Como Student Community Cooperative. Photo: Chris Steller

The University of Minnesota has quickly, if quietly, begun to address threats posed by a toxic waste dump it discovered under student family housing in Southeast Minneapolis.

The university found the toxins under three buildings on a four-city-block residential complex last year.

On Sept. 18, 2008, workers digging a trench at the Como Student Community Cooperative found ash and debris in the ground at its complex. Samples tested that day showed high levels of several toxins, including arsenic and lead. More tests revealed more hazards, so within days, on an emergency basis, the university hauled away 558 tons of contaminated dirt to a landfill in Rosemount.

The university last week finished the first phase of cleanup work, bringing the total amount of soil removed so far to 10,000 tons.

For generations, children have lived and played on the land along East Hennepin Avenue between 27th and 29th avenues SE. And for generations, it seems, the soil around the houses has held rich deposits of lead and arsenic — so much so that a handful of dirt ingested by a child, “if it was from a hot spot, could potentially cause brain damage,” according to Lynne Grigor, project coordinator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Toxins were detected from eight inches to eight feet below ground. Forty-eight soil tests revealed no pattern to the hot spots that would allow targeted removal.

Acting rapidly (compared to the usual pace for such projects) with more than $700,000 from Hennepin County and about $200,000 of its own money, the university last week finished the first phase of cleanup around two of the buildings, hauling away another 9,457 tons of soil.

With another application pending with the county’s brownfield fund, the university hopes to complete the cleanup next year.

Evidence of widespread effects on residents has not emerged. Several children have been tested, CSCC residents and staff said, but no one had heard of anyone showing high lead levels. University of Minnesota Environmental Health specialist Janet Dalgliesh said she knows of one case of elevated levels, for an unrelated toxin.

But it’s unclear whether that’s because the toxic dirt from the dump hasn’t affected anyone, or because people who have been affected haven’t yet been tested.

Jim Kelly, a health risk assessor at the Minnesota Department of Health, said his agency gets involved when local authorities request public health advice, or when blood tests reveal elevated lead levels in children. Neither has happened yet with CSCC, where several people said that the only tests specially spurred by the discovery — on older boys who dug deep in the dirt — didn’t have alarming results.

State law requires notification to the department only if a child younger than age six has more than 15 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, explained Erik Zabel, who works with immigrant populations for the department’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. The brains of children develop more quickly at that age and they’re more likely to get dirt in their mouths, he said.

In any case, Zabel said, the state doesn’t have responsibility to inspect for lead in Minneapolis, which has its own health department and lead-poisoning prevention programs, as well as a good rate of kids being tested.

Who knew what when?

Families of international students — married or in domestic partnerships — occupy just over half of CSCC’s 360 apartments (48 percent are from the United States or Canada, 18 percent from China). About 40 percent of the families have children, for a total population of about 1,000, according to General Manager Gerald Erickson, who has been at CSCC for 30 years and said he was surprised to learn about the pollution after the contractors found it last year.

CSCC from above. Toxins were found in soil around the three buildings at the north (upper) end of the complex. Photo: Google Maps

Once the contamination was discovered, Erickson said he left communication about it to the university’s Environmental Health staff, which provided email updates and fliers for residents and spoke at three co-op board meetings.

Board president Kendra Hernandez said the university offered to hold a special meeting for CSCC residents, but the board declined after no residents showed up at its board meeting for an announced university presentation on the topic. “There was never really a huge outcry” among residents, Hernandez said. The biggest complaint may have been about the orange fencing that kept people off the CSCC’s one recreation field and playground with swings. (An on-site child care center also used those play spaces, according to CSCC staff.)

One resident of a building where soil is being replaced, Rachel Dittli, said she considered the notices residents received adequate. But her husband, Albin, said he had concerns about dirt from the cleanup work blowing through windows into the apartment, including onto their kitchen table.

