Na Índia, escaneiam cérebro de réus em julgamentos

Leiam a incrível matéria completa no New York Times, India’s use of brain scans in courts dismays critics :

MUMBAI, India: The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete. Some scientists predict the end of lying as we know it.

Now, well before any consensus on the technology’s readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question.

For years, scientists have peered into the brain and sought to identify deception. They have shot infrared beams through liars’ heads, placed them in giant magnetic resonance imaging machines and used scanners to track their eyeballs. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has plowed money into brain-based lie detection in the hope of producing more fruitful counterterrorism investigations.

The technologies, generally regarded as promising but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence — except in India, where in recent years judges have begun to admit brain scans. But it was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison.

Psychologists and neuroscientists in the United States, which has been at the forefront of brain-based lie detection, variously called India’s application of the technology to legal cases “fascinating,” “ridiculous,” “chilling” and “unconscionable.”(…)

Guerra ao terrorismo migra do Oriente Médio para o Sul da Ásia, diz StrategyPage

Do ótimo site StrategyPage, de Jim Dunnigan, autor de How to Make War:

August 12, 2008: Iraq is quickly being displaced by South Asia as the area with the most terrorist activity. Currently, about a third of the world’s terrorist casualties are occurring in Iraq (currently, about 40 a day). Until al Qaeda and the local Sunni Arabs decided to use terror tactics to restore Iraq to Sunni rule, the Persian Gulf saw little terrorist activity. Well established police states saw to that. But South Asia has never had that kind of iron rule, and many terrorist groups have had more opportunities, for a very long time. Moreover, their recent defeat in Iraq has sent al Qaeda operatives, technicians and cash to Afghanistan. This showed up last March, when, for the first time, there were more terrorist deaths in Afghanistan (527) than in Pakistan (351).

Terrorism has been common in Pakistan for decades, mostly between Islamic radicals who don’t like each other very much. But since the Afghan Taliban were overthrown in late 2001. The Islamic radicals became quite angry with the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, where remnants of the Taliban continued to fight for power, or to support their main financial base among the heroin gangs. The Taliban and al Qaeda leadership were hiding out in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where the government was having a hard time finding and catching all of them.

Sul da Ásia: Índia, Sri Lanka, Paquistão...

Pakistan has some unique problems. It’s not just the national average illiteracy rate of 66 percent (and unemployment rate of ten percent) that causes so much unrest. In the tribal territories along the Afghan border, the illiteracy rate is over 90 percent, and the unemployment rate is unknown, but believed to be very high, even if you count most of those seemingly idle guys with guns, as employed. The tribal areas contain less than ten percent of the population, but far more of the armed unrest and terrorism. There are similar situations in rural India (the northeast and northwest, as well as communist rebels all through the jungles and hills of eastern India.) Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern coast of India, has been fighting separatist terrorists for decades, and recently has been a major source of terrorist activity in South Asia.

The shift of terrorism activity from the Middle East (Iraq, Lebanon and Israel) to South Asia won’t be as abrupt as it may seem. South Asia has had problems with terrorists decades before it became a big problem in the Middle East. Things will settle down in the Middle East, but will continue to get messier in South Asia.

Leia a matéria original: The War Moves East, Strategypage.com

Strategypage: Bangladesh faz novas leis para julgar terroristas e cortar financiamento

June 20, 2008: Bangladesh has established a special tribunal to try terrorism suspects. There are also new laws making it easier to cut off terrorist financing. The government believes that there are over 10,000 Islamic radicals in the southwestern parts of the country, and several Islamic radical organizations are trying to get some terrorist action going. So far, the police have jailed those who were getting too close to turning talk into action. Meanwhile, India has been accusing Bangladeshi Islamic radicals for several recent attacks in India.

Leia no site original: Bangladesh Cracks Down, Strategypage.com