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Complicity and recompense

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Not that I want to excuse Alberto Gonzales. Like many others I believe he should have left office long ago - and (while we’re about it) why wait now till his announced mid-September departure? But it is only fair to say that his use of law-enforcement to trample on supposedly inalienable human rights is far from unique these days.

Much of the fury he provoked arose from his role (lyingly concealed, if badly so) in ensuring that warrantless government surveillance of individuals could proceed unfettered – and indeed proceed aided and abetted by the nation’s big communications companies like AT&T and Verizon.

 

Yahoo!, the already troubled bastion of our newer means of communication (which is, just incidentally and surely not deliberately, named after satirist Jonathan Swift's imaginary tribe of brutish thugs) is this week wriggling to avoid legal responsibility for spying on its customers - spying that ended with the customers being imprisoned and tortured.

 

Now, that may be worse … though I acknowledge it's debatable … than anything Alberto Gonzales did.

 

On Monday in Federal Court in San Francisco, Yahoo filed an attempt to rebut a case brought against it by journalist Shi Tao and dissident blogger Wang Xiaoning, who were separately arrested by Chinese authorities and each sentenced to 10 years in prison.

 

In both cases - and in those of about sixty other victims, according to the World Organization for Human Rights USA, which is pressing the lawsuit – Yahoo’s China operation helped the authorities to identify the accused and provided information about their email traffic. In some instances, the suit contends, the accused were tortured; Wang Xiaoning’s wife has testified he was kicked and beaten in custody.

 

Yahoo pleads that the case should be dismissed on the grounds that the court has no jurisdiction over something that happened six thousand miles away. (A tried and tested defense ever since Christopher Marlowe’s 1589 drama The Jew of Malta, with its resonant line: “’Twas in another country – and besides the wench is dead!”)

 

The Yahoo-users’ lawyer Morton Sklar argues differently: "U.S. corporations are not bound just by the laws of their host countries, but also the laws of the United States and standards of conduct that are placed upon them by the United States and by the international community".

 

We’ll see. As you read this, Judge Claudia Wilken is pondering the case, and will deliver her judgment after a hearing in November.

 

 

A VERY DIFFERENT COURT IS CURRENTLY SITTING in judgment on an extremely contentious issue – sitting for a lamentably long time, and with lamentably little media coverage.

 

Unless you’re personally engaged in the subject-matter, you may not even have heard of the “Vaccine Court” a federal tribunal set up by Congress in reaction to public concern about childhood vaccinations. Currently its three-judge panel is weighing the case brought by about 5,000 parents who claim that vaccines caused their offspring to become autistic.

 

No proven link has been established, by any major official scientific body’s work, between vaccination and autism, but the parents are determined, and have recruited many individual scientists to their aid. Their aim in part, naturally enough, is to obtain compensation for the damage suffered. Twelve year-old Michelle Cedillo from Arizona is the central test-case, and two months ago she made a brief and dramatic appearance by wheel-chair in the Washington courtroom. She had been vaccinated, like many, at the age of fifteen months, and now is severely debilitated.

 

On the last day of the most recent hearing, Special Master George Hastings, speaking for all three judges, said they expected to rule “in several months”. It can’t happen too soon.

 

Rarely has the field of public health displayed such angry arguments about cause and effect (and blame) -  not merely between the medical establishment and frustrated members of the public. The broad movement of autism-affected families itself has become riven with internecine conflict, even to the point of one prominent and media-powerful family – that of Bob Wright, the ex-chairman of NBC – being deeply and publicly split, along the lines of father vs daughter (- with an autistic grandson at the heart of their initial involvement with the issue).

 

The core dispute is over the allegation that a form of mercury, used as a preservative in vaccines, might be to blame.

 

With such disturbing contentiousness unleashed, and against the stunning factual backdrop that half-a-million American children now suffer some form or another of autism (and the number grows at a rate that’s claimed to lie between 10 and 17 percent a year) there could hardly be a better time than now for a substantial solution-oriented book to appear.

 

It has appeared, in the form of Changing the Course of Autism by Bryan Jepson and Jane Johnson (from Sentient Publications).

 

Both authors - one lay, one medic - have children who have been diagnosed along the so-called “spectrum” of autistic conditions, and both of them help to run a center for treatment and research in Austin, TX, called Thoughtful House.

 

Aptly, it’s an exceedingly thoughtful book, too. It deals coolly with all the controversies, provides clear physiological explanations, and - perhaps even more helpfully -  sets out a well-reasoned and practical approach to ameliorating the symptoms that cause such confusion and distress for so many young people and their families.

 

 

AMID ALL THE AMERICAN, AND SOME INTERNATIONAL, MEDIA “ANNIVERSIFYING” of  Hurricane Katrina, two years after it decimated Gulf Coast communities, I heard one small but very telling journalistic lesson.

 

It was (sort-of) casually brought up by Chris Rose, the piquant columnist from the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, and recurring essayist on PBS’s Newshour. In the immediate aftermath of the 2005 flooding, his newspaper’s management evacuated to Baton Rouge, while newsroom operatives like himself remained scattered around, working from various improvised bases in their battered home city.

 

“Management 85 miles away,” Rose said, “No editorial meetings for months. And we won two Pulitzer Prizes”.

 

Case closed, don’t you think?