Foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will decide on whether to lift a moratorium on bringing in new states at a meeting in Tajikistan on July 25, a Russian diplomat said on Friday. “The moratorium has lasted for two years. We have now decided to consider the possibility of the SCO’s enlargement,” a source in the Russian Foreign Ministry said. Iran and Pakistan, observer states at the SCO since 2005, have sought full membership in the regional bloc comprising Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan and widely seen as a counterweight to NATO’s influence in Eurasia. The group primarily addresses security issues, but has recently moved to embrace various economic and energy projects. Russia and China have been cautious over admitting Iran, embroiled in a long-running dispute with the West and Israel over its nuclear program and alleged support for radical groups in Lebanon and other countries. Both China and Russia have major commercial interests in Iran. China wants Iranian oil and gas, and to sell weapons and other goods to the country, while Moscow hopes to sell more weapons and nuclear energy technology to Tehran. The Kremlin also needs Iran’s endorsement for a multinational arrangement to exploit the Caspian Sea’s energy resources. Other observers in the group are India and Mongolia.
A former Israeli defense official says the Israeli military used cluster bombs for two weeks during the 2006 Lebanon war without telling the Israeli government. Hagai Alon, an adviser to then-Defense Minister Amir Peretz, says the government only learned of the cluster bomb use when European countries raised the issue after the war. Alon spoke on Israel Radio on Saturday. The military said in response that it updated the government on all issues throughout the war. Cluster bombs open in flight and scatter dozens of bomblets over wide areas. U.N. experts say that of millions dropped over Lebanon, up to 1 million failed to explode. An Israeli war inquiry had raised questions about the army’s use of the weapons, noting a lack of “operational discipline, oversight and control.” (AP)
UK relies on torture tactics of Pakistani agencies
Rauf Klasra, News International (Pakistan), July 20, 2008
LONDON: Britain is surprisingly showing no urgency in signing an extradition treaty with Pakistan to get one dozen most-wanted people from Islamabad, suspected of involvement in terrorism on the British soil. This lack of willingness is due to the UK’s realisation that unlike the Pakistani secret agencies, the MI-5 and MI-6 may not be able to extract information from the suspects through torture because of legal complications, diplomatic sources have claimed. British and Pakistani authorities have been discussing the proposal of signing a treaty on extradition for many years without any significant progress. Officials from Pakistan and the UK have been visiting the capitals of both the countries yet they have not agreed anything in black and white. The visit of the prime minister’s Adviser on Interior Rahman Malik to London last week was marred because of a story published in the local media showing how the British agencies were colluding with Pakistani secret agencies that were torturing the accused in their custody to extract information. The minister for interior had also discussed the issue of the extradition pact in his meetings with Home Secretary Jackie Smith. However, Smith did not speak about it during his press talk in the Pakistan High Commission, showing UK’s lack of interest in signing the treaty.
Sources said British authorities were satisfied with Pakistani agencies in dealing with such high profile wanted men suspected of terrorism on British soil by using ‘tough’ means i.e. torture. The British authorities want Pakistan to keep on passing sensitive information extracted from the suspects to its agencies in order to foil any terrorist plot within the UK in future. Information about the attack on the Heathrow Airport was also passed on to the British agencies by Pakistan last year. Sources also said the mysterious escape of Rashid Rauf, wanted in the UK for plotting the Heathrow Airport attack from the custody of Pakistani law enforcement agencies, too contributes to the delay in the extradition treaty between the two countries. Pakistan had asked Britain to hand it over the Baloch nationalist leaders campaigning in the UK as a condition to extradite Rauf to Britain. The UK police had also arrested some Baloch nationalists but later they were bailed out by courts. However, the sources said, the real reason for not signing the treaty is that the authorities did not want to be involved in any legal controversy by torturing the suspects to extract information like it is done in Pakistan. Therefore, they are relying on Pakistani agencies, known for their use of torture, to get information from the suspects.
