Righting Wrongs: Pressure builds to close Guantanamo

Published in the Portland Phoenix

After years of delay, nearly 150 inmates still held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba may have improved hopes of getting released before they die. Human-rights groups are calling for the release process to accelerate, expressing gratitude that the government has made even a little bit of progress, while demanding prosecution of those who approved the use of torture against the detainees held at Guantanamo.

This month marks 12 years since the first inmates arrived there, and nearly five years since President Barack Obama signed an executive order calling for its closure. But the prison is still operating, holding people who were captured overseas and were at one time suspected of some sort of terrorist intention or action against the United States.

“Most of the people at Guantanamo have never been charged, let alone convicted, with any crime,” says Zeke Johnson, director of the security and human rights program at Amnesty International’s US headquarters in New York.

Of the 155 inmates still there, 77 have been cleared by US authorities for release — in some cases the clearance happened many years ago  — but have not yet been transferred out of the camp. Most of those are Yemenis whose home country is very unstable, which leads US officials to fear they would return to terrorist activities if they were sent there.

Another American fear has also delayed releases: the cruelly ironic concern that, if released, some of the inmates would be treated inhumanely upon their return home. So, the US rationale has been that it is somehow better to keep them in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day for years on end than to potentially risk their safety elsewhere.

In March 2011, Obama set up a Periodic Review Board that was to look at the cases of inmates who had not been previously cleared for release; that board issued its first decision last week, declaring that a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden was no longer a threat to the United States, and could therefore be released  — just as soon as a suitable country was found to accept him. Unfortunately, the man, Mahmoud Abd Al Aziz Al Mujahid is Yemeni, so he may not be going anywhere anytime soon.

There are 70 other inmates whose cases will be reviewed in the coming months, though again, their chances of actual release are questionable. But under the latest National Defense Reauthorization Act, signed into law last month, Obama has greater flexibility to determine who can be released. “He really needs to pick up the pace,” Johnson says, to bring inmates to a fair trial in federal court or to release them.

The president’s ability to do that remains limited, though; Congress continues to block any efforts to bring detainees to the US, even for further detention and trial.

Meanwhile, six men are facing trial under the military commission system created by Obama in 2009; that system has been criticized for failing to uphold international standards of fair and open trials.

The National Religious Campaign Against Torture mobilized late last week to call once again for the closing of Guantanamo, and to encourage Obama to step up his efforts under his new powers.

Amnesty International (which in 2008 brought a replica of a Guantanamo cell to Portland; see “A Night in Guantanamo,” by Jeff Inglis, June 20, 2008) made similar statements, and issued a six-page report condemning the existence of the prison and the American treatment of its inmates as counter to international law and human-rights standards, including those to which the United States holds other countries.

The report also called for prosecutions of those who authorized and conducted torture against Guantanamo inmates; despite admissions that officials as high as President George W. Bush authorized torture, no Americans have been charged with crimes in connection with the treatment of inmates there. 

Neutrinos: A little-noticed breakthrough lets scientists see the distant cosmos like never before

Published on GlobalPost

PORTLAND, Maine — Imagine being one of the very first humans, tens of thousands of years ago, to actually look up at the night sky. You’d see dozens of lights and other sights, with no understanding of what they were, where they were, or anything else. You might think they were just “pinholes in the curtain of night.”

Only after centuries of study, with the invention of countless increasingly complex devices to peer into the sky, can we say we know anything at all about planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe as a whole.

But a recent scientific discovery has brought us back to that very first night: to the very beginning of our exploration, and to the realization of just how rudimentary our knowledge is.

After decades of searching, scientists have detected high-energy subatomic particles originating from previously unknown sources in the universe.

The particles themselves aren't news. Neutrinos — nearly massless, charge-less byproducts of radioactive decay — were first theorized in 1930 and first detected in 1956 during nuclear experiments on Earth.

Since then, we have learned that neutrinos are literally everywhere. In the time it takes to read this sentence, about 700 trillion of them run through your body. Almost all of the neutrinos scientists have detected originated either from the Sun, from the Earth’s atmosphere, or from man-made nuclear activities.

However, an almost impossibly tiny proportion come from the far reaches of the universe. Tracing those neutrinos' movements offers the possibility of greatly expanding our understanding of the cosmos.

For more than a decade, a research project called IceCube has sought to do just that — to detect neutrinos from outside our galactic neighborhood, using a cubic-kilometer detector embedded in the Antarctic ice sheet.

A paper published in the journal Science revealed late last year that IceCube had detected 28 of the particles.

