Secrets of the CIA
By Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
    Monday 24 April 2006

A former CIA officer who was sacked last week after allegedly confessing to leaking secrets has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe, a friend of the operative told NEWSWEEK.The fired official, Mary O. McCarthy, "categorically denies being the source of the leak," one of McCarthy's friends and former colleagues, Rand Beers, said Monday after speaking to McCarthy. Beers said he could not elaborate on this denial and McCarthy herself did not respond to a request for comment left by NEWSWEEK on her home answering machine. A national security advisor to Democratic Party candidate John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, Beers worked as the head of intelligence programs on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff and later served as a top deputy on counter-terrorism for President Bush in 2002 and 2003. McCarthy, a career CIA analyst, initially worked as a deputy to Beers on the NSC and later took over Beer's role as the Clinton NSC's top intelligence expert.

The Virginia Tech provost pledges to create a group to study institutional approaches to race.
By Greg Esposito
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/wb/61690

BLACKSBURG -- A long day of student protest and discussion between Virginia Tech administrators and students upset at what they see as institutionalized racism netted two promises Wednesday from the university.Provost Mark McNamee said the university will form a task force on institutional approaches to race and he will meet one-on-one with every minority tenure-track faculty member."We feel very strongly about the importance of diversity on this campus. It's clear that from what we're hearing this is not being perceived or happening the way people would like," he said.

Students also chanted, "3 percent is not enough" in reference to the number of black professors who are tenured or on a tenure track at Tech. The actual percentage of those professors at Virginia Tech is 3.2 percent, up from 2 percent in 1998. Minority professors in the same categories increased from 10 percent in 1998 to 19 percent in 2005.But the percentage of black students at Tech stalled after initial gains early in the decade and is currently below 5 percent. That's less than half of the percentage of black students at all of the state's four-year public colleges.

Some photos from the piece:

The Collegiate Times covered yesterday's enormous protest outside of Burruss Hall in the wake of the dismissal of Chris Clement

http://www.collegiatetimes.com/print.php?a=6977
April 19th, 2006
Ryan McConnell, News Reporter

University Provost Mark McNamee addresses a crowd of protesters in front of Burruss Hall. The group was demanding answers to a firing of a professor in the political science department. McNamee, along with other members of administration and faculty, spoke in a forum later in the day about the issue.Waving homemade signs and chanting in unison, students and professors of all different backgrounds came to protest the controversial firing of political science professor Christopher Clement, along with what they said was a lack of diversity within the Virginia Tech faculty on the steps of Burruss Hall Wednesday afternoon. A forum was also held as a result of the rally later that evening, giving concerned members of the community a chance to have questions answered by an administrative panel.

One protestor, Nicholas Kiersey, a PhD student in Environmental Design & Planning, was particularly outspoken at the event. “Virginia Tech has the lowest percentage of faculty of color in the South with only 3 percent. Virginia Tech is failing its commitment to diversity, and failing to live up to its standards, as there are no mechanisms to sustain diversity,” Kiersey, who is white, said. “I'm very pessimistic about how the university will respond. I just see language, not action, and if the provost really believes what he's saying, then quite frankly I think he's living in a dream world.”

Christopher Clement's wife, April Mayes, who is a professor in Africana Studies and will also be leaving at the end of the semester, spoke at the forum, passionately defending her husband to the point of breaking down at the microphone. “What was demanded of Christopher was much more than what was ever demanded of other professors at that stage of his career … How can the administration get rid of a professor who has united all these different kinds of people?” Mayes brought to light that her husband had been selected to head the Diversity Committee within the Political Science department - but before he could assume this leadership position, the department decided to disband the committee.

Students Protest Small Percentage of Minority Faculty
Wednesday April 19, 2006 8:28pm

http://www.wset.com/news/stories/0406/320756.html

Blacksburg, VA - Students say it’s been a problem for years on the campus of Virginia Tech and Wednesday they came out in large numbers to get their message heard.  The problem, students say, is a lack of support among minority faculty members. They say not enough minorities are being hired and faculty who are working are being discriminated against.  More than 100 students along with some faculty members marched to Burrus Hall chanting the phrase "three percent is not enough." Students say only three percent of the more than 1,300 faculty members are African-American.  This protest comes after the departure of a black professor, Christopher Clement, who says he was criticized by other faculty members for being an activist. Officials at Virginia Tech say while 3 and a half percent of the faculty is African-American, 19 percent of the faculty represent a minority background.  Students say that's not enough.

