Ethics Newsline®

One of the most frequently reproduced photos from 2006 shows former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko shortly before his death from radioactive poisoning last month. His wan face, staring blankly at the camera from his London hospital bed, seems to telegraph three questions: Who, why, and what next?

In the coming months, these three questions — especially the last — will test the moral courage of Western nations.

Among Russia watchers in the West, the first question — who did it? — is in little doubt. All signs point to Moscow’s agents. Litvinenko, while still a colonel in the FSB (a successor organization to the Soviet clandestine service, the KGB), had criticized his agency and his government. He fled to London and became a British citizen. He was a noted critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin. He was on close terms with London’s most notable Russian exile, the billionaire financier Boris Berezovsky, whom he had been ordered by his FSB superiors to exterminate. At the time he was poisoned, he had begun investigating the assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of the Kremlin shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in October.

As he lay dying, Litvinenko accused Putin of orchestrating his death, a charge that Putin has dismissed. Now, however, traces of radioactivity have been found on British Airways planes that flew the London-Moscow route around the time of Litvinenko’s poisoning. And as of this writing, London media is reporting that British counterterrorism agents are heading to Moscow for further investigations.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for Russian involvement, however, is the choice of poisons. This is apparently the first time that highly refined polonium 210 has been used in this way — perhaps because it is so hard to obtain. Though polonium occurs in nature at very low levels, refining this isotope into poison requires sophisticated nuclear technology of the sort typically available only to state-supported actors.

Who wanted Litvinenko gone? Who had the means to arrange his death? Who had access to such a poison? Twist these three strands together, and the cable of evidence strongly ties this case to Moscow. But it doesn’t explain which of Moscow’s many factions was behind it. Putin himself? Rogue units within the FSB, wanting to discredit Putin or the agency? Or the FSB itself?

To sort that out, you need to ask why — not why he was killed, but why polonium 210. After all, if you want to silence a dissident, you can do it cheaply with a pistol. You can do it also with well-known poisons that are fatal within minutes. You can even make it seem accidental, so the trail can’t be traced.

But that presumes you’re after only one person. What if your goal is to send a message to every Russian exile, former spy, or would-be dissident still within Moscow’s clandestine services? The message: Don’t even imagine that you can get away with betraying us. We will track you down wherever you are — even in the well-secured capital of one of our former foes — and we will exterminate you. Don’t imagine that you’re not worth the expense; we’ll go out of our way to invent methods never before known. Don’t imagine we wouldn’t dare; we can construct plots so brash and bizarre that they will show up on television screens around the world. And don’t think we care about hiding; we’ll make sure this news story drags on interminably, reminding the world who did it. The result: Long after you’re forgotten, we’ll still be dreaded and invincible.

Seen that way, the pieces fall into place. This in fact may be a remarkably sophisticated modern act of terrorism. Like terrorism everywhere, its principal purpose is not to kill but to send messages. Since spreading those messages depends on intense media coverage, those repeated pictures of Litvinenko’s slow death were essential to the plan. And like most terrorist acts, it has no use for anonymity. The important point is to let your enemies know who did it — and to raise fears that you’ll strike again.

Given those overlapping strands, the choice of polonium 210 is diabolically clever. You don’t need to claim responsibility: Who else could do it? You don’t need to drum up global publicity: The media supplies it freely. You don’t need to track down and threaten each dissident: They’ll all be watching.

Would Putin do it? With all he has at stake in the global arena, that seems doubtful. Could rogue secret service officers do it? Probably not without broad access to the whole system. But would the FSB do it? Given its history of poisoning — extending, allegedly, to the use of dioxin against pro-Western Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko during the election in 2004 — it reputedly has few qualms about assassinations in general or this ancient methodology in particular. Given its fierce hauteur and fearsome reputation, it has a tradition of slapping down its enemies. And given the existential dangers it faces from the democratic ideals and processes of the West, where assassination typically is not permitted as a tool of statecraft, it may think the time has come for a grand flourish.

Then what next? The West faces a profound moral choice. If investigations increasingly point to the FSB, will Western nations give Moscow a mere slap on the wrist in the interests of maintaining diplomatic relations? Or will they take a firm and collective stand against a partner who, while aligned with the West in fighting terrorism, is not only using state-sponsored terrorism but inventing new forms for doing so? One thing is sure: This is no small story. If the FSB is at its core, it is either about a once-powerful but fading agency trying to reassert itself, or about a newly empowered agency expanding its global reach. Either way, the next few months will test the moral courage of the West.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics

“Many governments cooperated passively or actively [with the U.S. government]. They knew.”

