The Rag Blog

A STAGGERING 337,553 prescriptions for antidepressants were written for children and adolescents in the past year, raising fears about whether “happy pills” are being used as a quick-fix for despondent youngsters.

Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, has not approved any antidepressant medicines for children or adolescents younger than 18 but can not prevent doctors from prescribing them.

Medical regulators and drug companies warn against the use of antidepressants in young people and there is concern that the drugs, including the newer breed known as serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), have been associated with suicidal behaviour in the young.

Yet more than 75,500 prescriptions for antidepressants were written for children under 15 in 2005-06, according to figures prepared exclusively by Medicare Australia for The Sunday Age.

A further 262,000 antidepressant prescriptions were filled for youths aged between 15 and 20 in 2005-06. In Victoria there were 12,351 antidepressant scripts for children aged 14 and younger in 2005-06. In the 15-to-20 age group, 64,663 medicines were prescribed.

There is concern particularly that Prozac (fluoxetine), the only SSRI that appears to be more effective than a placebo in children, will become the new Ritalin, the drug of choice for a spate of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnoses in the 1990s.

Britain faces an ecological catastrophe that could wreak havoc on wildlife populations when the first outbreak of Asian flu hits the country.

Scientists say they fear that tons of the anti-viral agent Tamiflu – taken by Britons trying to combat the disease – would be flushed down sewers into rivers and lakes.

Natural populations of microbes would be killed off by a deluge of water polluted with concentrated amounts of the anti-viral drug. As a result, birds, fish and other creatures that rely on these bacteria and viruses for their survival could be devastated.

In addition, waters containing Tamiflu would provide ideal conditions for the evolution of drug-resistant strains of bird flu virus. These strains would then infect wildfowl and ultimately human beings, triggering a second outbreak of the disease – although this time Tamiflu would provide no protection against the virus.

‘Anti-viral drugs are quite new and no one has ever planned to use them in the vast quantities that are now being considered,’ said Dr Andrew Singer, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxford. ‘However, there are some very alarming environmental implications about giving out millions of doses of Tamiflu in order to combat an outbreak of Asian bird flu. These have not been considered by health authorities. This is unknown terrirory.’

The prospect of a pandemic of bird flu sweeping the world is a growing worry for scientists, doctors and health officials. They fear that the deadly flu strain H5N1, which is now established in poultry in many areas of the Far East, could soon mutate so that it infects human beings. A pandemic that would affect hundreds of millions of people could spread rapidly around the world as a result.

FOR those who have failed in a decade or three’s worth of New Year’s resolutions to become better workers, spouses, parents, athletes or lovers, there is a new frontier in personal growth — or at least a proliferation of products, mostly hawked over the Internet, that promise to help turn the last bit of untrammeled downtime (sleep) into an opportunity for improvement.

New health products have emerged, often from the margins of commerce. Old self-help approaches like subliminal “sleep learning” have evolved and found new life on the Web.

“While you sleep!” has become an Internet marketing catchphrase. The idea plays on two classic, if contradictory, American impulses: the desire to get ahead, and the compulsion to avoid the slightest expenditure of effort.

There are diet pills sold under names like Lose and Snooze and Sleep ’n Slim, which contain collagen and which the makers say can help maximize the body’s metabolism. There are foot pads from Japan that look like tea bags and promise to drain toxins and restore energy while you sleep.

On one Web site, hypnotictapes.com, besides recordings designed to improve public speaking or break addiction to alcohol or heroin, there are programs promising to help you, at least partly while sleeping, “Overcome Fear of Clowns” and “Master the Bagpipes.”

The Washington media spent the holidays trying to guess what the President’s new plan for Iraq might be. Meanwhile in the back rooms of the White House Karl Rove and White House Chief of Staff, Josh Bolten were doing what any world-class chess player does when facing defeat — plot a series of aggressive moves to throw their opponent off balance in the hopes of regaining the initiative.

How do I know this? Well, since God only talks to Rev. Pat Robertson – and, when He can’t get through to Pat, George W. Bush – I didn’t get it from Him. No it came to me in this news flash late yesterday:

Washington, D.C. – As President Bush prepares a new statement and stance on the war in Iraq, his cabinet is once again in the midst of transition. In the latest change, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte will resign to become deputy secretary of state, according to a government official….The shift, while seemingly abrupt, will allow Negroponte to return to his former career path as a diplomat. Negroponte will serve under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

It was that last line that gives away the strategy. “Negroponte will serve under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

Never! Negroponte quits as head of one of the most important and powerful posts in government, a job that puts him face to face with the President of the United States every morning, of everyday of the week, to accept a position as Rice’s assistant?

Fat chance.

So what’s up? Here’s what I think is up — and if I were Bush I would be itching to get on with the game.

Move 1: Announce what the administration knows will be a very unpopular decision to send more troops to Iraq.

Move 2: Let the Democrat-controlled Congress throw a fit and hold hearings the administration knows will stir up additional opposition and shake loose new damning information on the administrations march to war and mismanagement of that war.

Move 3: Just when all the above is hitting the fan, Dick Cheney announces he is retiring from office early due to “health concerns,” and because he does not want to be “a distraction” when he is called to testify in purjury trial of his former No. 2. Scooter Libby.