WDBJ 7 has video footage of today's large student protest outside Burruss Hall and the tense dialogue with Provost McNamee that ensued.

WDBJ 7: Tech students protest today in wake of professor's dismissal
http://www.wdbj7.com/Global/story.asp?S=4787439

More than 100 protesters came out at Virginia Tech today. They say Tech is not doing enough to hire minority teachers.Students of many races and ethnic groups walked a path through campus chanting and holding up signs. This after Political Science Professor Chris Clement was derailed from his tenure track.Clement says he was fired, but the University says the five-year veteran is still employed there. Clement remained in the background, but was on hand as students and other community members took their concerns to administrators.Virginia Tech administrators say they can't speak specifically about Clement's personnel issues. But a university spokesman says every teacher must demonstrate scholarship, service and an ability to reach students.

More on the Chris Clement firing. This time by Greg Esposito in the Roanoke Times.
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/wb/61522

BLACKSBURG -- A popular Virginia Tech professor known for his activism will leave one final demonstration in his wake today as students protest his departure.Christopher Clement, a black political science professor from Jamaica, received a negative vote last week in the third-year review of his six-year tenure process.About 40 students and a few faculty gathered in Squires Student Center on Monday night to discuss plans to make the administration aware of their concerns about Clement's departure and what they feel are greater university-wide issues.

Here is some coverage from the CT on Monday's meeting about Chris Clement's firing.

http://www.collegiatetimes.com/print.php?a=6943
April 18th, 2006
Michael Sutphin, Senior Reporter

In any business, decisions to hire or fire an employee are often controversial. And the business of higher education is no different.A coalition of about 50 Virginia Tech students made initial plans for a protest last night. Sparked by recent news about the departure of political science professor Chris Clement, students amassed to plan a Wednesday afternoon protest for what they described as institutional racism and underhanded hiring policies within the Department of Political Science.“I think we need to stress that this is not just about Chris Clement,” said Greg Sagstetter, senior philosophy and political science major and next year’s undergraduate representative to the Board of Visitors. “This is about institutional and systemic discrimination.”

By Andreas Umland
http://hnn.us/articles/23821.html#

One of the worrying results of the March 2006 elections to the Ukrainian parliament, Verkhovna Rada, was that the so-called “Popular Opposition” bloc led by the head of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Natal’ya Mikhailovna Vitrenko (b. 1951), managed to come close to passing the 3% barrier (with 2.93% of the official turnout) and thus almost entered the Rada. Vitrenko is the premier representative of radical anti-Westernism in Ukraine; she has also made herself known with her frequent invectives against Ukrainian politicians whom she does not hesitate to call “natsisty” (Nazis). Both of these circumstances are ironic in as far as Vitrenko has been for some time officially allied to a well-known Russian propagator of the West’s worst invention: fascism.

http://www.rainreview.net/rain-040103.html
Remembering Resistance: A Review of Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004)
By Fiona Jeffries
The Rain 4:1 (Winter 2006): 3

EXCERPT:

“Whatever their weaknesses,” wrote Protestant leader Martin Luther in the mid-sixteenth century amidst the European Witch-Hunts, “women possess one virtue that cancels them all: they have a womb and they can give birth.” Luther’s comments were far from shocking at the time. Rather they echoed a powerful current of thought that linked population growth to national wealth. So argues Silvia Federici in her impressive book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, that this connection between church and the state power and the production of labour power in early capitalism launched the Witch-Hunts that peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and the Americas. Federici’s book is a crucial contribution to the long history of resistance to the violence of the global capitalist enclosures. The long-time anti-empire, feminist activist and scholar situates the Witch-Hunts within a history of five centuries of capitalist globalization. The Witch-Hunts, her book argues, were as foundational to the production of the modern proletariat and global capitalism as the expropriation of the European peasantry, the genocidal campaigns of colonization in the Americas and the African slave trade. Caliban presents a sprawling global history, not of nations but of a collection of places connected through an historical web of exploitation and resistance. Caliban, the anti-colonial rebel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, she explains, is a symbol of the world proletariat and proletarian body as a site of resistance to capitalism. The figure of the witch at the centre of this story is an embodiment of a world that had to be destroyed for capitalism to flourish. The book sets out to answer several core questions: What fears prompted this concerted policy of genocide? Why was such savage violence asserted? And why were women its principal targets?

