Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Defining Terrorism: A Difference of Opinion

In order to successfully combat terrorism around the world, there must be a universal method of identifying potential terrorists or terrorist organizations. In order to accomplish this task, nations must come to an agreement on an objective definition of the word terrorism. Unfortunately, many nations around the world define terrorism differently. The lack of a common definition of terrorism may allow one nation to identify an organization as terrorist group, while another nation identifies the same organization as a legitimate group. This is often referred to as, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

READ ON
http://www.police-writers.com/defining_terrorism_difference_opinion.html

Sensors May Lead to Faster Treatment for Traumatic Brain Injuries

By Fred W. Baker III
American Forces Press Service

Jan. 14, 2008 - While it still may be years away,
military medical officials hope to one day place a sensor on every troop that would measure a blast's impact and alert a combat medic to the possibility of a brain injury. The latest fielding of helmets fitted with blast sensors to troops deploying to combat could be the first step to gathering the data to support that technology, Michael J. Leggieri Jr., deputy coordinator for DoD's Blast Injury Research Program Coordinating Office, said.

Brigades from the 101st Airborne and the 4th Infantry divisions will wear helmets fitted with sensors throughout their deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. The sensors will record routine impact data, as well as any blasts, or "events," to which the soldiers are exposed.

Leggieri is quick to point out that at this stage, however, the data will not be used in diagnosing or treating soldiers. Still in its infancy, the
technology's first hurtle will be to prove that a sensor reading can be matched to an event, he said.

"We need to figure out if we can actually, with some confidence, say that 'Yes, these data are representative of an ... event.' We don't know that yet," he explained.

The sensor data will be recorded along with other operational data that is typically gathered after an event such as a bomb explosion. That data is entered into an intelligence database with the National Ground
Intelligence Center that already is in use in the field. At the same time, if an injury occurred, patient data is recorded in a trauma registry also already in place.

The two databases are kept separate, Leggieri said.

"These helmet sensors, they are not medical devices. The data that they record are not medical data. So you can't take, and we won't allow anyone to take, the raw sensor data and make any kinds of decisions about medical treatment, or injuries or anything else," Leggieri said.

After the blast data is studied, and officials determine that it is reliable, they will then go back and match the event data with injury data. The medical community has access to the data through the Joint Trauma Analysis and Prevention of Injury in Combat Program. Officials want to see if they can make a connection between what is seen on the sensor reading and any resulting injury. This will help them to begin "unraveling" some of the causes of brain injury, Leggieri said.

"We know that if you hit your head against something, or if something hits your head, that you can get a brain injury. But the mechanism, at the cellular level -- how does that happen? There are still a lot of unknowns there," Leggieri said.

For example, Leggieri said that despite reports that exposure to a blast – or primary blast overpressure – can cause mild traumatic brain injury, there are no definitive studies to show that link.

"We don't know, in fact, if being exposed to primary blast overpressure can cause a mild traumatic brain injury. And, if it can cause a mild traumatic brain injury, we don't know what that mechanism would be," he said.

The specific cause of the injury, or the mechanism, is used to develop protection strategies and to design diagnostic tools and treatments.

Within the next year, if the data proves reliable, the impact data may be used as an "event monitor," Leggieri said. Similar devices are used in football players' helmets, where a particularly hard hit would signal a doctor's need for review. Combat
leaders on the ground could use the data to refer the servicemember to medical officials who would then use diagnostic tools to determine if an injury occurred.

But, first things first, Leggieri said. What makes this project valuable, he explained, is that researchers will be able to gather actual impact data from soldiers in combat, as opposed to research conducted in a laboratory.

"Right now we are getting an understanding of what happens out there – what kinds of impacts are the soldiers seeing – trying to understand that first, and then linking it to resulting injuries," he said.

Currently, data collection from only these two deployments is planned.

The sensor model fielded to 101st Airborne Division attaches to the back of the advanced combat helmet. It weights about 6 ounces and has enough memory to store data on 527 events. An internally mounted model will be fielded to the 4th Infantry Division. The sensor sits under the padding in the crown of the helmet. To harvest information from either sensor type, a soldier simply connects it to a
computer using a USB port, hits "save" and sends the data to a secure database.

National Security Archive Update, January 14, 2008

In 1974 Estimate, CIA Found that Israel Already Had a Nuclear Stockpile and that "Many Countries" Would Soon Have Nuclear Capabilities

Washington DC, January 14, 2008 - In the wake of the Indian "peaceful nuclear explosion" on May 17, 1974 and growing concern about the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities, the U.S. intelligence community prepared a Special National
Intelligence Assessment, "Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons," published today by the National Security Archive.

The 1974 Indian test created shock waves in the U.S. government, not only because of its broader implications, but because the
intelligence community had failed to detect that it was imminent (This failure led to an intelligence post-mortem.) The possibility that the Indian test might lead to a nuclear arms race in South Asia and create new pressures for nuclear proliferation elsewhere induced the U.S. government, which under Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had treated this problem as a lower-level issue, to begin viewing developing policies to curb proliferation as a higher priority.

That the SNIE estimated that "many countries" would have the economic and technological capability to produce nuclear weapons by the 1980s underlined the seriousness of the problem, as did another statement: "
Terrorists might attempt theft of either weapons or fissionable materials." Noting that there were over 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world, the report observed that "absolute assurance about future security is impossible."

The CIA released the 1974 SNIE in response to a FOIA request by National
Security Archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson, author of Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (New York: W.W. Norton,2006). Quicker than usual, the CIA posted the SNIE on its Web site before the National Security Archive published the document. In response to the CIA posting, the estimate has already received some play in the U.S. and Israeli press, as well as on www.armscontrolwonk.com. Interestingly, twenty years ago, the CIA released an excised version of the "Summary and Conclusions" of this document in response to a FOIA request by the Natural Resources Defense Council. It became the subject of a front-page story in The New York Times on 26 January 1978, under the headline, "C.I.A. Said in 1974 Israel had A-Bombs." In response to press queries, the CIA stated that the release was a mistake because it included some classified details.

Visit the Web site of the National
Security Archive for more information about today's posting.

http://www.nsarchive.org