A New York assemblyman whose daughter is alive because of two kidney transplants wants his state to become the first in the nation to pass laws that would presume people want to donate their organs unless they specifically say otherwise.

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky believes the “presumed consent” measures would help combat a rising demand for healthy organs by patients forced to wait a year or more for transplants. Twenty-four European countries already have such laws in place, he said.

If he succeeds, distraught families would no longer be able to override their loved ones’ decisions to donate upon their death. And eventually, hospitals would be able to assume the deceased consented to have his or her organs harvested, unless the person refused in writing.

Brodsky’s interest in organ donation is personal; his 18-year-old daughter, Julianne “Willie” Brodsky, received a kidney four years ago from a donor who was struck by lightning and an earlier transplant from her mother.

“People’s survival should not rest on acts of God alone,” said the elder Brodsky, a Westchester County Democrat.

Advocates say the availability of healthy donor organs is low just about everywhere nationwide, where 106,000 people are on a waiting list that averages three to four years for each type of organ.

But serious emotional, medical and ethical concerns worry families, who currently can stop organ harvests even if their loved ones agree to donate. So New York will move slowly, Brodsky said.

The state Department of Motor Vehicles says that 95 percent of the 2 million donors on New York’s donor registry come from driver’s licenses. The shortage occurs because the need is constant and many donors sign up when they are young, meaning any organ harvest can be years away.

Presumed consent, opponents say, could force someone to become a donor against their will. It also might lead patients viewed as prospective donors to worry about how hard a medical team will work to save them if there is a greater benefit to harvesting the organs.

Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, knows those arguments.

“There is a keen interest in trying to do something about the shortage of organs,” he said, noting a consent effort surfaced last year Delaware, but stalled. “Just redoubling efforts to get people using donor cards isn’t working.”

He said advances in medicine, a proliferation of transplant centers and longer life spans are driving demand, while supply is fairly static. Advocates say more than a dozen people on the national waiting list die each day.

“I think about it a lot,” said Kathe LeBeau, 51, of Latham, N.Y. She’s had kidney disease since she was 45, is on dialysis and has been waiting three years on the list for a kidney donation. “I can’t hardly wait for the call.”

Presumed consent, especially compared to another possible option of creating a legal organ market, can work in the United States as it has successfully in Europe, Caplan said.

“I have been arguing since 1983 for presumed consent … Spain, Austria, and Belgium shows success and it works and people don’t feel they aren’t given a fair chance to say ‘no,’” he said.

Still, he said a system that defaults to harvesting everyone’s organs will be a hard sell, and prompt misconceptions.

A 2008 bill in Delaware would have created an opt-out organ donation program but never got out of committee. Opponents called it an intrusion into people’s privacy that treated organs as commodities.

New York’s presumed consent would come in stages. The primary bill, which has strong support, would end what Brodsky said is a common practice by upset relatives who override the checkoffs of driver’s licenses and other documents executed by deceased donors.

This would enable hospitals to more quickly prepare a body for organ removal.

“We’ve lost literally thousands of organs in the confusion,” Brodsky said.

The next step is far more controversial. In a separate bill, drivers would check a box saying they don’t want to donate organs. If the box is not checked, it is presumed the driver wants to donate. Brodsky says he would revisit the opt-out bill if the primary bill is made law.

Some national organ donor organizations refuse to take positions on the opt-out proposal. So far, neither bill has a sponsor in the state Senate, also controlled by Democrats. The session ends June 21, but remains dominated by the late state budget that was due April 1.

WASHINGTON — Remember the Pentagon Office of Special Plans that helped collect dubious intelligence that led to the war in Iraq? Or the program where the Pentagon secretly briefed military analysts to promote the Iraq war?

Meet the would-be Office of Strategic Deception.

In a little-noticed report earlier this month, the Defense Department’s powerful Defense Science Board recommended creation of an entity designed solely for “strategic deception” against US adversaries.

“Specifically,” the report reads (pdf), “we recommend that the Secretary [of Defense] task both the Under Secretaries of Defense for Policy and Intelligence, and the Joint Staff, working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to create a tiger team to lay out courses of action and a way ahead for establishing a standing strategic surprise/deception entity. Once the initial work has been completed, all parts of the interagency should be brought into this effort.”

“Strategic deception has in the past provided the United States with significant advantages that translated into operational and tactical success,” it continues. “Successful deception also minimizes U.S. vulnerabilities, while simultaneously setting conditions to surprise adversaries.”

Deception is a common war-time tactic nations use to gain a leg up on their enemies, but as Wired notes, the Pentagon apparently believes the United States must begin engaging in strategic tricks even before it wages war against another country.

“Deception cannot succeed in wartime without developing theory and doctrine in peacetime,” the DSB report reads. “In order to mitigate or impart surprise, the United States should [initiate] deception planning and action prior to the need for military operations.”

And such attempts at strategic trickery must occur at virtually every stage in the United States’ dealings with other nations, the Pentagon’s science board says.

“Denial and deception efforts will be included from the onset, factors into both intelligence and response research and development activities at every stage, including war gaming.”

The DSB report was first flagged by InsideDefense.com.

In 2003, New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh highlighted the Office of Special Plans, a closely guarded cabal that did an end-run around the Pentagon to collect purported intelligence suggesting that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction.

“They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans,” Hersh wrote. “In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.

“According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States,” Hersh added.

Late last year, Raw Story’s Brad Jacobson revealed evidence that directly tied the activities undertaken in the military analyst program under President George W. Bush — where analysts were briefed to promote the Iraq war — to an official US military document’s definition of psychological operations. Such propaganda that is only supposed to be directed toward foreign audiences.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, who remains a spokesman for the Pentagon today, told Raw Story the program was intended only to “inform.”

Whitman said he stood by an earlier statement in which he averred “the intent and purpose of the [program] is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American public.”

December 26, 2009, 2:22PM

Kurt HaskellKurt Haskell’s boarding pass for NWA Flight 253

Kurt HaskellLori and Kurt Haskell

About an hour after landing, Haskell said he saw another man being taken into custody. But a spokeswoman from the FBI in Detroit said Mutallab was the only person taken into custody.

Update: Dutch police investigating report of accomplice in Northwest Flight 235 terror plot