Another resident, Kaying Thao, has been less satisfied with the information she has seen since moving to a CSCC apartment in June. When she heard workers were removing ash, she thought they meant trees. Thao first learned details about the pollution Nov. 4, at a meeting of the broader neighborhood group, the Southeast Como Improvement Association (SECIA), which has made environmental efforts a priority since a pair of nearby chemical-plant fires in the late 1990s.

Two possibly affected populations are more in the dark. Residents living across the street only got notice about the pollution last week, thanks to a SECIA volunteer. Grigor said her agency will review whether adjacent properties can join the queue for state Superfund money. SECIA Environmental Coordinator Justin Eibenholtzl said he was disappointed that neither neighbors or the neighborhood group were notified.

Grigor said the pollution-control agency was also concerned about past residents of the dump-site housing, who wouldn’t know about the pollution at their former homes and may have moved to other polluted areas, increasing risks due to cumulative exposure. But while the MPCA has sometimes tried to track down people in similar situations, the health risks at CSCC aren’t high enough to trigger that sort of response, she said.

People tend to live at CSCC for only two to four years (and must move after seven), so exposure periods for individual residents are limited — a consideration in assessing risks, said the university’s Dalgleish. Short stays meant risks haven’t been “undue,” she said, but once the university learned of the pollution, any risk beyond a residential standard was “unacceptable.”

But high turnover at CSCC also means thousands of former residents don’t know they were living on a toxic waste dump.

Theories and skeptics

How did the ash get there and why did the university build housing on it?

The ash likely came from a municipal incinerator that operated in South Minneapolis from the 1930s until 1960, said Dalgleish, but dumping stopped after the university acquired the property in 1945.

Since 1947, thousands of young parents and children have lived in homes provided by the university on that property. First came quonset huts and trailers where families of G.I. Bill veterans set up housekeeping in the 1940s and 1950s. Then in the 1970s and 1980s came CSCC.

If construction crews noticed the ash in 1982, they may have seen it more for its advantages in building foundations than for its potential hazards. Although the federal Superfund laws were in place by then, contractors’ attitudes and practices concerning polluted building sites didn’t fully change until 1990, she said.

Photo by Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

A good theory?

“I think that’s absolutely it,” said Tim Busse, a spokesman for University Services, which includes both Environmental Services and Facilities Management departments. “Attitudes have changed,” he said. The university would not build housing on an ash dump now, he said, but he doesn’t think the university is going to investigate why it happened 27 years ago. “Rather than trying to fix blame, the idea is now to fix the problem and get it cleaned up for the residents,” Busse said.

But the incinerator-dump theory has some detractors among older neighborhood residents.

Joe Stimark, who turned 87 on Monday, still lives in the house where he was born, three blocks from CSCC. He remembers playing baseball there, on what were then open fields. He can tick off the factories and other industrial neighbors down through the decades. He doesn’t remember a dump at the CSCC site.

Dave Williams, 88, a neighborhood resident since 1943, lives a block away from CSCC. Long in the excavation business, he knows how the lay of the land has been altered over the years but recalls no dump on the CSCC site. His guess: the university brought in fill to make a sloping site more level for the post-war quonset huts.

Also skeptical is Connie Sullivan, a neighborhood resident since 1977 and local historian since retiring from the university faculty. Her research shows the land sat unused as railroad property for 50 years before the university bought it.

Whenever the toxic ash arrived and whatever its source, one thing is certain: young people were playing on it. Like her father before her, Stimark’s daughter, Mary Gregg, and her neighborhood friends played hide-and-seek amid waist-high grass there in the late 1950s and 1960s, after the quonsets were gone. Boys drove go-carts there, coming home splattered with mud.

In the 1970s, intramural university softball teams played on three diamonds over the dump site, recalled alum Andy Mickel.