Move 4: The next day Bush announces he will nominate Condoleezza Rice to replace Cheney.

Move 5: At the same time Bush announces he is nominating Negroponte to replace Rice as Secretary of State.

The above series of moves makes political sense on so many levels that I consider it inevitable. Think about it:

For Cheney: By all reports, Cheney has been sidelined within the administration. No longer being a major player – actually the major player — is so NOT Dick Cheney. If he can’t run the show, he’s not interested. Also, leaving before the end of Bush’s final term would put some daylight between Cheney and the shoddy Bush legacy — not a lot of daylight, but a lot more than if Cheney stays until January 2009.

For Bush: Appointing the first woman and the first African American to the vice presidency, Bush knows, would put him in the history books for something besides the mess his war has made out of the Middle East. By appointing Rice VP he would lock in for all history his place as the first US President to have a female and black as his No. 2 — an historical “two-fer.”

NEW YORK, Jan. 7 /PRNewswire/ — A draft report recently produced by the Baghdad embasy’s director of strategic communications Ginger Cruz suggests that despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the United States has lost the battle for Iraqi public opinion, reports Baghdad Bureau Chief Scott Johnson in Newsweek’s January 15 issue (on newsstands Monday, January 8). “Insurgents, sectarian elements and others are taking control of the message at the public level,” the draft states. Videos of U.S. soldiers being shot and blown up, and of the bloody work of sectarian death squads, are now pervasive. The images inspire new recruits and intimidate those who might stand against them. “Inadequate message control in Iraq,” the document warns, “is feeding the escalating cycle of violence.” (A U.S. Embassy spokesperson claims the draft reflects Cruz’s personal views, not official policy.)

Sunni insurgents in particular have become expert at using technology to underscore — some would say exaggerate — their effectiveness. “The sophistication of the way the enemy is using the news media is huge,” Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told Newsweek just before he returned to the United States. Most large-scale attacks on U.S. forces are now filmed, often from multiple camera angles, and with high- resolution cameras. The footage is slickly edited into dramatic narratives: quick-cut images of Humvees exploding or U.S. soldiers being felled by snipers are set to inspiring religious soundtracks or chanting, which lends them a triumphal feel. In some cases, U.S. officials believe, insurgents attack American forces primarily to generate fresh footage. Advancements in technology have also made these videos easy to download and disseminate. “Literally, it’s only hours after an attack and [the videos] are available,” says Andrew Garfield, a British counterinsurgency expert who has advised U.S. forces in Baghdad. “You can really say it’s only a cell-phone call away.”

So was this what the Iraq war was fought for, after all? As the number of US soldiers killed since the invasion rises past the 3,000 mark, and President George Bush gambles on sending in up to 30,000 more troops, The Independent on Sunday has learnt that the Iraqi government is about to push through a law giving Western oil companies the right to exploit the country’s massive oil reserves.

And Iraq’s oil reserves, the third largest in the world, with an estimated 115 billion barrels waiting to be extracted, are a prize worth having. As Vice-President Dick Cheney noted in 1999, when he was still running Halliburton, an oil services company, the Middle East is the key to preventing the world running out of oil.

Now, unnoticed by most amid the furore over civil war in Iraq and the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the new oil law has quietly been going through several drafts, and is now on the point of being presented to the cabinet and then the parliament in Baghdad. Its provisions are a radical departure from the norm for developing countries: under a system known as “production-sharing agreements”, or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US, would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq’s oil.

PSAs allow a country to retain legal ownership of its oil, but gives a share of profits to the international companies that invest in infrastructure and operation of the wells, pipelines and refineries. Their introduction would be a first for a major Middle Eastern oil producer. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world’s number one and two oil exporters, both tightly control their industries through state-owned companies with no appreciable foreign collaboration, as do most members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Opec.

WASHINGTON — An estimated 100,000 employees of US defense contractors working in Iraq are no longer immune from military prosecutions, because of a little-noticed provision in a 2007 defense spending bill aimed at holding private contractors accountable for crimes committed in war zones.

For the past three years, an unprecedented number of private contractors in Iraq have performed jobs previously reserved for the military, with immunity from military rules that govern troops and from criminal prosecution in Iraqi courts.

The legal loophole caused outrage during the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. Soldiers involved in abusing prisoners were sentenced in military courts, but the civilian interrogators working alongside them for Titan Corp. and CACI International, two private firms, faced no punishment.

The 2007 Defense Bill, enacted in October, placed contractors and others who accompany the military in the field under the same set of military laws that govern the armed forces.

“Basically 100,000 contractors woke up to find themselves under the Uniform Code of Military Justice,” said Peter W. Singer , a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes on civilian military contractors and whose article on a defense blog Thursday called attention to the change.

Previously, the code applied to “persons serving with or accompanying an armed force in the field” only during a war, which US courts interpreted to mean a war declared by Congress. No such declaration was made in the Iraq conflict. Now, Congress has amended the code to apply to persons accompanying an armed force during a “declared war or contingency operation.”