Earlier, when Rahman Malik was claiming in a press conference in the High Commission that Pakistani agencies were under his control, at the same time a story was being discussed in the British press how the British intelligence officers colluded in the torture of a British medical student detained in Pakistan after the July 2005 suicide attacks in London. Labour backbencher John McDonnell had complained to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) that the student, his constituent, was picked up by a Pakistani intelligence agency and tortured for two months in a building opposite the British deputy high commission in Karachi. The student told McDonnell after his release that he was questioned by British intelligence officers, who he believes were from the Security Service, the MI-5. McDonnell believes that the British officials “outsourced” his mistreatment to the Pakistani agency and wants the IPT to examine the matter. Earlier this year, four British nationals claimed they were mistreated after being detained by Pakistani intelligence agents, and that they were then questioned by British intelligence officers, between or after the torture sessions. Earlier, the Guardian reported that three other Britons – including the McDonnell’s constituent – had also alleged they were mistreated after being detained in Pakistan, and were eventually released without charge. Meanwhile, the MI-5 asked the Home Office to issue a statement which said: “The Security and Intelligence Agencies do not participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture or inhumane or degrading treatment. For reasons both ethical and legal, their policy is not to carry out any action which they know would result in torture or inhuman or degrading treatment.”
It is unknown how many Britons have been held in Pakistan for questioning during counter-terrorism investigations in recent years. Earlier this year, the Foreign Office had responded to a parliamentary question from Andrew Tyrie, Tory MP and the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group, on extraordinary rendition, saying there were six such cases since 2000. But the Guardian says the number is at least 11, and there are unconfirmed reports that the number of such cases may exceed. Some of the detainees complained of not receiving any assistance from the British consular officials. The Foreign Office maintains that it is not responsible of representing them while they were in Pakistan as they had dual nationalities. The men’s lawyers said this claim was undermined by the strenuous efforts that British diplomats made on behalf of the 200-plus dual nationals forced into marriage in Pakistan each year. A number of the detainees themselves deny this, saying that the British intelligence officers who used to question them during their detention ignored their complaints that they were being tortured by Pakistani agencies.
Re-Thinking Jeffrey Goldberg
Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008
Last year, at my family’s Passover seder, I heard myself issuing a series of ideologically contradictory, Manischewitz-fueled political pronouncements. If I remember correctly, I called for the immediate invasion of Yemen (or possibly Oman); the outlawing of Wal-Mart; and the mandatory arming of college professors. I believe I may also have endorsed Russ Feingold for president. My friend Bill Knapp, who is a Democratic political consultant and, as such, a man whose devotion to a coherent set of liberal-centrist policy ideas does not waver, at least in public, suggested that I have my head examined, in order to determine whether I was neurologically wired for liberalism or conservatism. My wife asked, with a disconcerting level of enthusiasm, whether this was actually possible. “Not only is it possible, but I have the perfect person to do it,” Bill said (I’m permitted to quote him because the Goldberg seder is on the record). He told us that a neuroscientist named Marco Iacoboni, who directs UCLA’s Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Laboratory (it sounds even better in the original German), could scan my brain while showing me images of famous politicians. My brain’s response to these pictures, as recorded by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, would uncover my actual inclinations and predispositions by sidestepping the usual inhibition controls that can make focus-group testing unreliable.
I was hesitant, for two reasons. First, I believed that I already possessed a superior grasp of my brain’s division of labor: 30 percent of my brain is obsessed with the Holocaust; an additional 30 percent worries about my children; 10 percent is reserved for status anxiety; 7 percent, The Sopranos; 4 percent, Kurds; 2 percent, Chinese food; and so on. I reserve approximately 6 percent, on good days, for The Atlantic. In addition, I think about sex, and the New York Yankees. My hesitation also grew from inexperience: I’d never been subjected to a brain scan. What if the MRI discovered that I have a deep empathy for Pat Buchanan? What if it discovered a malignant tumor? What if it discovered a malignant tumor in the shape of Pat Buchanan? But the science seemed almost irresistibly interesting. Also, of sufficient danger to humanity to warrant at least the formation of a strong opinion on my part.
