Bush pushes spending on no-condom education

By Katherine Stapp

New York City , New York, Oct 18. (IPS) -- Thousands of US students are being taught that chastity is the only way to avoid pregnancy or HIV/AIDS, although whether these abstinence-only programs really work is highly questionable, activists say.

Public school programs teaching that “no sex is safe sex’’ have been around since 1996, when the Welfare Reform Act provided half a billion dollars for abstinence education. Teachers at schools with abstinence grants are strictly forbidden from answering questions about birth control or condom use.

“We don’t talk about HIV/AIDS prevention except to say ‘remain abstinent until marriage and once married, be monogamous with your spouse’,’’ a teacher in Texas recently told Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Now, the administration of President George W. Bush is trying to hike spending on abstinence programs by one-third, to $135 million a year. The move follows through on a campaign promise Bush made in 1999 to “elevate abstinence education from an afterthought to an urgent goal.”

Critics of abstinence-only education say they do not oppose urging teens to wait to have sex. But they believe it is critical that young people who do become sexually active know how to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy or disease. It is hardly an academic debate.

In the US last year 43 percent of girls and 49 percent of boys in high school had had sex at least once, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Young people ages 13-24 currently account for about 13 percent of all new HIV cases. Girls younger than 20 years old are the hardest hit, making up 61 percent of new youth infections, the CDC says.

“The Bush administration wants to spend millions more dollars on abstinence-only programs that put teenagers at higher risk for HIV,’’ said Rebecca Schleifer, a HRW researcher who issued a report this month on abstinence education in Texas.

Many doctors and public health experts are also sceptical about the strategy. The American Medical Association, the Office of National AIDS Policy, and the National Institutes of Health all recommend sex and HIV/AIDS education that includes discussion of condoms and other birth control methods.

Parents also appear to support comprehensive sex education in schools, and most are unaware that their children are not getting it, said Tamara Kreinin, president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), a New York group that opposes more funding for abstinence-only programs.

SIECUS released a nationwide poll this month showing that 81 percent of lower-income parents -- African American, Hispanic and white -- support sex education programs that teach young people about all aspects of sex and sexuality. The finding mirrors those of previous surveys by ABC and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“This poll demonstrates that the proliferation of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs across the nation is completely out of step with the parents and guardians of our nation’s most vulnerable young people,’’ said Kreinin.

Ninety-six percent of respondents of the SIECUS poll said it was important to talk to their children not just about basic reproductive facts, but about relationships and becoming sexually active, although many had not yet done so. “The results of this poll make it clear that parents and guardians may need more assistance than they think,’’ Kreinin added.

Critics of abstinence-only programs also complain that some of them actively promote misinformation about condoms -- a scientifically proven way to prevent HIV transmission.

In Texas, which has the fourth largest population in the United States of people living with HIV/AIDS, taxpayer money is being used to finance a “Truth for Youth” television and radio ad campaign suggesting that parents who tell their children to use condoms may be putting their lives at risk.

“For years, you’ve heard about safe sex,’’ the spot says. “The truth is that condoms will not protect people from many sexually transmitted diseases.’’

HRW says another publication disseminated to teenagers suggests that condoms may “seem’’ to prevent HIV, but HIV’s “low infectivity,” rather than condom use explains some of that purported effectiveness.

Sally Fleming, a Texas schoolteacher who feels the abstinence-only restrictions have left her “in a bad situation’’, told HRW: “Before McCAP [the local abstinence project], I could say, ‘if you’re not having sex, that’s great. If you are, you need to be careful and use condoms.’ Boy, that went out the window.’’

“As a health teacher, I don’t believe in abstinence-until-marriage education, but I worry about breaking the rules,’’ she added.

The programs also stigmatize gay and lesbian teenagers, critics say, because they claim that sex outside of marriage “is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

Some programs also contain explicit religious messages, which would preclude them from receiving federal funds. The American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued the state of Louisiana to block state funding of abstinence projects that included staging plays with Jesus as a character featuring a chastity curriculum called “God’s Gift of Life.”