Now, the soil under the polluted play areas has all been removed and replaced. But the long delay put a strain on families with children, said Hernandez, the co-op board president, who coaches a kids’ soccer team on the play field. The pollution cleanup’s pace may have been quick by state standards, she said, but it didn’t feel that way to residents.

“Our big field was out of commission for so long,” she said. “People said, ‘Are they ever going to be done?’”

Photo: Paul Demko, MnIndy

Senate Democrats are salivating at the prospect of attacking Republicans in 2010 who voted against an anti-rape amendment sponsored by Al Franken, reports Politico. The provision, which was supported by 68 senators, would prevent the Department of Defense from contracting with companies that prohibit employees from suing over workplace disputes — including complaints of sexual assault.

The amendment was inspired by the story of a 19-year-old KBR employee who was gang-raped by co-workers while detailed to Iraq. Upon returning to the U.S., she learned that she was unable to sue the company because of a clause in her contract. Thirty Republicans voted against the measure, often coming up with rather tortured explanations for their votes.

“I think anyone who voted against that has some tough explaining to do,” New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told Politico. “And I think particularly some incumbents already in a challenged position — it can be very detrimental to them because women voters are going to look at that and wonder, ‘Does this senator stand on my side?’”

But Politico posits that the amendment could also prove politically problematic for Franken as he attempts to complete the transition from liberal pitbull to respected legislator.

“Franken’s amendment may make sense for national Democrats in laying down lines of attack heading into the 2010 campaign — but this is not what Franken needs to build a base in Minnesota,” Larry Jacobs, of the University of Minnesota, told Politico. “Being a poster boy of a hard-hitting campaign against the Republican Party is the opposite of what he needs in Minnesota.”

MnIndy file photo

The University of Minnesota is the latest public body to make a mess with multiple beverage-marketing deals. The U of M has canceled a contract with Red Bull because the energy-drink company’s on-campus ads conflicted with the university’s separate, exclusive contract with Coke. Last year it was the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board that couldn’t keep its dealings with the same two drinks straight.

Selling corporations exclusive access to citizen-consumers, while lucrative, creates perennial problems for public institutions.

The U of M had to back out of another deal last year, with Victoria’s Secret, after the lingerie retailer’s taste in Gopher-branded attire didn’t measure up to the university’s “image” and “values.”

Last week, the university’s marching band director denied the band had formed the TCF Bank corporate logo at the university’s new TCF Bank Stadium, so named under a $35 million contract with the bank. Rather, he said, when the student-musicians formed the letters “TCF” on the field during the opening game of the football season, they were spelling out the name of the building.

Once the line is crossed, public bodies cheerfully go above and beyond the obligations they create for themselves to corporate sponsors.

This month, the public Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission’s decision to let the Minnesota Vikings sell naming rights to various parts of the Metrodome bore fruit, as the field and several gates got new corporate names such as “Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.”

Public agencies doing double-deals with beverage multinationals and slapping corporate logos on publicly funded educational facilities is another, but the Minneapolis park board took the trend one step further in the summer of 2008, when it sold Red Bull a permit to install huge cubes marketing its product — in the guise of a photography exhibit — on the bike lanes that run down the middle of the historic Stone Arch Bridge. Several bike-pedestrian crashes ensued.

Photo: David Harvey, Flickr

We crossed a line in the turf this month when the publicly owned place where the Minnesota Vikings (alone, now) play football was renamed “Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.” Let the re-branding of one of Minnesota’s greatest statesmen begin. 

The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, the public body that owns and operates the Humphrey Metrodome by authority of the State of Minnesota, gave its blessing for the Vikings to sell naming rights for various parts of the facility.

The Mall of America gave the Vikings an untold sum to buy naming rights to the field for three years. As the Star Tribune’s Steve Brandt points out in his “Dateline Minneapolis” column:

It’s just another example of the commercialization of the public realm in the Twin Cities. We pay most of the bill to erect stadia and arenas through sales taxes, tickets or state bonds but the sponsors who kick in the relatively few last dollars in the deal get the naming rights. There’s Target Center. Xcel Energy Center. TCF Bank Stadium. And Target Field is on the way.