Bill and his partners in FKF Applied Research—the two F’s are Tom Freedman, a former Clinton administration official, and his brother Joshua, a psychiatrist and UCLA neuroscientist—are pioneers in the field of neuromarketing. They argue that fMRI technology provides fail-safe insights into consumer behavior. Unlike traditional methods of measuring the effectiveness of advertisements, fMRI defeats the curse of standard market-testing: the bias in self-reporting. In other words, if the ventral striatum lights up when I drink Pepsi, this means—according to FKF, at any rate—that I find Pepsi greatly pleasurable, even if I report no particular experience of pleasure in a taste test. For those of us who would prefer to deny Pepsi and Taco Bell and Nike access to our skulls—and who, God knows, don’t want Karl Rove and Mark Penn spelunking down our brain stems—advances in neuromarketing provoke a good measure of apprehension.
Bill Knapp tried to allay my fears. “You have too much amygdala about people looking at your amygdala,” he said, referring to a part of the brain that experiences fear and loathing. In his view, knowledge gained from fMRI technology will benefit not only marketers but consumers. “Insights into the human mind are empowering for you. Both sides in the marketing equation are getting more information. You can use this to figure out why someone won’t buy a Jaguar, and also why some people don’t take global warming seriously.” Still, I wondered to what degree this was truly scientific and to what degree it was 21st-century phrenology. The columnist David Brooks, who is writing a book about the brain, encouraged my skepticism when I talked to him about this. “My fear is that this is like flying over Los Angeles at night, looking at the lights in the houses and trying to guess what people are talking about at dinner,” he said. I mentioned Brooks’s doubts to the neuroscientist Iacoboni, who dismissed them, but with a caveat. “This is not one-to-one mapping,” he said. “You have to interpret the data within the context of the brain activation. It’s not mathematical, but it can give you an amazing understanding of what lights up different parts of the brain.”
Iacoboni, a world leader in the study of mirror neurons—cells in the brain that help us process the emotions and actions of other people (his new book, Mirroring People, has much to say about the connection between autism and “broken” mirror neurons)—told me that in order for his team to sift my brain comprehensively, I would have to spend a full week undergoing fMRI screening. But even an hour inside the machine would yield a baseline understanding of my neurological predispositions. And so one day a few weeks ago, I found myself being slid inside an MRI at UCLA, with headphones over my ears and video goggles over my eyes. I quickly realized that Joshua Freedman and his team had chosen stimuli that matched my preoccupations. One of the first video images they showed me was Jimmy Carter speaking in defense of his decision to meet with Hamas leaders. Then there was President Bush talking about oil, and Hillary Clinton talking about health care, which caused me to realize that if you haven’t lain supine in a claustrophobia-inducing magnetized tunnel while watching Hillary Clinton talk about health care one inch from your eyeballs, well, you just haven’t lived. The Clinton video was followed by scenes from The Wire and The Sopranos. Kind of like a palate cleanser. Then came a series of photographs: John McCain, Edie Falco, Golda Meir, Barack Obama, and David Ben-Gurion. One sequence consisted of Osama bin Laden, Daniel Pearl, my 7-year-old son, and my wife. Then another sequence: Obama, Hillary, Yasir Arafat, Bruce Springsteen, a poster for Fiddler on the Roof, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, George W. Bush, Bob Dylan, me, David Bradley (the man who owns this magazine), and Ronald Reagan.
I spent an hour inside the MRI and emerged irritated, with a clanging headache. “You have a good-looking brain!” Iacoboni said, smiling. For some reason, the news that my brain did not contain any tumors, Pat Buchanan–shaped or otherwise, failed to improve my mood. I was worried, of course, about my reactions to several of the stimuli. I asked Freedman what would happen if the photograph of David Bradley activated my insula, the region of the brain associated with revulsion. “We’ll reinterpret the findings,” he said. OK, but what if the sight of Golda Meir provoked feelings of sexual arousal? What if the sight of David Ben-Gurion provoked feelings of sexual arousal? What if it turned out that I actually feel disgust at the sight of Bruce Springsteen? To think of all the money I’ve wasted on concert tickets and T-shirts. Most worrisome, of course, was the matter of my wife. Inappropriate activations could have lasting consequences.