Hawks win war between propaganda, intelligence

Analysis by Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Oct. 23 (IPS)— When national security analysts looked at the poll data on Americans’ perceptions linking the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein earlier this month, they were startled.

Two-thirds of the 1,513 respondents queried by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press said they believe that “Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks” on New York and the Pentagon. The number is slightly higher than the 62 percent who said they support taking military action “to end Saddam Hussein’s rule.”

“The Pew results indicate that the imputation of an Iraq-9/11 link strongly resonates with a majority of Americans,” noted Lee Feinstein, a senior fellow at the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which co-commissioned the study.

This is despite the fact that, “most analysts inside and outside government have disputed the suggestion of a direct link, and earlier suggestions by administration officials asserting such a link have been muted,” Feinstein said.

Indeed, despite strong pressure from the administration of President George W. Bush — so strong that critics charge that it amounts to an effort to “politicize” intelligence — US spy agencies appear unanimous that evidence linking Baghdad with the Sept. 11 attacks, or any attacks against western targets since 1993, is simply nonexistent.

So, apart from the fact that Saddam Hussein has been systematically demonized in the US media since his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, where does this notion come from?

The only piece of evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and the attacks was an account that first surfaced within nine days of the attacks.

According to early press reports, the leader of the 19 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, met in Prague — between Apr. 8 and Apr. 11, 2001 — with an alleged Iraqi spy, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, who was expelled by the Czech authorities shortly afterward.

In October, senior Czech officials, notably Interior Minister Stanislav Gross and later Prime Minister Milos Zeman, confirmed that such a meeting had taken place.

Those confirmations were seized on as pure gold by the hawks in the administration and the neo-conservative opinion-shapers outside it who have played such an important role in mobilizing public support for war against Iraq.

“The undisputed fact connecting Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks is this,” wrote New York Times columnist William Safire in November. “Mohammed Atta, who died at the controls of an airliner-missile, flew from Florida to Prague to meet on April 8 of this year with Ahmed Ani, the Iraqi consul.”

Although US intelligence officials quietly insisted that they had no evidence of such a meeting, Safire, who has since written half a dozen articles defending the Czech report, and his fellow hawks clearly understood that a link between Sept. 11 and Baghdad would provide the cassus belli (cause for war) against Iraq.

“A Must Meeting for the Attack-Iraq Crowd,” noted the headline by Washington Post columnist Robert Novak in May.

Now, however, it appears that no such meeting took place.

Czech officials told western correspondents in Prague last weekend that President Vaclav Havel advised the White House earlier this year to disregard the earlier Czech report because both he and senior intelligence officials considered it unreliable.

The Bush administration has offered no substantive reaction to the repudiation of the Czech report carried on the front page of the New York Times on Monday.

The administration has recently insisted that it has evidence of other links between Baghdad and al-Qaida, but those other supposed connections do not tie Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Nonetheless, even if the allegation of the meeting is now dropped, it appears that it has served its purpose in linking Hussein with Sept. 11 in the public mind.

In the year since the attacks, the alleged Prague meeting was cited more than 530 times in articles that appeared in major US newspapers since the attacks. Perhaps more important, due to the fact most Americans get their world news from television, the story was cited another 230 times on network news and in talk shows over the same period.

The meeting became a staple of the neo-conservative media offensive over the last year.

It has been repeatedly stated as fact on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, and in coverage by right-wing magazines, notably The Weekly Standard and The National Review.

Besides Safire, the most outspoken proponents of the link have featured former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey, Washington Post columnists Michael Kelly and James Hoagland, and the head of the Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney.

Also in this group is the chairman of the Pentagon’s own Defense Policy Board (DPB), Richard Perle, who sent Woolsey to Europe within 10 days of the attacks to seek out evidence, and DPB member Kenneth Adelman.

The failure of the CIA and the FBI to confirm the meeting has provoked undisguised contempt from the believers, who from the outset charged that the agencies were inept, lazy, or politically disinclined to “connect the dots.”