Two doors down from the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota is a business-school building where every classroom carries a corporate logo. The university’s marching band has twice formed the logo for TCF Bank — at the opening game at the university’s new TCF Bank Stadium, and at the university’s final football game at what is now Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Stadium.

Brandt laments “how far we’ve ebbed in our sense of the distinction between the public and private realms.” But that’s what makes the Mall of America the perfect private purchaser for a public place-name. The mall was the site of a landmark 1999 Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that free-speech rights don’t extend to its public spaces.

Say, speaking of free speech: Here’s how one of Humphrey’s best-loved quotes – from his famous speech to the 1948 Democratic National Convention when he was mayor of Minneapolis — could be rebranded for today:

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of naming rights, I say to them we are 29 years late. To those who say that this naming-rights program is an infringement on the state’s rights, I say this: The time has arrived for the Mall of America to help the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission to get out of the shadow of state’s rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of naming rights. People — human beings — this will be the issue of the 21st century. People of all kinds — all sorts of people — are looking to the Mall of America for leadership, and they’re looking to the Mall of America for precept and example and shopping.

Image: mnhs.org

“The Road to TCF Bank Stadium” is being shown on the Big Ten Network cable TV channel and at the U of M website (or below).

It’s 22 minutes long but apparently fills a half hour on TV, with breaks between seven sections carrying titles like “Game Day Experience” and “Teamwork.”

You can glimpse the band form the “TCF” logo in a small box during the ending credits, but it’s easier to see in a separate short showing the entire Sept. 12 opening game against Air Force in only two minutes, using time-lapse videography.

Dusk has fallen, the field lights are on, and the band comes out to form a giant “M” for Minnesota at the 1:40 mark. The students in the marching band then transform their “M” into the letters “TCF” as they appear in the bank’s ads and signs.

Update: Tim Diem, director of the university’s marching band, tells the Minnesota Independent the band was simply displaying the name of the stadium. “If they’d named it Veterans Stadium, we would have spelled out ‘Veterans,’” Diem says. He disputes that the band had formed a corporate logo: “It’s the name of the building.” The home opener at TCF Bank Stadium was the second time the band did the “TCF” formation, according to Diem. They also did it last year at the Metrodome, when like last month, he says, “We were putting on a celebration.”

The longer video has a variety of people saying nice things about the university, the stadium, and the process that got TCF Bank Stadium built. Says Dave Mona of the Gopher Radio Broadcast Team:

I was afraid I’d see a ton of advertising. You’re not going to see — This is not a NASCAR. This is a college football stadium. I think people will be pleasantly surprised. Even though there’s a lot of corporate money in here, it’s very subtle.

But those “subtle” ads and logos that do make it into the stadium reach young adults in the midst of an important rite of passage, on the cusp of becoming full-fledged consumers. As U of M child-development Prof. Rich Weinberg sees it from his bleacher seat:

It’s been almost 28 years, I believe, since we’ve had a generation of students that have had the opportunity to experience this. And I really feel strongly that it’s not just by being in the classroom that’s important, but the whole socialization as a young adult really includes this experience.

Of course, even U of M classrooms carry corporate logos these days.

In the video, you’ll watch in vain for any explanation of TCF Bank’s $35 million naming-rights deal beyond a listing for the bank under the heading “Significant Corporate Sponsors & Donors.” That blurs a line that’s distinct in the lengthy contract between the university and the bank: TCF is paying for advertising.

Yet TCF Bank Chairman Bill Cooper seems to like that line blurred. Here’s what he told Mona and Star Tribune sports columnist Sid Hartman on their “Sports Huddle” show on WCCO-AM last Sunday:

It’s kind of half charity and half business. We’ve seen a lot of business out of it.

