March-April 2004 Archived Blogs

		w April 23, 2004
		Pentagon Ban on Pictures of Dead Troops Is Broken By BILL CARTER The Pentagon's ban on making images of dead soldiers' homecomings at military bases public was briefly relaxed yesterday, as hundreds of photographs of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base were released on the Internet by a Web site dedicated to combating government secrecy. The Web site, the Memory Hole (www.thememoryhole.org), had filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year, seeking any pictures of coffins arriving from Iraq at the Dover base in Delaware, the destination for most of the bodies. The Pentagon yesterday labeled the Air Force Air Mobility Command's decision to grant the request a mistake, but news organizations quickly used a selection of the 361 images taken by Defense Department photographers. Read More
		w March 17, 2004
		May I See Your ID? By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Someday we'll look back with shame at the infringements of civil liberties in the last few years. There's been a broad pattern of injustice to individuals (mostly Muslims) in the name of protecting security for the rest of us. Think of the detention of more than 1,200 Muslim immigrants in the U.S., the jailing of children in an extralegal zone in Guantánamo, and the unending imprisonment, without access to lawyers, of "enemy combatants," even when they are American citizens. But that ground has been well poked over. For me, the tougher question is whether there are some areas where we should be more aggressive about sacrificing our liberties. In fact, I think there are two where we could significantly increase our security with a negligible cost in freedom. Read More
		w March 4, 2004
		How Tiny Swiss Cellphone Chips Helped Track Global Terror Web By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and DESMOND BUTLER The terrorism investigation code-named Mont Blanc began almost by accident in April 2002, when authorities intercepted a cellphone call that lasted less than a minute and involved not a single word of conversation. Investigators, suspicious that the call was a signal between terrorists, followed the trail first to one terror suspect, then to others, and eventually to terror cells on three continents. What tied them together was a computer chip smaller than a fingernail. But before the investigation wound down in recent weeks, its global net caught dozens of suspected Qaeda members and disrupted at least three planned attacks in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, according to counterterrorism and intelligence officials in Europe and the United States.... Investigators said they believed that the chips, made by Swisscom of Switzerland, were popular with terrorists because they could buy the chips without giving their names. "They thought these phones protected their anonymity, but they didn't," said a senior intelligence official based in Europe. Even without personal information, the authorities were able to conduct routine monitoring of phone conversations. Read More