Thus, in May, Woolsey complained that the doubters were talking anonymously. “Why? They have their policy agenda, which is to limit the president’s options,” he charged.

Asked just two weeks ago in a Cable News Network interview to respond to CIA and FBI insistence that they have never seen corroborating evidence about the Prague link, Perle simply responded, “They’re wrong.”

Perle, in Prague for a Trilateral Commission meeting last weekend, was informed personally that Czech intelligence no longer believes the Atta meeting took place, according to United Press International.

While Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted from the outset that he had seen no evidence of the Prague meeting, the hawks around Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld actively pushed the theory behind the scenes.

Rumsfeld and Cheney have been more circumspect, at least in public.

Asked by Novak in May whether he believed Atta met with al-Ani in Prague, Rumsfeld replied, “I don’t know whether he did or didn’t,” then changed the subject to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Asked a similar question a month ago, Cheney, reportedly particularly frustrated by the intelligence agencies’ failure to prove the link, was positively coy. “Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I’m not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can’t say that,” he said.

“We’ve seen in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohammed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions, and on at least one occasion we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center,” he added.

“The debates about, you know, was he there or wasn’t he there, again, it’s the intelligence business,” Cheney said.

The New York Times account does not make clear when Havel informed the White House of the results of his own investigation into the matter.

Nation Briefs

Where is Mahar Arar?

Monia Mazigh has no idea what happened to her husband, Mahar Arar, after US officials detained him and shipped him off to Syria. It has been 21 days since she has spoken with him, and both the Canadian and Syrian governments claim to have no knowledge whatsoever of his whereabouts.

On Sept. 26, Arar -- who holds dual Syrian/Candian citizenship -- departed Tunis, where he was vacationing with his family, on a flight to Montreal. He was detained by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service while on a stopover in New York. His family alleges that he was subjected to nine hours of interrogation without a lawyer before being jailed at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center. On Oct. 3, six days after he was scheduled to land in Montreal, Arar made a desperate and emotional phone call to his mother-in-law telling her that he had been jailed and needed help.

The family contacted Amal Oummih, an immigration lawyer based in New York. On her Oct. 5 visit with Arar, Oummih found that he was confused, frightened, and emotional. He spent much of the visit sobbing uncontrollably, she said.

Officials at the Department of Foreign Affairs revealed Oct. 17 that Arar, 32, was deported to Syria on Oct. 7 or 8 from Kennedy Airport in New York. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham admitted that Canada had no idea where Arar was being held, and in a statement the same day, Syrian Ambassador Ahmad Arnous denied any knowledge of Arar’s whereabouts.

Arar has not set foot on Syrian soil in 16 years. He avoided compulsory military service before leaving Syria for Canada as a teenager, which could land him in prison there, according to his wife. (The Ottowa Citizen, with additional information from Citizen News Services)

‘Other’ policy hits target

Beginning last month, on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on Washington, DC, and New York City, the US established a third line for people to stand in at ports of entry: “other.” Where once the lines were simply “citizen” and “non-citizen,” there is now this new line for travelers to ponder: who is this “other”?

At the “other” line, visitors must be photographed and fingerprinted before entering the US. The “other” line was established for Muslim men ages 16-45 who are from a list of 26 countries. These “other” men are deemed “security risks” by the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System and are deemed target aliens to be monitored.

The new policy to target Muslim men requires that visas not be issued to these men until their application is approved by officials in Washington, DC. Though the visa process is supposed to take 30 days, this new process of individually handling each application drags on much longer.

Recently, Iowa State University reported that its physics department lost one third of its incoming graduate students because of related visa matters. Many other campuses have reported a similar situation. (The Alarm)

Once-obscure law has become key part of ‘anti-terror’ strategy

Before Sept. 11, 2001, a 1996 federal law that barred providing “material support” to terrorist groups was so obscure it had been used only three times, and never against anyone accused of having ties to al-Qaida.

