While Bill 2183 might just be regarded as an attempt to bring the control of all infectious diseases under one statute, the bill does away with a previous amendment that would exclude HIV/AIDS, which is not spread through casual contact, from such control.Senator Marci Francisco’s efforts to restore this exclusion failed, despite arguments that the new bill could leave the door wide open for harassment and discrimination of those living with HIV/AIDS.The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) has been following the bill’s progress — Cody Patton, Executive Director of Positive Directions, a social service agency for HIV patients in Kansas, told AHF that, while advocates think an actual quarantine is inconceivable, the new law “could allow some county employee to use this law to justify their religious beliefs over their professional responsibilities and discriminate against people with HIV/AIDS.”Michael Weinstein, President of AHF, was far more vocal in his opposition to the new bill, stating that:“By including HIV/AIDS in this updated law permitting public health quarantine, Kansas legislators harken back to the earliest, darkest days of the AIDS epidemic when Lyndon LaRouche led an unsuccessful effort in California in 1986 to quarantine people with AIDS through California’s Proposition 64—a ballot measure that was resoundingly rejected by California voters by a 71% to 29% margin.”While there are merits to the new law itself, which would allow firefighters or paramedics to test a victim’s blood for infectious diseases without the currently necessary court order, it nonetheless does away with a 1988 Kansas ban on the quarantine of those living with AIDS.The Kansas state legislature will likely be voting on the new law within the next few weeks. While it remains to be seen whether its passage could make life more difficult for the AIDS/HIV community in the conservative state, Weinstein believes that, at best, it demonstrated poor understanding of HIV and its transmission, which is unlike tuberculosis or other airborne communicable diseases.At worst, he implied that the new bill could simply be an overt attempt at discrimination. For HIV/AIDS advocates, the bill is a chilling reminder of the sort of discriminative practices that existed before widespread efforts to educate the public regarding the communicability of HIV/AIDS. In one of the most infamous episodes for the US, in August of 1988 Eliana Martinez, a mentally handicapped, AIDS-infected girl was ordered by a federal court to attend a Florida school within a transparent partition in response to parents’ fear of the disease. … Read More
Michele Bachmann again tries to repeal Obamacare
Apparently still unfazed by the Supreme Court’s ruling, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., announced today that she introduced legislation into the new Congress to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act.Bachmann tweeted:[embedtweet id="286909118814511104"]According to a report by CBS News in July, the then-33 unsuccessful attempts by House Republicans to repeal the law had used up around 80 hours of time in Congress, or two full work weeks, at a cost of around $48 million. Continue Reading… … Read More
Revisiting the Decision to Go to War in Iraq
It is to be expected that national intelligence services will sometimes fail to identify and discover a threat to the nation in a timely fashion. But when intelligence warns of a threat that isn’t really there, and then nations go to war to meet the phantom threat — that is a serious, confounding and deeply disturbing problem.
But in a nutshell, that is the story of the war in Iraq, in which the U.S. and its allies attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq because of the supposedly imminent threat posed by Saddam’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction — a threat that proved illusory.
A new book published in the United Kingdom called “Failing Intelligence” provides a remarkable account of the British experience of how intelligence on the Iraqi WMD program was shaped and packaged to support the decision to go to war in Iraq. The book’s author, Brian Jones, was the chief specialist in weapons of mass destruction on the UK Defence Intelligence Staff. He was also a skeptic of the stronger claims made about the existence of Iraqi WMD stockpiles. The book documents his mostly unsuccessful attempts to register that skepticism, to moderate the extreme claims made by government officials, and later to hold those officials accountable for their actions.
He provides a detailed first-hand account of how his efforts were consistently deflected in the rush to war, and how intelligence declined into propaganda. It’s a grim but instructive case study in the overlapping failure of intelligence gathering, intelligence production, and intelligence oversight.
The National Security Archive has recently published three richly informative collections of declassified U.S. and British government documents on the lead-up to the Iraq war (including several key documents cited or relied upon by Brian Jones).
“The more deeply the processes of creating the government reports on the alleged Iraqi threat are reconstructed — on both sides of the Atlantic — the more their products are revealed as explicitly aimed at building a basis for war,” wrote John Prados of the National Security Archive and journalist Christopher Ames in an analysis of the documents.
“In the light of a decision process in which no serious consideration was given to any course other than war, the question of whether American and British leaders set out to wage aggressive war has to be squarely faced,” they wrote.
The post Revisiting the Decision to Go to War in Iraq appears on Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy. … Read More
Revisiting the Decision to Go to War in Iraq
It is to be expected that national intelligence services will sometimes fail to identify and discover a threat to the nation in a timely fashion. But when intelligence warns of a threat that isn’t really there, and then nations go to war to meet the phantom threat — that is a serious, confounding and deeply disturbing problem.
But in a nutshell, that is the story of the war in Iraq, in which the U.S. and its allies attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq because of the supposedly imminent threat posed by Saddam’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction — a threat that proved illusory.
A new book published in the United Kingdom called “Failing Intelligence” provides a remarkable account of the British experience of how intelligence on the Iraqi WMD program was shaped and packaged to support the decision to go to war in Iraq. The book’s author, Brian Jones, was the chief specialist in weapons of mass destruction on the UK Defence Intelligence Staff. He was also a skeptic of the stronger claims made about the existence of Iraqi WMD stockpiles. The book documents his mostly unsuccessful attempts to register that skepticism, to moderate the extreme claims made by government officials, and later to hold those officials accountable for their actions.
He provides a detailed first-hand account of how his efforts were consistently deflected in the rush to war, and how intelligence declined into propaganda. It’s a grim but instructive case study in the overlapping failure of intelligence gathering, intelligence production, and intelligence oversight.
The National Security Archive has recently published three richly informative collections of declassified U.S. and British government documents on the lead-up to the Iraq war (including several key documents cited or relied upon by Brian Jones).
“The more deeply the processes of creating the government reports on the alleged Iraqi threat are reconstructed — on both sides of the Atlantic — the more their products are revealed as explicitly aimed at building a basis for war,” wrote John Prados of the National Security Archive and journalist Christopher Ames in an analysis of the documents.
“In the light of a decision process in which no serious consideration was given to any course other than war, the question of whether American and British leaders set out to wage aggressive war has to be squarely faced,” they wrote.
The post Revisiting the Decision to Go to War in Iraq appears on Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy. … Read More