And that’s rocked the physics world.

These minuscule particles from distant sources are analogous to the light emitted by the first stars ever seen by human eyes.

Because they are so tiny and electrically neutral, neutrinos “can travel at nearly the speed of light from the edge of the universe without being deflected by magnetic fields or absorbed by matter,” according to IceCube’s explanatory webpage.

Most vitally, “they travel in straight lines from their source,” which means when we "detect them here on Earth, we can calculate where they came from, like a laser pointer aimed back out into space,” said Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who directs IceCube.

“At the moment we don’t know what we’re mapping,” he added.

Still, the accomplishment is significant, in that it may lead to the discovery of more distant parts of the cosmos than we have ever known. It could even lead to new fields of physics. Some scientists suspect these extra-galactic neutrinos may be able to tell us more about the heretofore invisible “dark matter” that many believe makes up most of the mass of the universe.

Very high-energy neutrinos, like the 28 detected by IceCube, are as much as billion times more energetic than those commonly found here on Earth. They are thought to come from supernovas and black holes, but nobody is sure yet.

“The energy requirements of these sources are so large” that theorists’ imaginations are being stretched to come up with possible explanations, Halzen said. “We are really looking at the violent processes” of the universe.

Halzen has spent most of his career searching for neutrinos and trying to explain their origins, and not even he knows what we’ll find.

IceCube is only the first glance from the first “eye” ever to look at the sky in this way. “It’s like a map of the universe with 28 pixels,” he said. “That’s a lot of emptiness.”

Finding even these few neutrinos has taken decades of innovation and science. As far back as the 1970s, Halzen said, it was clear that finding high-energy neutrinos would require a massive detector.

Scientists thought that using a cubic kilometer of ice in the South Polar Plateau could be a way to achieve this. They embedded equipment in the ice, setting up a grid of deep holes and inserting long strings with detectors at regular intervals. The goal of wiring this massive cube was to detect tiny light pulses emitted when, at extremely rare intervals, a neutrino actually hit a piece of matter.

In 1999, your correspondent witnessed an early, small-scale test of the idea at the South Pole. Using hot-water hoses to “drill” the holes that house the equipment, a detector was built just 1 percent of the size of IceCube's. The effort consumed massive quantities of fuel to power huge water heaters near the South Pole. When that project — called AMANDA, for Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array — proved the concept was valid, construction began on the larger IceCube. It only finished in December 2010.

Now the task is to keep adding to the neutrino map, in part with IceCube, but also by finding more efficient means of detecting high-energy neutrinos, Halzen said. As that picture comes into sharper focus, physicists and astronomers can compare it with other maps of the universe, including those marking known locations of black holes, pulsars, and supernovas.

Right now, “there’s nothing that stands out” as matching up, Halzen said, though it’s obviously quite early in the process.

Transitions: Goodbye, hello

Published in the Portland Phoenix

With this issue, managing editor Jeff Inglis departs after more than eight years with the Portland Phoenix, and turns the reins over to Deirdre Fulton, who has been the paper’s full-time staff writer since 2007.

I’ve largely shied away from writing about myself in these pages because a newspaper isn’t about its editor, nor its staff. It’s about its readers, and the community they share. I’ve made occasional exceptions to the no-me rule for newsworthy angles on important topics; see, for example, “A Night in Guantanamo,” June 20, 2008; and “In My Rights Mind,” September 21, 2012. I hope you’ll pardon me another, to share my own brief perspective on the past eight-plus years I’ve spent shepherding the shared treasure that is thePortland Phoenix.

Things I’m proudest ofOur first-person articles bringing oft-unheard voices to important debates about abortion, rape survival, and long-term unemployment.

Our years-long scoop (still unchallenged by any Maine media outlets), a multiple-award-winning series, uncovering torture in the Maine State Prison, which has resulted in markedly improved treatment for mentally ill people who have ended up in the criminal-justice system.

Something I’m not proud ofNot explaining clearly enough how terrible FairPoint’s takeover of Verizon’s landlines would be for Mainers; the deal was approved by regulators who claimed it would be “in the public interest.” Now thousands of Mainers suffer bad phone and Internet service at high cost, and all the rest of us are being asked to open our wallets to prop up outdated landline technology, instead of preparing for the future by funding high-speed Internet connectivity.

Things still unfinishedMaine’s Democrats still act an awful lot like Maine’s Republicans (and vice-versa), but our paper’s repeated shaming of both political parties for catering to the interests of the wealthy and out-of-state corporations, and their sustained collective neglect for regular Maine people, has begun to help progressives gain ground in Augusta, and possibly even in searches for higher positions.

