NEWS BRIEFS

Forest Service purchases a pair 
of flying drones to fight pot growers
   The U.S. Forest Service has bought a pair of flying drones to track down marijuana growers operating in remote California woodlands.
   Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, told The Associated Press on April 3 that the pilotless, camera-equipped aircraft will allow law enforcement officers to pinpoint marijuana fields and size up potential dangers before agents attempt arrests.
   The purchase of the two SkySeer drones, for a combined $100,000, reflects rising interest in remote-controlled aircraft among law enforcement, science and other government agencies.

Miami-Dade hoping to use 
unmanned aircraft to fight crime
   MIAMI — Al-Qaeda terrorists and other U.S. enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq have to worry about unmanned American aircraft, a.k.a. drones, tracking them from the skies. Someday, South Florida residents may have the same concern now that the Miami-Dade Police Department has asked the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to use a small unmanned surveillance aircraft for law enforcement.
   The department says, if granted permission, it would employ the drone only in “tactical” situations that present a danger to officers on the ground (commonly an initial excuse for complete use of civil-liberty abusing tactics — safety of officers).
   According to the FAA, Miami is one of only two big-city police departments in the country that have applied for the permits. Houston is the other.
“It won’t be used for patrol or for traffic,” said Detective Juan Villalba, Miami-Dade police spokesman. “It would be used in SWAT team situations — like someone barricaded in a house, or where a hostage has been taken. It might be used to try to determine how heavily armed a person might be. It will not be armed itself.”
   Not yet.

Seymour Hersh says U.S. officials 
hold tapes of Iraqi children being raped
   Seymour Hersh, an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. who is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters, said the U.S. government has videotapes of children being raped at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
   “Some of the worst things that happened, you don’t know about, OK? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

Colleges toss privacy of ‘troubled’
students ‘out the window’
   Lexington, Ky. — On the agenda: A student who got into a shouting match with a faculty member. Another who harassed a female classmate. Someone found sleeping in a car. And a student who posted a threat against a professor on Facebook.
   In a practice adopted at one college after another since the massacre at Virginia Tech, a University of Kentucky committee of deans, administrators, campus police and mental health officials has begun meeting regularly to discuss a watch list of troubled students and decide whether they need professional help or should be sent packing.
   “You’ve got to be way ahead of the game, so to speak, expect what may be coming. If you’re able to identify behaviors early on and get these people assistance, it avoids disruptions in the classrooms and potential violence,” said Maj. Joe Monroe, interim police chief at Kentucky.
   Such committees represent a change in thinking among U.S. college officials, who for a long time were reluctant to share information about students’ mental health for fear of violating privacy laws.
   “If a student is a danger to himself or others, all the privacy concerns go out the window,” said Patricia Terrell, vice president of student affairs, who created the panel.

Torture bracelet to control
dissenting Americans?
   The Department of Homeland Security is pursuing the introduction of a device known as the Security Bracelet, a wearable tag that would allow authorities to inflict pain compliance on suspects from a distance, while also recommending law enforcement applications and potential use in “crowd control situations.”
   Introduced ostensibly to combat airline terrorism, a creepy promo video courtesy of the patent holders Lamperd FTS exploits shocking 9/11 imagery to push the torture device as a solution to countering potential hijackers by inflicting “Electro-Muscular Disruption” and presumably giving the rest of the passengers a debilitating shock at the same time.
   “Upon activation of the electric shock device, through receipt of an activating signal from the selectively operable remote control, means the passenger wearing that particular bracelet receives the disabling electrical shock from the electric shock device. Accordingly, the passenger becomes incapacitated for a few seconds or perhaps a few minutes, during which time the passenger can be fully subdued and handcuffed, if necessary. Depending on the type of transmission medium used to send the activating signal, other passengers may also become temporarily incapacitated, which is undesirable and unfortunate, but may be unavoidable,” reads the patent for the device.
   The claim that such a shock would “not cause permanent injury” is an insult to the hundreds of Taser victims who have lost their lives to so-called “non-lethal weapons” — devices whose abuse by authorities has led groups like Amnesty International to condemn them as an affront to basic human rights.