The preliminary findings began to arrive a few days later, in a series of e-mails from Iacoboni. “Carter: big amygdala response on both sides! Jeff, do you fear this guy?” Fear might not be the most accurate term, but I worry about him a great deal. I’d recently given his book on Israel a negative review in the Washington Post. Score one for the fMRI. The Sopranos video sequence, he said, activated a “nice response in the fusiform face area, a visual area processing faces, but an especially big ventral striatum response, which is a brain area that gets active for rewarding stimuli. We now know you really like The Sopranos.” I didn’t need a million-dollar machine to tell me that. But it turns out that my ventral striatum likes The Wire even more. Iacoboni and Freedman saw intense movement in my extrastriate visual areas and among my mirror neurons. When we spoke later, Iacoboni explained that the mirror-neuron activity suggests that I “identify with the characters to such a degree” that I’m “almost pretending to do the things they’re doing on the screen, being a homicide detective. When people watch a movie they love, they’re truly living the things taking place on the screen through their mirror neurons.”
Then it was on to the question about my political leanings. Film of Obama, Iacoboni said, showed some mirroring, which suggests empathy, and a small amount of activity in the medial orbito-frontal cortex, which is a source of positive emotion. My brain likes Obama, apparently. My reaction to Bush could not be measured, because I fidgeted each time he appeared on screen. “You can’t lie still when you see Bush,” Iacoboni said. I stayed still for McCain, who stimulated “big mirroring,” indicating empathy, and some amount of ventral-striatum activity, an overall positive response. Images of Hillary stimulated activity in the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex, which is a region of the brain involved in cognitive control. “You may be trying to suppress unwanted emotions,” he said. What those emotions are, he couldn’t say. “There’s a lot of conflict in your mind about Hillary.” Iacoboni told me he needed to do further testing, but that it was safe to say that I feel no particular loyalty to either political party.
Bin Laden, I was pleased to learn, stimulated predictably negative brain activity, but the neuroscientists were flummoxed by my reaction to the sight of Ahmadinejad, who apparently stimulated, in a most dramatic way, my ventral striatum. “Reward!” Iacoboni said. “You’ll have to explain this one.” When I couldn’t, Joshua Freedman, who is a practicing psychiatrist, offered a possible explanation: “Perhaps you believe that the Israelis or the Americans have the situation under control and so you’re anticipating the day that he’s brought down.” He asked me some questions about my view of Jewish history, and then said: “You seem to believe that the Jewish people endure, that people who try to hurt the Jewish people ultimately fail. Therefore, you derive pleasure from believing that Ahmadinejad will also eventually fail. It’s very similar to the experiment with the monkey and the grape. It’s been shown that the monkey feels maximal reward not when he eats the grape but at the moment he’s sure it’s in his possession, ready to eat. That could explain your response to Ahmadinejad.” He paused. “Or it means that you’re a Shiite.”
Iacoboni and Freedman were more definitive on another, less consequential, question. “You’re definitely a Springsteen person,” Iacoboni said. “Your brain is silent on Dylan.” When shown a photograph of Springsteen, I displayed a “big mirroring response in the ventral premotor cortex and inferior frontal gyrus, where mirror neurons are located.” He went on, “You like the Boss a lot, you identify with him, empathize with him, and you are almost pretending internally to sing and play like him.”