Here’s “The Road to TCF Bank Stadium”:

Photo: Minnesota Independent

On a Saturday night last month, roughly 70 Minneapolis Hmong residents gathered at Fairview Park on the city’s North Side. They were joined by Minneapolis City Council members Barb Johnson and Don Samuels, who represent the area, to discuss relations between the Minneapolis Police Department and the Hmong community.

The meeting was prompted, in part, by a recently released study by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) that documents the paucity of Hmong police officers on the force. But also shadowing the meeting were several troubling incidents involving cops assigned to the MPD’s 4th Precinct and the Hmong community in recent years. In 2006, 19-year-old Fong Lee was shot eight times by an officer after fleeing police. Then in 2007, 22 shots were fired when police wrongly raided a Hmong family’s home during a botched drug raid.

“We’re a group that oftentimes doesn’t get heard from,” says Yia Yang, a community organizer with CURA who attended the meeting at Fairview Park. “But there’s really not that much trust with the Minneapolis Police Department.”

A couple of seemingly simple proposals came out of the meeting at Fairview Park. Representatives of the Hmong community wanted to sit down with Police Chief Tim Dolan and 4th Precinct Inspector Michael Martin to express their concerns. More concretely, they wanted a Hmong-speaking officer assigned to the day shift in the 4th Precinct as soon as possible.

The CURA study seemingly backs up the need for such a personnel move. At the time of the 2000 census, the most recent period for which figures are available, there were just under 10,000 Hmong residents of Minneapolis. Roughly 70 percent of those inhabitants were clustered in the 4th Precinct, which covers all of the city’s North Side.

But MPD recruitment has failed to keep up with demographic trends — a phenomenon that certainly isn’t limited to the Minneapolis force. The 900-officer agency has just eight Hmong police officers, representing less than one percent of the force.

Further troubling to members of the Hmong community is where those officers are assigned. More than half of the Hmong officers patrol the 5th Precinct in southwest Minneapolis, an area that is predominantly wealthy and white. Just 226 Hmong residents — or roughly two percent of the city’s overall Hmong population resided in the 5th District at the time of the 2000 census.

Meanwhile the 4th Precinct, home to the majority of Minneapolis’ Hmong population, has just two Hmong officers. What’s more, both of those cops work the overnight shift. The upshot: when Hmong residents of the North Side, many of whom are recent arrivals in this country and have limited English language skills, call the cops for help there’s generally no one available who speaks their language. Shifting one of the existing Hmong cops to the day shift in the 4th Precinct seemed like a simple, common-sense means to at least partly address the problem.

“That is what the community feels would address this problem for them,” says Don Samuels. “I’m supportive of it.”

But Samuels and others realize that getting a Hmong cop assigned to the day shift in the 4th Precinct is not as simple as it might sound. MPD’s personnel policies are governed by a labor contract with explicit rules regarding assignments and shifts. In essence, individual officers bid for assignments based on order of seniority.

“We can’t tell people where they can and cannot work,” says Sgt. Jesse Garcia, an MPD spokesman. “To actually move somebody over there would be outside of the contract and basically against their rights as an employee.”

Garcia compares it to posting a job listing for a police liaison at (predominantly-black) North Community High School and limiting it to African-American candidates. “You would be staring down the barrel of a lawsuit at some point,” he says.

Garcia also points out that the CURA study relies on outdated numbers to draw its conclusions, as the 2000 census was completed nearly a decade ago. He argues that the Hmong community is no longer so heavily concentrated on the North Side. “It has spread out through the city much more,” he says.

In addition, any deal would have to be brokered with the Minneapolis Police Federation. The police union has notoriously sharp elbows and lately has been at loggerheads with police brass over the firing of officer Jason Andersen.

Andersen is the cop who shot Fong Lee in 2006. He was exonerated of any wrongdoing by the department, and a civil jury subsequently ruled that Andersen did not use excessive force in shooting Lee. But Andersen was subsequently arrested on a domestic assault charge, which apparently prompted an internal affairs investigation by the MPD and led to his dismissal.

