THE American army delivered an apology and blood money on Tuesday May 8th to the families of 19 Afghan civilians killed in March by marines. As in similar cases in Afghanistan and Iraq the killings, which took place on a road near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, were discovered by journalists and initially misrepresented by American commanders. Announcing the climb-down, an American colonel in Afghanistan told reporters: “I stand before you today deeply, deeply ashamed and terribly sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people.”

This is unlikely to prevent many more such incidents. The killing of large numbers of civilians by American forces, through indisciplined firing or as a result of their heavy reliance on air-strikes, has been a bitter feature of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq—just as it was in Vietnam.

Indeed, later on Tuesday at least 21 civilians were killed in air-strikes in the southern province of Helmand, according to Asadullah Wafa, its pro-American governor. In Iraq on Wednesday, according to local security sources, an American helicopter involved in an attack against suspected insurgents killed a number of children at a primary school north of Baghdad.

Since the killings in Afghanistan in March, American troops in that country—mostly from a counter-terrorism contingent that is operating outside the main American-led NATO peacekeeping force—are alleged to have killed civilians on at least five occasions. Late in April at least 57 civilians are said to have been slain in American air-strikes at Shindand, in western Afghanistan.

The slaughter in Jalalabad appears to have occurred in similar circumstances to the better-known murder in 2005 of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, in western Iraq. After being attacked by a suicide bomber, American marine special forces allegedly retaliated by shooting at every Afghan in sight. Another 50 civilians were wounded in their attack. As in Haditha, the marines then tried hiding their bloody tracks.

Afghan journalists at the scene had video film confiscated and digital photographs deleted from their cameras. American officials claimed that the marines had faced a “complex ambush”, with Taliban marksmen hidden among the civilians. The Taliban are capable of such tactics. Before last week’s violence in Shindand, a tally by the Associated Press showed 151 civilians had been killed in Afghanistan this year, including 100 by the Taliban. Another estimate, by Human Rights Watch, suggests that more than 1,000 Afghan civilians died in violent attacks in 2006, more than half of them the victims of Taliban assaults.

Yet there appears to be no evidence that the marines near Jalalabad came under attack after the bomb-blast. America’s Department of Defence has launched a criminal investigation into the incident. The family of each slain Afghan has received $2,000.

ECHELON is a massive system designed to intercept virtually all email and fax traffic in the world and subject it to automated analysis, despite laws in many nations (including this one) barring such activity. The laws were circumvented by a mutual pact among five nations. It is illegal for the United Kingdom to spy on its citizens. Likewise the same for the United States. Under the terms of the UKUSA agreement, Britain spies on Americans and America spies on British citizens and the two groups trade data. Technically, it may be legal, but the intent to evade the spirit of the laws protecting the citizens of those two nations is clear.

ECHELON has been in development since 1947, the result of the BRUSA and UKUSA treaties signed by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Designed and co-ordinated by United States National Security Agency (NSA), the ECHELON system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and telephone communications carried over the world's telecommunications networks. Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organisations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world.

ECHELON is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual's e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the United States and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.

The five intelligence agencies that constitute the UKUSA agreement are the National Security Agency (or NSA, from the USA), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ - United Kingdom), the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB - New Zealand), the Communications Security Establishment (CSE from Canada), and the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD in Australia). This alliance, which grew from co-operative efforts during World War II to intercept radio transmissions, was formalised into a written agreement in 1948 and aimed primarily against USSR. The agencies are today the largest intelligence organisations in their respective countries. With much of the world's business occurring by fax, e-mail, and phone, spying on these communications receives the bulk of intelligence resources. For decades before the introduction of the ECHELON system, the UKUSA allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but each agency usually processed and analysed the intercept from its own stations.

Those computers in spy stations are known as the Echelon dictionaries. However, computers that can automatically search through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole.

The only public reference to the Dictionary system anywhere in the world was in relation to one of these facilities, run by the GCHQ in central London. In 1991, a former British GCHQ official spoke anonymously to Granada Television's World in Action about the agency's abuses of power. He told the program about an anonymous red brick building at 8 Palmer Street where GCHQ secretly intercepts every telex which passes into, out of, or through London, feeding them into powerful computers with a program known as "Dictionary."