For more, read: http://www.rainreview.net/rain-040103.html

http://www.collegiatetimes.com/news/3/ARTICLE/6869/2006-04-11.html
Empowered widow exposes harsh CIA interrogation tactics
April 11th, 2006
Victoria Wilson, Staff Writer

Torgersen 2150 was packed with students, faculty members and Blacksburg residents Friday night. A petite woman with brown, flipped out hair and bright blue eyes approached the podium. Her delicate posture and enthusiastic smile made the room seem relaxing. She wasn’t speaking about cozy issues.

Instead, Jennifer K. Harbury, a Harvard-educated lawyer, spoke for two hours about human rights and interrogation techniques employed by the CIA and addressed in her most recent book, "Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture."

Harbury’s husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, was a Mayan resistance leader who was captured, tortured and eventually killed by military officials in Guatemala during the early 1990s. At the time of his imprisonment, officials told Harbury that her husband died in combat. However, she later discovered that the Guatemalan army actually faked his death. For over two years, Velasquez was tortured and held in custody along with 350 other prisoners. Eventually he was thrown out of a helicopter to his death, she said. Harbury discovered these details after she found the body of an 18-year-old man, who was certainly not Velasquez, in her husband’s grave. She was later informed that the army killed the anonymous man to hide her husband’s existence.

After realizing the reality of the situation, Harbury went on a mission to find out more. She fought for information from the State Department to the United Nations. She went on hunger strikes, wrote to Congress and did anything in hopes of uncovering intelligence. In 1995, Sen. Robert Torricelli told Harbury someone hired by the CIA killed her husband. She said the State Department confirmed that Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, who was paid by the CIA to torture prisoners in Guatemala, did in fact kill Velasquez.

Harbury then went on to explain some of the interrogation techniques used on her husband and other prisoners in Guatemala and around the world.

Harbury discussed "water boarding," which she claims is a technique the CIA still practices. She said that water boarding is performed by holding a prisoner under water until they are almost dead, then reviving them using CPR. She explained other techniques, such as dog attacks and electrical shock.

Harbury then spoke about friends of hers who have been tortured. She talked about a young American nun she knows who was gang-raped, endured 112 cigarette burns, and various other tortures. Harbury said the woman was only released from imprisonment because an American intelligence worker realized she was an American.

Harbury then explained why she feels interrogating prisoners by means of torture is usually ineffective. She explained she believes the phrase "there are just a few bad apples … that are out of hand" is simply a dodge to the problem. She also expressed her belief that the CIA gets around torture restrictions by calling the methods "cruel and degrading, but not torture." Finally, she discussed the CIA’s ticking-bomb scenario and explained that she doesn’t think that using torture techniques will result in intelligence that will prevent a crisis from occurring. After her speech, Harbury addressed students’ questions. When asked about media coverage of torture in the United States, she responded with "There’s been a complete shutdown of our mainstream press." She continued, "We are not being told the truth … it’s being heavily censored."

When asked by a student about why she thinks the CIA still uses torture techniques if they aren’t effective, Harbury replied, "I think it’s the people who have never been to war that think (torture) is effective." She added, "Everyone is still looking for the perfect truth serum, but there isn’t one."

Christopher Clement, an assistant professor in the department of political science, organized the event with help from many organizations, including the International Club and Cooper House. "I saw (Harbury’s) latest book and saw her on C-Span," he said. "I wanted a speaker who would discuss torture, and she was an ideal choice."

Nicholas Kiersey is a VT graduate student who attended the speech. He has been campaigning to stop CIA recruitment on campus and thought that Harbury’s visit shed light on what he feels are important issues. "I think (Harbury) is a great speaker and was so surprised to see that so many students showed up to listen to her on a Friday night," said Kiersey. "I think it shows that she’s a quality speaker that’s well-known and speaking about a very important topic that students care about."

This is my first RapidWeaver-powered blog entry. My old iBlog site is now discontinued. All future NervousFishblog entries will be here instead.