The police federation has made it clear that it’s not happy about Andersen’s firing. Lt. Robert Kroll, vice president of the police union, told the Pioneer Press last month that Andersen was simply a hard-nosed cop doing his job.

“In the current administration, that is not tolerated,” Kroll told the St. Paul daily. “They don’t want big, tough street cops. They feel he got them negative press over Fong Lee, so they’re going to make him pay.”

While the internal-police spat has little to do with whether a Hmong cop is assigned to the 4th Precinct day shift, it might mean that the police federation will be in little mood to compromise over contractual obligations. (Calls to the police union by Minnesota Independent were not returned.)

Despite these hurdles, Wameng Moua, editor of Hmong Today, argues that the city’s leadership can get a Hmong officer assigned to the day shift in the 4th Precinct if it’s truly viewed as a priority. Even a Hmong liaison who is not a sworn law-enforcement officer would be a big improvement, he notes.

“We all know that if anything is a priority they’re going to pursue it despite any budget restraints,” Moua says. “To me it just seems the mayor, the chief, they just don’t see it as a priority to help out a big part of their constituency.”

Samuels hopes that some kind of deal can eventually be brokered.

“I think we have to broach the subject with the police and the union to see if exceptional circumstances could bring about an exceptional compromise,” he says, “because there is significant hardship in the community.”

Photo: Chris Steller, MnIndy

Saturday night, sports fans filling the new TCF Bank Stadium at the University of Minnesota can enjoy some good old-fashioned logo-spotting the way it was meant to be — back on campus and under the stars. You can help Goldy Gopher do a spot check to see if the University of Minnesota is fulfilling its contractual obligations to market TCF Bank.

It’s one thing to say the name of a private bank every time you refer to the public university’s new stadium. True enthusiasts will want to go the extra yardage by checking off these randomly selected stipulations from the $35 million contract between TCF and the U of M:

__ [TCF Bank Stadium] and/or Stadium Logo shall be prominently displayed in a fixed manner on the exterior of the Stadium … visible and readable from the two intersections abutting the Stadium site through which it is anticipated that the majority of cars passing the Stadium will move … [T]the University shall not be required to demolish any existing buildings in order to achieve such visibility.

__ The name “University of Minnesota” and the slogan “Home of the Golden Gophers” and such other slogans as the University may adopt from time to time for marketing University of Minnesota football or University of Minnesota athletics in general (”University Slogans”) may be displayed at up to sixty percent (60%) of the size of [TCF Bank Stadium] on fixed signs that number in the aggregate … fewer than or equal to the combined number of prominent exterior signs displaying [TCF Bank Stadium]. If the University’s name or slogan is illuminated in any location, then the exterior sign(s) in the same location that bear [TCF Bank Stadium] shall be illuminated with the same or greater lighting quality and intensity. …

__ [TCF Bank Stadium] shall be prominently displayed on a “welcome” sign in the Stadium ticket lobby.

__ [TCF Bank Stadium] shall be prominently displayed over the largest two scoreboards … [T]he height of the uppercase letters in [TCF Bank Stadium] is at least the same as the height of the clock and score digits of such scoreboards and [TCF Bank Stadium] is sufficiently illuminated as to avoid being obscured by the intensity of light emanating from scoreboard displays.

__ [TCF Bank Stadium] shall appear on all University Home Game tickets … University shall not use Home Game or Event ticket backs to advertise or promote any Financial Services Company or its products or services. …

__ [TCF Bank Stadium] and/or Logo will appear on name badges used by service employees employed by University. …

__ [TCF Bank Stadium] and/or Logo will appear on all vehicles that are exclusively dedicated to maintenance at the Stadium.

__ To the extent that it has control over radio and television broadcasts, the University shall require the [TCF Bank Stadium] be used to identify the Stadium in all of such broadcasts that emanate from the Stadium.