– Giovanni Claudio Fava, head of a special investigative team of the European Parliament, announcing findings last week that despite their denials, 11 European countries worked with the CIA to “secretly abduct, transport, and detain terrorist suspects,” reports the New York Times. Countries named in Fava’s report include Britain, Germany, and Italy.

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”The conduct of AWB and its officers was due to a failure in corporate culture…. AWB has cast a shadow over Australia’s reputation in international trade.”

– Former judge Terence Cole, reporting the findings of an inquiry into the Australian Wheat Board (AWB), which knowingly authorized $222 million in bribes to secure business with Saddam Hussein’s government. AWB officials repeatedly had denied any knowledge of the wrongdoing, which took place between 1999 and 2003 under the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. Cole recommended that police pursue criminal charges against 12 executives, reports the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON
For the past four years, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security data mining program secretly has assigned computer-generated scores to millions of international travelers entering or leaving the United States, rating the risks they pose of being a terrorist or a criminal.

The Associated Press reports that travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge their scores, which will be held by the government for 40 years.

Scores in the Automated Targeting System (ATS) are based on a computer analysis of factors such as travel records, destinations and points of origin, nationality, past travel, license plate numbers, and even what sort of meal was ordered during a flight, according to various press reports.

The ATS program’s existence was revealed last month in an inconspicuous notice published in the Federal Register, the Washington Post reports. The mechanism first had been implemented as a method to screen cargo about 10 years ago, but later was expanded quietly to create risk profiles for individuals.

Travelers’ ATS scores could subject them to extra scrutiny at customs, and the data will be available to various government agencies, contractors, and consultants, according to the computer trade journal InformationWeek.

Homeland Security spokesman Jarod Agen defended the program as reasonable and necessary for public safety.

“If you booked your flight by cell phone and that cell phone shows up at a terrorist’s safe house, you will be under greater scrutiny,” he said, according to a report from the Washington bureau of the Toronto Star.

Agen also said that long-term retention of data is essential because terror plots take years to develop.

Incoming Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) pledged to scrutinize the ATS program as well as other databases, according to the Boston Herald.

Various privacy groups expressed doubt about the system late last week, claiming that it subjects law-abiding travelers to intrusive, secretive, and unchallenged monitoring.

Last Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed formal comments urging the government to abandon the program, according to the Washington Post.

In addition, the senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the Post that he believes that allowing the program to run for years without formal notification is a violation of federal privacy laws.

Overseas news organizations note that the revelation of the program’s existence is causing concern among international travelers. The Times of London reports that among those worries is the belief that “hundreds of Americans have had problems in being misidentified persistently as terror suspects” under faulty monitoring programs.

The London-based Guardian quoted Gareth Crossman, policy director for a civil rights group called Liberty, as charging that the ATS system is “profiling rather than intelligence-led policing” and that it lacks “human input, which is troubling.”

BOSTON
More than a third of experts who oversee clinical trials at medical schools and research hospitals have a financial relationship with companies that sell drugs or medical devices, according to a new survey from the New England Journal of Medicine.

According to a summary of the report from the Los Angeles Times News Service, nearly 7 percent of members of hospital review boards — committees established to protect the welfare of patients in experimental trials — discussed or voted on clinical studies sponsored either by companies with which they specifically had a relationship or by those firms’ direct competitors.

The Associated Press reports that the study found that many who have such conflicts rarely or never disclose them.

In addition, the survey of 563 members of 100 institutional review boards found that most scientists and physicians who sit on those panels said they had received no guidance on ethical issues relating to conflict of interest or what to do if they faced such a conflict, report the AP and National Public Radio.

According to an analysis from the Boston Globe, some patient advocates say the study is alarming. If a review board “is riddled with financial conflicts of interest, it’s not going to be as protective as it should be,” Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, told the Globe.

Federal regulations say that researchers who review medical experiments must avoid conflicts of interests so that patients who volunteer for studies are not subject to excessive risk from research in which scientists make a profit, according to the Reuters news agency.

BEIJING
Looking to avoid interference from animal rights groups, U.S. firms are outsourcing drug testing to China, where there is a plentiful supply of dogs, cheap scientists, and government regulations that stifle protest, the Boston Globe reports.

Globe Beijing correspondent Jehangir Pocha writes that companies such as Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, and Roche have disclosed plans to establish research and development centers in China.

Many companies also are expected to outsource their animal-testing clinical trials to firms specializing in setting up Chinese-based testing.

The head of one such firm, Glenn Rice of Bridge Pharmaceuticals, tells the Globe that China is “a good place to be, as it is the world’s largest supplier of lab monkeys and canines — mostly beagles.”

