A Montreal woman says Canadian border agents made her strip to see if she had a pink tattoo on her buttocks after mixing her up with an alleged criminal.

Sylvie Menard, who has no history of trouble with the law, returned home from a relaxing Mexico vacation in April to a stressful and humiliating airport encounter with authorities.

Menard, manager of a Montreal wine business, is still seeking an explanation as to why she was handcuffed and locked up, then told to undress.

“They don’t have enough information to identify who’s a criminal and who isn’t,” she said in an interview. “And that’s the big problem.”

Dominique McNeely, a spokesman for the Canada Border Services Agency, said he could not discuss details of the case.

But he said false matches do happen.

“We have to perform these checks to be absolutely sure,” McNeely said. “We can’t let someone enter the country unless we’re absolutely certain about their identity.”

Menard, 43, said that after being questioned by a customs official she was pulled aside for secondary screening. Her luggage was swabbed for drug residue, and her name was run through a computer.

Next a border officer read out Menard’s rights, handcuffed her and led her to a cell.

She began to wonder if someone had slipped drugs into her bag.

“I was really stressed,” she said. “I thought maybe somebody put something in my luggage.”

As far as Menard can tell, her relatively common name matched that of a woman with the same birth date who was sought by police.

She tried to explain that they had the wrong person, but police were summoned. Menard says it felt like a bad dream. Meantime, her boyfriend was waiting for her in the arrivals area.

Menard was astounded at what came next. A female border officer asked her to pull down her pants and expose her buttocks to see if she had a distinguishing mark – a large pink tattoo.

Nothing was there but the officer later returned and made her disrobe again to check whether the tattoo had been removed with a laser.

“I showed them twice that there was no pink tattoo there, because they came back to see if it was erased.”

McNeely said travellers are told they have a right to speak with a supervisor before being subjected to an invasive search.

But that wasn’t clear to Menard.

Further police computer checks apparently turned up a physical description that showed the other Sylvie Menard was indeed a different person.

Menard says a police officer suggested she change her name to avoid future confusion.

“That was the solution.”

McNeely confirmed that name and birth date are the key personal identifiers matched against agency databases.

He said almost 100 million people enter Canada annually, and the number of false matches is relatively small. Most problems are cleared up quickly, he added.

McNeely also acknowledged that a police agency that has flagged somebody may be called to verify their identity.

Menard says there must be an easier way, given that she was carrying a passport, driver’s licence and health card.

“They should have enough computer information to verify more than the birth date and the name. It’s too basic.”

Menard has lodged a complaint with the police watchdog.

She has also filed a grievance with the border agency. But she initially had trouble figuring out where to go.

“I went on their website. I couldn’t find any link to complain, any email, anything.”

McNeely said people can call a 1-800 number to file a grievance with the agency’s border information service. If dissatisfied with the response, they can complain to Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan or their MP.

The means of complaining should be “readily accessible,” said Wesley Wark, a security specialist at the University of Toronto who sits on an advisory committee that provides guidance to the border agency.

“Maybe it shows that there are still problems to be worked out.”

Source: The Canadian Press

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The Department of Defense is training all of its personnel in its current Antiterrorism and Force Protection Annual Refresher Training Course that political protest is “low-level terrorism.”

The Training introduction reads as follows:

“Anti-terrorism (AT) and Force Protection (FP) are two facets of the Department of Defense (DoD) Mission Assurance Program. It is DoD policy, as found in DoDI 2000.16, that the DoD Components and the DoD elements and personnel shall be protected from terrorist acts through a high pirority, comprehensive, AT program. The DoD’s AT program shall be all encompassing using an integrated systems approach.”

The first question of the Terrorism Threat Factors, “Knowledge Check 1” section reads as follows:

Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?

Select the correct answer and then click Check Your Answer.

O   Attacking the Pentagon

O   IEDs

O   Hate crimes against racial groups

O   Protests

***

The “correct” answer is Protests.

A copy of this can be found on the last two pages of this pdf.

The ACLU learned of this training and on June 10, 2009 sent a letter to the Gail McGinn, Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, objecting to their training all DoD personnel that the exercise of First Amendment rights constitutes “low-level terrorism.”