The journalist Nick Hager discovered thanks to several interviews with more than 50 people concerned with New Zealand’s Signal Intelligence Agency, that there is a network of spy stations around the globe. Inside it, "the thousands of simultaneous messages are read in real time as they pour into each station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computers find intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks".

Similarly, British researcher Duncan Campbell has described how the US Menwith Hill station, near Harrogate, in North Yorkshire (Great Britain) taps directly into the British Telecom microwave network, which has actually been designed with several major microwave links converging on an isolated tower connected underground into the station.

Menwith Hill Station was established in 1956 by the US Army Security Agency (ASA). Inside the closely-guarded 560 acre base are two large operations blocks and many satellite tracking dishes and domes. Initial operations focused on monitoring international cable and microwave communications passing through Britain. In the early 1960s Menwith Hill was one of the first sites in the world to receive sophisticated early IBM computers, with which NSA automated the labour-intensive watch-list scrutiny of intercepted but unenciphered telex messages. Since then, Menwith Hill has sifted the international messages, telegrams, and telephone calls of citizens, corporations or governments to select information of political, military or economic value to the United States.

Every detail of Menwith Hill's operations has been kept an absolute secret. The official cover story is that the all-civilian base is a Department of Defence communications station. The British Ministry of Defence describe Menwith Hill as a "communications relay centre." Like all good cover stories, this has a strong element of truth to it. Until 1974, Menwith Hill's Sigint specially was evidently the interception of International Leased Carrier signals, the communications links run by civil agencies -- the Post, Telegraph and Telephone ministries of eastern and western European countries. The National Security Agency took over Menwith Hill in 1966. Interception of satellite communications began at Menwith Hill as early as 1974, when the first of more than eight large satellite communications dishes were installed.

All telecommunications traffic to and from Europe and passing through Britain is intercepted at the base, including private telephone calls, faxes, emails and other communications. Much of the information is collected, processed and relayed back to the United States automatically. A great deal of this information comes from spy satellites and the base has a number of large white golf balls or kevlar "radomes" containing satellite receiving dishes.

Palestinians detained by Israeli security forces are routinely tortured and ill-treated, according to a new report published by Israeli human rights groups yesterday. The ill-treatment, which includes beatings, sensory deprivation, back-bending, back-stretching and other forms of physical abuse, contravenes international law and Israeli law, the report says.

The Centre for the Defence of the Individual and B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, compiled the report after interviewing 73 Palestinians who had been arrested in 2005 and 2006.

The report found that almost 50% of detainees who were arrested in raids or at random were beaten by the army or police before they were handed over to the Shin Bet security agency for interrogation. The prisoners were interrogated for an average of 35 days and spent most of their time in tiny cells in solitary confinement. They were interrogated from five to 10 hours a day. More than half did not see a lawyer or representative of the Red Cross for the whole period of interrogation.

The report found that prisoners were effectively starved by being offered food designed to appear rotten or unappetising. Their only exercise was the walk from the cell to the interrogation room during which they were shackled, handcuffed and blindfolded. In some cases more extreme treatment was used. One in five detainees were deprived of sleep for up to three days and a quarter were beaten by their interrogators.

Out of more than 500 complaints against Shin Bet since 2001, not a single one has been upheld. Israel's justice ministry said Shin Bet interrogations were carried out in accordance with the law, although it declined to comment on the "interrogation techniques" detailed in the report.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant in the Al Qaeda terrorist network, said in a new video that he hoped US forces would stay in Iraq long enough to be dealt a catastrophic blow. In the video aired Saturday, Zawahiri reacts to the legislation passed by the US Congress in late April to force a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq starting in October and concluding by early 2008. US President George W Bush vetoed the legislation, which would have authorised several months of spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A compromise has yet to be reached in Washington between Bush and opposition Democrats, who took over Congress in January. Zawahiri said that the legislation "reflects American failure and frustration". He lamented that it would "deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces, which we have caught in a historic trap". "We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 troops ... in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson, which will motivate them to review their entire doctrinal and moral system which produced their historic, criminal Crusader-Zionist entity," Zawahiri said. The US has lost over 3,000 soldiers in action in Iraq, and currently has about 160,000 forces in the war-torn country. The Washington-based IntelCenter, a private organisation that tracks the releases of Al Qaeda recordings, estimated that the latest video of more than 60 minutes could not have been made before April 26.