__ TCF shall have one full-page color ad per Home Game in all game day football programs, which may be located on the inside front cover, back cover, or in the center, as TCF may choose.

Just across campus, you can warm up for your evening of logo-spotting with a visit to another new U of M building crowded with corporate logos. Herbert M. Hanson, Jr. Hall, which opened a year ago at the Carlson School of Management on the West Bank campus. Can you find logos for:

Securian?

Wells Fargo and Dairy Queen?

Best Buy?

Toro?

SuperValu and Travellers?

And for champion logo-spotters only, four in one go: Can you find logos for 3M, Target, General Mills and US Bank?

A Chinook helicopter flies over Afghanistan (U.S. Army photo)

WASHINGTON — Last year, as Dr. Steven Miles, professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, was researching the deaths of detainees in U.S. custody, he noticed something strange. Although the Department of Defense had in the past issued press releases when detainees died at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, at some point in 2006, he says, the “entire prisoner death reporting system was turned off in Afghanistan.” Although at that time deaths in Iraq were still being reported, he says, that system was “turned off” at the beginning of 2008.

Miles, a member of the board of the Center for Victims of Torture and author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and America’s War on Terror,” was working on an updated edition of his 2006 book, which documents how physicians and psychologists working for the U.S. military violated the Hippocratic oath and American Medical Association rules by helping the government design and monitor abusive interrogations. The Hippocratic oath requires doctors to consider above all the health of their patients and to do no harm, while an AMA directive prohibits physicians from “providing or withholding any services, substances, or knowledge to facilitate the practice of torture” and obliges doctors to support victims and to “strive to change situations in which torture is practiced.”

Instead, Miles documented, first in the British medical journal the Lancet and then more expansively in his book, physicians actually helped facilitate torture. “The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations” in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, he wrote. Death certificates were falsified and military health officers were either reporting instances of torture late, or not reporting them at all, he found. And, he observes in the Appendix to the book’s second edition, titled “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors,” published by University of California Press this year, the military appeared to be using physicians and psychologists to test the reactions of detainees to particular interrogation techniques, which may well violate ethical bans on experimentation on human subjects. Physicians for Human Rights recently released a report documenting similar concerns.

As Miles was working on his book, he realized there were huge gaps in the military’s reporting about the torture, injury and death of detainees in its custody. Although Miles says the Pentagon never reported the deaths of detainees subjected to “extraordinary rendition” — those sent to other countries for interrogation, sometimes under torture — the Pentagon had, at least, been reporting the deaths of some prisoners it acknowledged having in its custody.

Then one day, the press releases stopped. “They just stopped reporting it,” said Miles last week. It couldn’t be that no one died, he said, because “you have a certain expected death rate based on the size of the population. I’ve been able to trace all public death reports and can show when they turned them off.”

Last week, the Washington Independent first reported that the Department of Defense appears to have stopped releasing information about the deaths of detainees in its custody in Afghanistan and Iraq. (It has continued to release them concerning detainees at Guantanamo, most of whom are represented by lawyers.) Despite numerous daily requests for a response from the Pentagon since the middle of last week, the site has still not received any information from the government about whether or why it stopped issuing these reports for its other detention centers abroad.

Miles, meanwhile, has used his findings to write an article about the Pentagon’s failure to disclose detainee deaths and their causes. The paper is now being prepared for publication in the American Journal of Bioethics, a leading bioethics journal and website. In his paper, Miles writes:

In May 2004, shortly after media published photographs of lethal abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, DoD disclosed 22 prisoner deaths; of which 12 (54%) were attributed to natural causes. DOD did not disclose another 67 deaths that occurred during that same period. Only 13 (15%) of the total 89 deaths were due to natural causes. By the end of 2008, 93 of 165 known decedents (56%) are unnamed. Death certificates are available for 37 (22%). Homicides and shelling of prisons are the leading causes of death. DoD has completely suppressed prisoner death reports from Afghanistan since 2004 and adopted a similar policy for Iraq in 2008.