For those who have worried about a trend – evident, for example, in the USA PATRIOT Act, the universal and ongoing government surveillance of all of Americans’ electronic communications that began in February of 2001 (seven months before 9/11), the global war on a tactic (terrorism), therefore making this war unending, the unprecedented pre-emptive arrests of protestors at the 2008 Republican National Convention with those protesters being charged as “domestic terrorists,” the justifications for torture, pre-emptive wars of aggression, ongoing occupations, American gulags such as Bagram, suspension of habeas corpus, and “prolonged detention” for acts someone might commit, not what they have done, FBI et al infiltration of protest groups and the government’s acknowledged use of undercover agents (agents provocateurs) in said infiltration, thus giving the government under the rubric of fighting domestic terrorism unrestrained and unsupervisable power to suppress legitimate political activities, the unleashing and justifications for Christian fascists to murder those they do not like (such as the assassination of Dr. George Tiller and the killing at the Holocaust Museum a few days ago) – this news adds further fuel to the fire.

These are not items from some famously vilified, non-US dictatorial regime. These are items from the good ole USA, land of the free and home of the brave.

Just how brave are we now? How free are we still? Are we brave enough to be “winter soldiers” and stand up against these fascist moves? Or will we go down in history in infamy, the way the “Good Germans” of the 1930s and 1940s did?

Satellite photo of one of the detention camps built by Halliburton’s subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root. This one’s in Wyoming.

Source: Salon

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Accused al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed complained that interrogators tortured lies out of him, though he proudly took credit for more than two dozen other terror plots, according to newly released sections of government transcripts.

”I make up stories,” Mohammed said at one point in his 2007 hearing at Guantánamo Bay.

In broken English, he described an interrogation in which he was asked the location of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

”Where is he? I don’t know,” Mohammed said. ‘Then he torture me. Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area or this is al Qaeda which I don’t know him.’ I said no, they torture me.”

Yet at the same military tribunal hearing, Mohammed ticked off a list of 29 terror plots in which he took part.

The transcripts were released as part of a lawsuit in which the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking documents and details of the government’s terror detainee programs.

Previous accounts of the military tribunal hearings had been made public, but the Obama administration went back and reviewed the still-secret sections and determined that more portions could be released.

Most of the new material centers around the detainees’ claims of abuse during interrogations while being held overseas in CIA custody.

One detainee, Abu Zubaydah, told the tribunal that after months “of suffering and torture, physically and mentally, they did not care about my injuries.”

Zubaydah was the first detainee subjected to Bush administration-approved harsh interrogation techniques, which included a simulated form of drowning known as waterboarding, slamming the suspect into walls and prolonged period of nudity.

Zubaydah claimed in the hearing that he “nearly died four times.”

”After a few months went by, during which I almost lost my mind and my life, they made sure I didn’t die,” Zubaydah said.

He claimed that after many months of such treatment, authorities concluded he was not the No. 3 person in al Qaeda as they had long believed.

Source: Miami Herald

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Scientists have used genetic engineering to tame one of the most deadly food poisoning microbes and turn it into a potential new way of giving patients medicine and vaccines in pills rather than injections.

Colin Pouton and colleagues note that patients by far prefer pills and capsules to the discomfort and inconvenience of injections. But many medicines and vaccines cannot be given by mouth because they would be destroyed by stomach acid without being absorbed into the bloodstream. One promising approach is to use live bacteria, which can survive those harsh conditions and pass easily from the GI tract into the blood.

The scientists describe development of a new strain of Listeria monocytogenes, bacteria that normally cause food poisoning, but which have been genetically engineered to be harmless. Instead of causing disease, the new microbes can be loaded with medicine or vaccine, and deliver that beneficial cargo by “infecting” cells.

After entering cells, the bacteria burst and die, leading to Pouton’s term “suicidal strain” for the microbes. The researchers demonstrated that engineered bacteria containing a test protein could successfully penetrate a group of intestinal cells grown in the lab and deliver the protein inside the cells while leaving the cells unharmed. The findings suggest that the approach could potentially work in humans, the researchers say.

Source: Science Daily

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