“Animal testing also does not have the political issues it has in the U.S. or Europe or even India, where there are religious issues as well,” Rice told the Globe. “So now big pharma is looking to move to China in a big way.”

Rice tells the Globe that lower costs for Chinese testing will allow more research into so-called orphan diseases, ailments that do not ordinarily attract much research funding because of their rarity.

Animal rights groups have protested offshore outsourcing, characterizing it as a way to circumvent U.S. animal testing laws, but admit that it is difficult to mount sustained opposition in China, which did not have any animal welfare legislation until 2004 and inconsistently enforces the laws today, according to the report.

NEW YORK
In one of the more unlikely scenarios in recent education news, students from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism have been charged with cheating on an open-book, take-home exam.

In a pass-fail class.

In a course about ethics.

The New York Times reports that Columbia has admitted it is looking into the matter, but has not specified how the cheating might have taken place.

According to the New York Daily News, the alleged cheating may have involved students who took the exam discussing its contents with class members who had not yet taken it.

The exam, which was the final for a course dealing with journalism ethics, was administered online, with students required to write two pass-fail essays within 90 minutes during a time period of their choosing, UPI reports.

As of late last week, none of the 200 students in the required course has been formally charged with cheating, according to the newspaper trade journal Editor & Publisher, but all students will be required to attend a special course meeting to discuss the incident.

AUSTIN, Texas
A state ethics commission has opened a Texas-sized loophole in campaign law, ruling that public officials do not have to disclose how much money they receive from political donors. Instead, they only have to report they received a check, according to the Associated Press.

The AP notes that the ruling stems from a June 2005 case in which a Dallas state pension board member received two $50,000 checks meant to defray costs from a lawsuit related to his role as treasurer of the Texas fund-raising operation for former congressman Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

The board member had described the contributions only as “checks.” When the incident was revealed though other channels, an outraged state representative asked the ethics commission to change its rules and require disclosure of the amount of gifts, the AP reports.

But the Ethics Commission this week affirmed that state officials can accept unlimited cash donations without revealing the amount. According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, all they must do is reveal the source of the gift.

The Times notes that campaign watchdogs and some public officials said they were shocked by the ruling, arguing that it effectively was legalizing bribery.

“This creates a loophole big enough to drive an armored car full of cash through,” Craig McDonald, director of the nonprofit group Texans for Public Justice, told the Times. “It makes a mockery of our ethics laws.”

Four bills aimed at closing the loophole are expected to be filed in the state’s upcoming legislative session, according to the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Last week’s decision also touched off a volley of criticism in newspaper editorial pages across the Lone Star State.

Among the more vocal was the Houston Chronicle: “Try to imagine a more volatile ethical time bomb than this: a state that pays its lawmakers a pittance but allows them to accept cash and checks in undisclosed amounts from supporters and individuals seeking legislative favors,” reads the paper’s Nov. 29 editorial.

WASHINGTON
A dispute over an ethics issue dominated debate over the chairmanship of one of the U.S. House of Representative’s most important committees last week.

The leadership of the incoming Democratic Congress, which was swept into power after campaigning on a theme that the Republicans represented a “culture of corruption,” faced a dilemma over naming a new head of the House Intelligence Committee.

As the Voice of America news service reports, incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi passed over the two most senior Democrats on the committee, Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.) and Rep. Alcee Hastings (Fla.), in favor of Texas congressman Silvestre Reyes.

Pelosi’s decision came in the wake of an earlier controversy in which her first choice for majority leader, John Murtha (Penn.), was killed by a vote of House Democrats after Murtha’s earlier ethics-related problems were dusted off for display by Republicans and the press.

But unlike the majority leader post, the Wall Street Journal notes, most committee chairmanships, particularly those on so-called select committees, are awarded solely at the discretion of the speaker.

Although leadership posts are customarily decided by seniority, it was within Pelosi’s discretion to bypass the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, longtime political rival Harman, and the next-most-senior Hastings, who still carries ethical baggage from his impeachment as a federal judge in 1989, the New York Times reports.

Hastings, an African-American, was strongly backed by the Congressional Black Caucus, the Washington Post reports, and passing him over creates an additional complication for Pelosi’s relationship with the caucus, which she enraged earlier this year during another ethics scandal — when she removed Louisiana congressman William Jefferson, an African-American, from the powerful Ways and Means committee after she learned he was under investigation on bribery charges and that federal agents had found $90,000 hidden in his freezer.

MADRID
Haiti, the poorest nation in the Americas due in part to an economy crippled by corruption and lack of investor confidence in the government, last week pledged stricter oversight of donated funds designated to alleviate poverty.