That the government has concealed or delayed reporting on deaths in its custody is nothing new. The New York Times reported in 2004 that the Defense Department had provided incomplete or inaccurate information about deaths of prisoners in its custody. And Human Rights First, a leading human rights legal advocacy organization, in a comprehensive report in 2006 documented similar gaps in the government’s reporting of deaths in U.S. custody.

“Our report found that commanders failed to report deaths in custody,” said Devon Chaffee, advocacy counsel with Human Rights First. “Sometimes they reported them days or weeks later. But there clearly was a reporting problem. Some were simply not reported at all,” she said, although Army regulations require that deaths in U.S. custody be reported within 24 hours.

Human Rights First’s report, Command’s Responsibility, based on its study of autopsy reports and interviews with military personnel, witnesses and physicians, found that between August 2002 and February 2006 nearly 100 detainees had died “while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global ‘war on terror.’” Although the military had deemed 34 of those deaths suspected or confirmed homicides, Human Rights First counted a total of 45 cases where the facts suggested “death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention.” What’s more, in almost half the cases surveyed, “the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced.” Overall, the group found, by the beginning of 2006, “eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.”

The international Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, requires each signatory country to report publicly the deaths of detainees in its custody. But because President Bush early on decided that detainees in the “war on terror” are not technically “Prisoners of War” entitled to the protections the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. military has not followed that requirement.

The Obama administration does not appear to have changed the reporting policy, although at least some officials in the administration have declared the “war on terror” over. Still, the Pentagon under President Obama has not resumed regular reporting on the deaths of prisoners in custody, says Miles. The system is “still shut down,” he said. “Obama hasn’t opened it up. It’s just mysterious to me.”

The Washington Independent has called and written to officials in the Defense Department at least six different times in the last week, asking for a response to this claim about its reporting and for a statement of the current policy on reporting detainee deaths. Late yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the DoD issues press releases when detainees die at Guantanamo Bay; the Washington Independent still has not received an answer with regard to the deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Regardless of the DoD policy, however, the result of the suppression of this information is that no one seems to know how many detainees in U.S. custody have died – including how many of those have been murdered or tortured to death – since the “war on terror” began.

Chafee said that Human Rights First and other human rights organizations, as far as she knows, have not had the resources to update their reports to keep an accurate count.

Representatives for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights said those organizations have not been able to track those numbers, either. Both have sought information from the government related to detainee deaths through the Freedom of Information Act.

Daphne Eviatar is a law reporter for the Washington Independent.

Source: Wikipedia

The University of Minnesota’s Stem Cell Institute is facing scrutiny for the second time in a year over allegations of falsified data in research reports. The New Scientist identified the suspect research in April, prompting the University to launch an investigation.

Last fall, an expert panel ruled that a former Ph.D. student in the institute, Morayma Reyes, falsified images in a published research report.

And this spring, the New Scientist identified more allegedly falsified research involving photographs by researcher Jizhen Lin.

In April, New Scientist told the university of our concerns about Lin’s work. The university took the decision to begin an inquiry in mid-July, but it has not clarified which papers will be covered. Lin declined to comment on the concerns about his work while the inquiry is under way.

The New Scientist inquiries have resulted in three papers affiliated with the Stem Cell Institute being corrected and one being retracted entirely.

In all cases, researchers appear to have used doctored photos as evidence in published reports.

The University of Minnesota’s Stem Cell Institute has also been the subject of controversy over an effort by anti-abortion activists to have the institute’s embryonic stem cell research shut down.

The university originally wanted to limit alcohol sales at its new football stadium to luxury seating such as suites. But the legislature passed a law mandating equal access to booze. Rather than acquiesce, the Board of Regents opted instead for an outright ban.