The amendment, spearheaded by Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, was the latest in a series of moves by lawmakers to plug legal loopholes that had allowed contractors who had committed crimes overseas to escape justice. A Senate aide said the amendment passed with little discussion. “There was a concern about whether we have an adequate allocation of legal responsibility for contractors,” said the aide, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “If they are not subject to Iraqi law, what law are they subject to?”

WASHINGTON – Just as debate rages over sending more U.S. troops to Iraq, there are differing views about whether economic incentives such as micro-loans and U.S.-funded jobs programs would coax militiamen to trade guns for tools.

Some reconstruction experts say giving Iraqis jobs that include clearing streets and fixing water and sanitation systems would produce little economic benefit for a country on the brink of all-out civil war.

Others say civilian jobs programs — an idea President Bush is considering — are designed to build security. Only when violence is under control, they say, can business flourish.

Details have not been disclosed about the economic incentives Bush will announce as early as Wednesday. But those familiar with the plan say he is favoring short-term jobs programs, extending micro-loans to small businesses and increasing the amount of money military commanders can spend quickly on local projects to improve the daily lives of Iraqis.

“Job creation is the most promising,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t know why we haven’t done it before. It’s not the best way to build a new economy, but we need to address security even if that doesn’t conform to Econ 101.”

Military analysts say Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who recently finished his tour as the No. 2 general in Iraq, has recommended a short-term jobs program. So did Donald Rumsfeld in a memo he wrote two days before he resigned as defense secretary.

Keith Crane, a senior economist at the RAND Corp., is skeptical because such programs employ insurgents but have little effect on their political activities. “In some instances, insurgents have participated in make-work schemes during the day, then fought the coalition at night,” he said.

UNITED STATES investigators have tracked down dozens of gruesome photographs taken by marines of 24 Iraqi civilians massacred in Haditha.

The images, found on laptop computers and digital media drives, provide evidence of a series of shootings beside a taxi and inside three homes that military criminal investigators have alleged were murders.

The images have provided the Naval Criminal Investigative Service with powerful and visceral evidence of what happened in Haditha on November 19, 2005.

Many photographs were on laptop computers that had been shipped back to the US, and deleted images were also recovered from a Sony PlayStation Portable memory drive, investigative documents showed.

Marines were found to have downloaded the images from each other’s devices, traded them and loaded them onto personal websites. One marine told investigators he saw some photographs set to music on another marine’s computer. Some were emailed from Iraq to a civilian in the US.

There were also photographs showing the bomb crater and the destroyed vehicle in which Corporal Miguel Terrazas was killed and which triggered the Haditha killings.

There was a picture of a young boy with a helicopter on the front of his pajamas, slumped over, his face and head covered in blood and in another a mother was lying on a bed, arms splayed, the bodies of three young children huddled against her right side.

The images were contained in thousands of pages of investigative documents obtained by The Washington Post, though it was decided that most of the pictures were too graphic to publish in the newspaper.

A leaked copy of the inquiry quotes a horrified witness as saying that the marines went “crazy” after the roadside bomb.

The Bush administration’s assault on personal liberties in 2006 rendered one of the most cherished documents in the United States — the Bill of Rights — virtually worthless. In case you haven’t check in with the BOR lately, you can find it in its entirety here.

Following are a few examples from last year and the specific amendment they rendered worthless:

Let us once again build an Ummah, a generation that will put an end to sorrow and tears. This dead world longing to live again. To be alive again, to be injected with the kalimah that had once captivated her 1400 years ago and nourished her for over 1000 years…

This generation needs to be given new breath, new spirit and to be shone with new light that will again brighten this wonderful world…

This is the full speech of Iran’s president Ahmadinejad, at the Amir Kabir University in Tehran. It’s a must see.

There was a lot of talk about this speech – the mainstream media labeled it a students uprising against a dictator.

Well, you can see for yourself what it was.

Happy New Year, everyone.

You guys (and ladies) get a load of G.W.’s New Year’s Resolution? (h/t Firedoglake)

My thoughts are with the troops as we head into 2007.

People always ask me about a New Year’s resolution — my resolution is, is that they’ll be safe and that we’ll come closer to our objective, that we’ll be able to help this young democracy survive and thrive and, therefore, we’ll be writing a chapter of peace.

Seriously, he can’t do anything right. Not a thing. He can’t even give a proper New Year’s Resolution.

See, the whole principle here (which isn’t all that complicated), is that you change something negative about your own behavior, to make the next year more pleasant for yourself and those in your immediate vicinity. A common example would be resolving to lose weight, or to eat more nutritiously, or to get a better job, or to go back to school.

The President’s had such a lousy, miserable year of fuck-ups and boondoggles, he doesn’t really have to aim high to improve his 2007 behavior.

How about resolving not to molest fellow world leaders?

How about resolving not to continually violate the Constitution by arresting, holding and torturing alleged terrorists without due process?

How about resolving to be a better role model as a father, to teach respect for other people by example?

How about not telling the public little white lies all the time, designed to make you look more intelligent and capable.

Those would be some reasonable George Bush New Year’s Resolutions, though I think we’d all like to see him resolve to no longer be President, along with Vice President Mammon Cheney.