And my reaction to David Bradley, the man who signs my paychecks? “You activated a fronto-parietal network in the right cerebral hemisphere that has been implicated in self-recognition in many experiments,” Iacoboni said. Does this mean that I think I’m David Bradley? I asked. There are aspects of David Bradley’s lifestyle I’d like to adopt as my own, of course, but there are also aspects of Jay-Z’s lifestyle I’d like to adopt as my own, and I’m under no illusion that I’m Jay-Z. Freedman said that my reaction to Bradley’s face was similar to what it would be if I’d been looking in a mirror: “You’re seeing approval of yourself when the image appears.” In other words, I’m a narcissist. “From a boss’s perspective, I would be worried if there had been dorso-lateral prefrontal-cortex activity, because that means you would be trying to inhibit your automatic responses.” Which is what happened when I saw a picture of my wife. This had me concerned, but Iacoboni explained: “The dorso-lateral prefrontal-cortex activity means you’re trying to exercise cognitive control, that you’re trying to protect the privacy of your relationship with your wife. I interpret this positively because there’s also medial orbito-frontal cortex activity, which is a region associated with positive emotion.” Iacoboni could not explain one other response to my wife’s photograph: “You have weird auditory-cortex activity, almost like you’re hearing her voice, even though we just showed you her picture without sound.” When I told my wife about this, she asked me how it could be that I hear her when she’s not speaking, but don’t hear her when she is speaking. I said that this was a question well beyond the capacity of neuroscience to answer.
Iacoboni told me that there was one other troubling finding, the one concerning Edie Falco. “Your medial orbito-frontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and ventral striatum are all activated. Wow! What will your wife say?” Apparently my brain—or the part of it I now refer to as my prefrontal Spitzer lobe—finds the sight of Edie Falco somewhat exciting. “Both the medial orbito-frontal cortex and the ventral striatum process reward—sex is, with food, the primary reward—and the anterior cingulate cortex often activates for internal conflict.” He went on, “People watching erotic pictures—and you watching Falco—are aroused but kind of feel guilty for being aroused, or simply feel guilty by being aroused in a brain scanner, with other people looking at their brain responses.” Could it just mean that I think Edie Falco is a great actress? “Yes, sure,” he said, tentatively. “You could say that.”
“The good news for your marriage,” Freedman said, “is that you had a much stronger, more positive overall response to your wife than to Edie Falco. This is just a primitive response. Edie Falco is not who you are.” But I’d certainly pay money to see her in a movie. The commercial implications of this nascent science became quite obvious to me at a certain point in my debriefing. FKF already has a list of corporate clients, Bill Knapp told me. He would not name the companies, but he said they are all interested in measuring the “strength of their brand iconography, where it lives in the brain, what is attracting people to the brand, and what is pushing them away.” So far, 155 volunteers have been tested at UCLA as part of FKF’s work. Knapp said that although both he and Tom Freedman come from the political world, they are not selling their services to campaigns. “The political world would not find this acceptable yet. Ten years from now, it will be as widely used as focus groups and polling.” I tend to think, after my own experience, that there’s a great future for vanity scanning as well—particularly in West L.A. Who wouldn’t want to learn how best to light up their own ventral striatum? Of course, I’ve been left with a series of bothersome questions (not to mention a wife who will no longer watch Sopranos reruns with me). I’m not so much troubled by the question of why Ahmadinejad provoked a positive response in me—I know what I know, despite what my brain says. But what do I do with my Dylan albums? Who should I vote for? And if Edie Falco blurbs Jimmy Carter’s next book, will I have a stroke? What would my brain do if, more plausibly, I were to run into her someday at a movie screening? I posed this last question to Joshua Freedman. “Your amygdala would light up,” as the fight-or-flight reaction was triggered. “But then your dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex would probably come in and say, ‘I don’t want her, I like what I have.’”
AntiWar.com Radio, Jul 19 2008
Gareth Porter, reporter for IPS News, discusses the fight between the “realists” and hawks in the Bush administration, the routine where Rice gets what she wants, but then Cheney makes her efforts meaningless – as in the case of William Burns’ trip to Geneva, George Bush Jr.’s complete inability to lead – thank goodness, crying wolf, the public’s distracted impotence to stop a war they oppose, the relative influence of the Israeli Lobby on Middle East policy in Congress and the White House, Ariel Sharon’s preference for the order of future regime changes, speculation that Cheney may have “learned” a bunch of nonsense about a necessary clash of civilizations from Prinston historian Bernard Lewis after 9/11, the War Party’s former(?) belief in regime change from the air.
Niqnaq 