But in recent weeks, US prosecutors have transformed the statute into a cornerstone of their domestic war on suspected terrorists, alleging that members of “sleeper cells” from Lackawanna, NY, to Seattle had provided, or attempted to provide, resources to the al-Qaida network.

US authorities say the law is particularly useful in combating the domestic terrorist threat, but many defense attorneys and civil liberties advocates contend the law is worded so broadly that even unknowing contributions to groups the government labels terrorists can be prosecuted. Two federal judges in Los Angeles, in separate cases, have declared all or parts of the law unconstitutional.

David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has participated in a legal challenge to the statute, maintains that the material-support ban is dangerously vague and could easily be used against people engaged in lawful activity.

“This law is so broad it would make it a crime for a Quaker to send a book on Ghandi’s theory of nonviolence to the leader of a terrorist group,” Cole said. “It essentially resurrects the guilt-by-association philosophy of the McCarthy era.”

The law, included in the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty act and strengthened after Sept. 11, makes it a crime to provide almost anything of value – including training, money, or personnel – to groups labeled terrorist organizations by the State Department. The charge carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison. It was first used in the case against John Walker Lindh, the American who eventually pleaded guilty to fighting alongside Taliban forces in Afghanistan. (Washington Post)

Report: corporate scandals cost more than $200 billion

Recent corporate scandals have cost Americans more than $200 billion in lost investment savings, jobs, pension losses and tax revenue, according to a report released Oct.17.

The report issued by the No More Enrons coalition, partially funded by consumer groups and labor unions, said losses from 401(k) investment accounts alone totaled $175 billion and public pension funds nationwide lost at least $6.4 billion as the stock market plummeted amid a crisis of investor confidence.

It is estimated that more than a million workers lost their jobs at affected companies, while company executives cashed out billions of dollars of their stock.

Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill suggested that the high-flung 1990’s, in which the stock market soared, allowed some corporate leaders to “stray” from their values.

The new report put together data from government and other public sources to detail the impact of accounting failures at many corporations. The $200 billion total is “an extremely conservative estimate,” said Mike Lux, president of American Family Voices, part of the No More Enrons coalition.

The report identified nearly $13 billion in lost federal tax revenue from companies with questionable accounting practices underreporting their profits to the IRS, but Lux said the amount was likely to be higher. (AP)

Researchers
stymied by block
on government documents

Some scientists are running into a major post-Sept. 11 stumbling block: Federal restrictions have eliminated access to information vital to their studies.

The government has cut internet links, stripped information from agency web sites and even required federal librarians to destroy a CD-ROM on public water supplies. Researchers worry that the rush to protect national security will hurt their efforts and the public.

In March, the White House provided government agencies with a guide that, according to associate director for policy with the federal Information Security Oversight Office Laura Kimberly, was intended to remind agencies to examine security issues regarding government documents. At issue were decisions about whether or not to declassify information.

The result, say experts, has been an information clampdown.

For example, University of Michigan researchers lost access to an Environmental Protection Agency database with information vital to their three-year study of hazardous waste facilities.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ project on government secrecy, says unclassified technical reports have been yanked from the Los Alamos National Laboratory web site.

The government watchdog group OMB Watch has sent Freedom of Information Act requests to federal agencies asking what information was removed from web sites because of the Sept. 11 attacks. (AP)

Bush protested
in Atlanta

President Bush visited Atlanta Oct. 17 as part of his ongoing fundraising efforts around the country. He was greeted by between 400 and 500 protesters in front of the downtown Atlanta hotel where he was addressing the Republican Party event.

Student groups, faith-based groups, various political and activist organizations, and many concerned citizens not affiliated with any group took part in the demonstration. People voiced concerns over Bush’s policies on issues ranging from war on Iraq to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.

Protesters lined both sides of the street in front of the hotel and chanted slogans while receiving honks of support from passing motorists. The protesters then embarked on a spontaneous and unpermitted march during which people opted to take the streets instead of using the sidewalks. The march ended a couple of miles away at the CNN Center with a short rally and the reading of the “Not In Our Name” pledge of resistance. (Atlanta Indymedia)