We and many others are still debunking the war on the poor Governor Paul LePage is waging (which by the way began under elephant-in-donkey’s-clothes John Baldacci), bolstering the principle that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers — and that corporate welfare should be a real, and fruitful, target for those who truly wish to root out government fraud, waste, and abuse.

People I’m grateful to
The staff, full-time and freelance, of the Portland Phoenix. There are too many to name them, but they know who they are and what they have meant to me, to our efforts, and to our readers. Three standout long-term mentors, collaborators, and partners must be named, though: former executive editor Peter Kadzis, the late senior managing editor Clif Garboden, and incoming managing editor Deirdre Fulton. I’m thrilled to be leaving you in her hands, and her in yours.

And most of all, all of you, our readers and community members, for caring about thePortland Phoenix, for reading it, for thinking and talking about what we write, and yes even for criticizing us when you wish we had done better. Without you, there’d be nothing to write about, nothing to say, and nobody to read our words. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Press Releases: Whining is losing

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Eliot Cutler is trying to present himself as a serious candidate for governor, three years after coming in second to Republican Paul LePage, but he and his media team need to step up their game.

Just two months ago, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mike Michaud masterfully manipulated the state’s media coverage of his announcement that he is gay (see “Getting Spun, by Jeff Inglis, November 15, 2013).

In part because of that news, nobody was surprised when EqualityMaine (the state’s largest group promoting equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Mainers — and one with coveted grassroots energy) endorsed Michaud’s candidacy for the Blaine House last week.

There was no chance EQME would endorse LePage, and the governor’s response to the endorsement reflected mutual disinterest: In typical non-sequitur fashion, it was about jobs.

But Cutler, the independent, was clearly hurt by the choice, issuing a lengthy statement from his campaign’s press office that called the decision “partisan” — as if a political endorsement was supposed to be otherwise! He also enlisted former state senator Dennis Damon (a big player in this state’s fight for marriage equality) to write an opinion piece in the Bangor Daily News extolling the virtues of Cutler’s financial generosity toward that movement and other issues of importance to LGBT people.

And while he told WGAN radio on Monday that he didn’t want to make it a campaign issue, Cutler’s repeated complaints that someone else got an important endorsement seemed to suggest otherwise, though the campaign did distance itself from a Tuesday event set up by supporters to whine some more.

The whole thing was a silly overreaction that promptly got Cutler stung as a weak whiner. Michaud’s spokesman, David Farmer, went straight for the jugular, saying Cutler’s response showed his “true colors” as “a Washington lawyer (who) if he doesn’t get what he wants, he attacks.”

Facebook comments were withering. Even Attorney General Janet Mills, a Democrat, joined a comment thread on Democratic activist Jill Barkley’s page, saying “I have never seen or heard of Mr. Cutler testifying or writing letters or cutting ads on marriage or equality issues (or other issues) over the many years they have been debated, including those early years when only a handful of legislators of either party openly supported the legislation. Mr. Cutler has been out of touch and hors de combat.” (Which, for those who haven’t recently brushed up on their French idioms, literally means “outside the fight.”)

Some might say that in landing the endorsement, Michaud had successfully spun not just the press but also the activist community; that seems unlikely, given the level of vocal debate about the unfortunate truth that during Michaud’s time in the state legislature, he voted 19 times against bills that would have moved LGBT Mainers toward equality.

Rather, the choice seems to have been one based on image for EqualityMaine, and there are three important factors the group must have considered. First, of course, is its relationship with the Democratic party structure, which is pushing Michaud hard as a better-than-Cutler option for anybody-but-LePage voters. Bucking that organization could have been politically expensive.

Second must have been the very fact that Cutler has given EQME thousands of dollars, which certainly would have led to accusations that he had purchased the endorsement if it had gone his way. No group wants to appear as if its support is for sale.

And third is the incredible symbolism of working to elect the nation’s first openly gay governor. (New Jersey’s Jim McGreevey doesn’t count; he came out seconds before announcing his resignation.) There’s simply no way EQME could have been expected to back any other candidate; imagine history’s judgement of a gay-rights organization that didn’t support a gay candidate in such a landmark-possibility race.

Cutler apparently either failed to grasp these basic points, or, more likely, didn’t think of them while tied up in his frustration at not getting the support of a very powerful grassroots organization. Did he think, perhaps, that he should have given EQME more money? Or that he’d wasted what he’d sent?