The BBC reports that the commitment came after Haiti’s prime minister admitted that 99 percent of the $750 million dollars pledged in July had not reached the intended destinations.

Donors met with representatives from Haiti and other nations in a conference in Madrid last week, according to reports from the Reuters news agency and UPI.

Haiti elected a new president and slate of lawmakers this year, replacing an interim government that was put in place following an armed uprising by former military officers.

While prime minister Jacques Edouard Alexis reiterated his nation’s commitment to fight corruption, he bristled at claims that Haiti is the world’ most corrupt government, saying that a recent report making that claim was based on outdated information and did not reflect the performance of the current administration.

Referring to a Transparency International “Corruption Perceptions Index,” a survey of 163 countries in which Haiti received the lowest marks, Alexis told the Associated Press that the “methodology should be questioned.”

Haiti’s president, Rene Preval, has pledged to fight graft and clamp down on tax cheats, according to the AP report.

TAMPA, Fla.
A death in a Florida “boot camp” that dispensed harsh discipline and exercise as an alternative to traditional jail time resulted last week in indictments and controversy over the ethical obligations of guards and a nurse at the facility.

USA Today reports that while a videotape showed seven staffers pummeling the 14-year-old boy, who later died, one other person charged with manslaughter in the case did not strike or shove him.

Kristin Anne Schmidt, a nurse, is charged with causing the death of Martin Lee Anderson through “culpable negligence,” meaning she failed to make a reasonable effort to protect him, according to Tampa television station WSTP.

Video of the event showed the nurse standing by and not intervening in several incidents where the boy was hit, kneed, and forced to the ground, CNN reported. The boy had complained of breathing difficulties and died later in a hospital.

The death resulted in the closing of all of Florida’s “boot camps” as well as ongoing accusations that the death of the teen, who was black, was racially motivated. Five of the seven guards and the nurse are white.

Further inflaming the controversy were conflicting autopsy reports, one of which concluded that the youth died from complications of sickle-cell anemia while the other stated that he was suffocated as a result of smelling salts stuffed in his nose, according to a report from the Tampa Tribune.

LONDON
A new report says that consumers in the United Kingdom are spending more on so-called ethical products, such as environmentally friendly energy and organic foods, than on beer and cigarettes.

The BBC reports that the approximately $56 billion spent in 2005 surpassed the beer-and-cigarette total for the first time, and marked an 11 percent increase over the year before, according to an analysis by the Co-operative Bank’s annual Ethical Consumerism Report.

Other “ethical” products popular in the United Kingdom include Fairtrade coffee, which is produced with beans purchased under arrangements beneficial to third-world growers and to their environments, and free-range chickens, according to the Scotsman.

There is also substantial ethical-money trade in food, transportation, and financial products, the Times of London reports.

The increases in ethical spending appeared substantial given the fact that overall U.K. household expenditures rose only 1.4 percent during the same period, reported the London-based Independent.

According to the Independent report, there remains plenty of room for growth in products and services related to “ethical spending,” as it still represents only 5 percent of total spending by a typical U.K. household.

From CareerBuilder.com:

“Are employees getting away with playing hooky from the office? According to CareerBuilder.com’s annual survey on absenteeism, 32 percent of workers said they called in sick when they felt well at least once in the last year. One-in-ten admitted to doing so three times or more.

“And while some employers said they typically don’t question excuses given, others were more skeptical. Twenty-seven percent of hiring managers reported they have fired a worker for calling in sick without a legitimate reason….

“The most popular motivator for missing work was the need to relax, according to nearly half (48 percent) of workers. Twenty-four percent of workers pointed to the desire to catch up on sleep while 20 percent cited personal errands. Other top reasons included doctor’s appointments (17 percent), plans with family and friends (16 percent), and housework (16 percent).

“One-in-four workers said they consider their sick days to be equivalent to vacation days and treat them as such.

“Comparing genders, women were more likely to take a sick day when they weren’t feeling under the weather. Thirty-seven percent of women called in sick with bogus explanations compared to 26 percent of men….

” ‘Although an improvement from last year, the amount of unexcused absences from the office is significant and can be indicative of employee dissatisfaction,’ said Rosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Resources at CareerBuilder.com. ‘Forty-five percent of hiring managers have caught an employee calling in sick with a fake excuse. This begs two questions: Do you have the right employees working for your organization and do you have the right employee management practices in place for your staff?’…”

“Almost all our faults are more pardonable that the methods we resort to to hide them.”

– François de la Rochefoucauld (French writer, 1613-1680)