rails" that transported 'El Chapo' to freedom. At the end of a tunnel stood a newly constructed house, where a neighbor said he saw a helicopter land on Saturday evening.Read full article >>
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Daghestan’s Interior Ministry Targets State Broadcasterby support@pangea-cms.com (Liz Fuller)
The offices of Daghestan's State TV and Radio Corporation have been raided by Interior Ministry officials following a July 5 program that discussed allegations of dubious police interrogation methods.
Returning from Latin America, the pope described a sharpening divide between rich and poor, but he admitted to speaking about the middle class only “in passing.”
Stunning Escape of Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán Fuels Mexicans’ Cynicism by WILLIAM NEUMAN and AZAM AHMED
Arely Gomez, the Mexican attorney general, looks at what is believed to be the end of the tunnel through which Joaquin Guzmán, known as El Chapo, escaped from the Altiplano prison.
Pope Francis says he wasn't offended by 'communist crucifix' gift by Associated Press aboard the papal plane
Pontiff says he views Bolivian president Evo Morales’s controversial present, based on the work of an assassinated Jesuit priest, through lens of history
Pope Francis has said he wasn’t offended by the “communist crucifix” given to him by Bolivian president Evo Morales during his South American pilgrimage.
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Iranians desperately await relief from financial sanctions as nuclear deal nears by Tehran Bureau correspondent
With a nuclear deal achingly close, we talk to those waiting for the result with bated breath
Like most small business owners in Tehran, pharmacy owner Morteza has faced a nightmarish scenario since 2011, when international sanctions on Iran’s financial system impeded the flow of drugs and medical equipment into the country. Aside from a drop in profits, Morteza is haunted by a daily procession of terminally ill customers who fail to find the medicines they are prescribed. “I can’t even count how many of my own customers and customers of my colleagues died of cancer because we didn’t have the drugs they needed,” he says. “At night, I dream of customers coming to the store looking for drugs we don’t have. They curse at me. They think it’s our fault.”
As the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the 5+1 reach the final stages, members of the Iranian public are shifting their attention to domestic policy. While recent research suggests that a majority of Iranians support a nuclear agreement and an end to crippling economic sanctions, they also expect the deal to quickly alleviate the daily tribulations they have faced as a result of their government’s insistence on Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment. In return for significant concessions in the international negotiations, they anticipate an improved standard of living, better access to foreign medicine, and significantly more foreign investment.
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Could extradition have foiled drug lord's escape?
Ukrainian military pilot Nadia Savchenko, detained by Russian authorities, faces a 25-year prison term over journalists' deaths, an agency reports.
The current negotiations with Iran will provide Iran with $150 billion to fund terrorism and pursue nuclear weapons, warned James Woolsey, former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and current chairman of Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Speaking on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia’s NewsTalk 990 AM or online, Woolsey stated neither the negotiations nor any agreement that grows out of them “are going to substantively … do anything to stop the Iranians from having a nuclear weapon.”
This is in contrast to White House press releases being issued on the subject, he said.
Klein brought up his own report on WND documenting that Israeli defense officials note Iran has been paying the salaries of Hamas’ so-called military wing.
Even the State Department confirmed in last month’s report that Iran’s “state sponsorship of terrorism worldwide remained undiminished.”
When asked whether Obama’s negotiations are merely an attempt to secure a legacy for himself, Woolsey replied, “Whatever he’s interested in, his behavior is not restricting terrorism by Iranian-backed entities such as Hamas or … any others, and it is not moving us toward any important restrictions on Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.”
Woolsey stated the negotiations are not doing anything positive at all. “If the negotiations on Iran are halted, Iran will end up getting up to $150 billion to finance … terrorism and their nuclear weapon,” he said.
The ex-CIA director noted that when the current round of negotiations began, “We had some very solid objectives to get [Iran] away from having a nuclear infrastructure.” This included not letting Tehran enrich uranium, and to allow inspections to be conducted whenever something looked suspicious.
“All of these are gone,” said Woolsey. “We’ve been negotiating with ourselves. Since the Iranians won’t make any changes in the directions we needed, I guess the administration’s negotiators or the administration itself, decided we would negotiate with ourselves – and we have defeated ourselves. We have conceded to the Iranians virtually all of the major points in the negotiations.”
WND.com |
Ex-CIA chief: Iran deal worse than worthless
WND.com The ex-CIA director noted that when the current round of negotiations began, “We had some very solid objectives to get [Iran] away from having a nuclear infrastructure.” This included not letting Tehran enrich uranium, and to allow inspections to be ... |
Kendrick White dismissed from Russian university post amid 'information war' with Westby Marc Bennetts - Special to The Washington Times
MOSCOW — As the Kremlin fights what officials in Moscow have called an "information war" with the West, Russian state-run media are more powerful than ever.
Exactly how powerful is something that U.S. citizen Kendrick White discovered this week when he was dismissed from his position as deputy head of ...
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MOSCOW (AP) - The Russian defense ministry says 23 people have died and 19 have been injured when the ceiling of military barracks collapsed in Siberia.
Rescuers search for hours for men trapped under the debris of an airborne troops training center in Omsk where the ceiling collapsed in the ...
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