In any case, his response forgot the first rule of campaigning (“If you’re talking about the other person, you’re losing”) and made him seem petty and hypersensitive. It also reinforced the Democratic narrative that Cutler is a fringe sideshow trying to steal the limelight (and the Blaine House) for his own glory.

But there is a silver lining: If Cutler can’t grow a thicker skin, it’ll be a hoot to watch his reactions once LePage starts campaigning in earnest. 

Billing Dept.: FairPoint wants bigger subsidies, from all Mainers

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Still struggling merely to provide the lowest quality landline telephone service in Maine, FairPoint Communications has now picked a fight with its competitors in the telecommunications industry by asking state regulators to charge non-FairPoint phone customers in Maine as much as $5 per month each to keep the company afloat — even if those people don’t use landlines at all.

FairPoint has always been up against a wall, since it highly leveraged itself to buy the assets of Verizon’s Northern New England operations in 2008, a deal only approved by regulators in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont because of the company’s promises to invest in expanding high-speed Internet connectivity and hiring skilled workers to support its services. (See “A Bad Idea Triumphs,” by Jeff Inglis, February 29, 2008.)

Well before the deal was approved, the Portland Phoenix revealed that the company planned to lay off four percent of workers every year, including some who had been recently hired; see “No Raises — It Gets Better,” by Jeff Inglis, November 20, 2007.)
After the deal was closed, the transition from Verizon to FairPoint was repeatedly delayed and rife with problems, including multiple failures to connect an unknown number of 9-1-1 calls to emergency services workers. (See “We Told You So,” by Jeff Inglis, July 4, 2008.)

And then in 2010, FairPoint declared bankruptcy. While under protection of a federal court, it strong-armed state regulators into granting permission to slow the Internet rollout. (See “FairPoint’s Struggles Continue,” by Jeff Inglis, September 3, 2010.)

This latest request, though, is the first to ask for financial support from those beyond its actual customer base — including tens of thousands of Mainers who do not use FairPoint’s services at all.

In June, FairPoint claimed that its so-called “service of last resort” (phone service where no other option is available) costs too much to provide to customers without additional help, and asked the Maine Public Utilities Commission for permission to raise prices $2 per month on its customers, and also for millions from the state’s Universal Service Fund, which is supported by all telecommunications customers, including cellular and cable subscribers.

The state’s USF collection now totals $7.8 million a year, according to William Black, deputy at the Office of the Public Advocate, which represents the people of Maine in utilities-regulation proceedings. FairPoint’s request would mean the fund would need to collect $67 million more, all from surcharges to customers — most of whom do not use FairPoint, and many of whom have actually transferred away from FairPoint in search of better service.

State service-quality reports show that FairPoint (including its subsidiaries) is worst at missing appointments among all telephone companies in the state, has the longest average delay as a result of missed appointments, and has the second-highest average of problems not being solved within 24 hours (behind tiny Island Telephone Company, based in Warren).

Jeff Nevins, FairPoint’s spokesman in Maine, did not return calls, and so was unable to answer questions about whether service would improve as a result of the requested investment, nor why people who left FairPoint should be asked to improve the company’s service to its remaining customers.

Wayne Jortner, senior counsel at the Office of the Public Advocate, says usually a company in FairPoint’s circumstances would ask for an increase in customer rates; he says FairPoint hasn’t done so for fear higher prices would drive away even more customers. That’s what has led to the company’s request to use USF money — spreading the cost across all Mainers with telephones.

The dispute has intensified in November and December, with the five major cellular companies (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular) filing objections to FairPoint’s request with the PUC, as has TimeWarner Cable, which also operates a telephone service over its cable Internet connections.

The decision process will run through July, with hearings slated in late May; Jortner and Black have requested the PUC hold public-testimony sessions around the state before making a final decision.

FairPoint’s request to use USF money for landline service runs counter to a current trend in telecommunications regulation: Federal USF money is now being transitioned away from subsidizing rural and high-cost phone service, in favor of expanding high-speed Internet access throughout the country. (Compared to other developed, tech-savvy countries, the US has significantly slower Internet speed at substantially higher costs, according to regular annual surveys by international Internet backbone giant Akamai.)

The state USF money is managed separately, Jortner says, with no such obligation to invest in future technology over dwindling legacy services.

Public comments to the Maine Public Utilities Commission are welcome at all times, via maine.gov/mpuc/ or by mail to 18 State House Station, Augusta ME 04333. This request is in docket 2013-00340.