Triage for Disaster Response

I'm having a terrible thought about the Haiti tragedy -- that all this time and effort has been put into finding 70 people trapped in the debris while at least that many and probably many more have died because they couldn't receive even first aid treatment in the streets. Search and rescue is glamorous and uplifting when a person is pulled out alive; but how many people are dying in those same 20 hours that those 80 people could have saved, just by walking around. At a hospital in an emergency, there is a protocol of triage, where the dying are not the first priority but the living who might die if not treated. However, triage doesn't apply to S&R, except to decide where to dig. All these teams received priority for landing at the airport and priority for transportation to the site. This might work where there are plenty of others to assist in the first aid process, but is this the priority in this situation. Do responders need a triage plan for what gets delivered in what kind of an emergency. Does a S&R team deserved priority over a hospital team in this dire emergency. Seeing people pulled alive brings joy and relief to one person's friends and families, but at what cost to thousands without such help. There was an article about a hospice that was damaged but the people were without food and water. It was only a mile or so from the airport. Is it triage to not rush food and water to this site, while rushing it to an orphanage?

By saying this out loud, I'm struck by how heartless this sounds, but triage is heartless but effective in providing the best response to the most people.

Criminal Law and Anti-Terrorism

"If the government grants use immunity to a witness, it is prohibited from thereafter prosecuting the witness based on the testimony it compels or anything derived (directly or indirectly) from it. In other words, witnesses who admit to a crime while testifying under use immunity can't have their statements "used" against them in any prosecution for that crime.

The government can, however, still try to prosecute that crime, as long as it uses evidence from other places. Under the Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Kastigar v. United States, prosecutors bear the "heavy burden" of affirmatively establishing that the evidence against an immunized witness is derived from independent and legitimate sources, not the witness." Slate magazine

Much is made of the decision to try the underpants bomber in criminal court because of issues related to interrogation of him regarding related plots and other information on the Al Queda cell in Yemen. Anything he says could be used against those people not being interrogated, but not against him in a court of law. Miranda is a standard of admisability, not a prohibition on interrogating a prisoner. The problem becomes separating the interrogation from the evidence gathering for the purpose of trial. See recent DOJ case on Blackwater guards for murding 17 Iraqi civilians. In a terrorism case such as the underpants bomber, it would seem very simple to separate the prosecution evidence from any information gained for purposes of anti-terrorism. We already legitimately have almost all the evidence we need to prosecute him for attempting to blow up the plane. Any information he might provide [to intelligence interrogators] regarding other plots or background on Yemen terror would appear to be irrelevant to the bomb prosecution and therefore, it would appear there would be no bar, as long as the interrogators didn't share the information gained with the prosecutors. Am I missing something?

Peter principle at DHS, CIA, NIA?

I've been puzzling over the Christmas underpants bomber [I think ridicule is much more effective than fear] and why he wasn't secondarily screened. The reason came to me and awakened me out of a deep sleep. JM from work who spent millions and produced nothing. They have someone like him overseeing the terror databases who has the same inability to see his limitations with computers but barges forward anyway, refusing advice and assistance, wasting billions and getting nothing in return, while his boss is oblivious to his weaknesses. What else explains the inability of the TSA/Airlines to match passenger lists to the terror database [sssss how many are there, when there should be just one?] Maybe they don't want the best people doing the job because then the costs might de-escalate instead of always going up. How much good will could we have bought in Yemen by spending $127 million on the population instead of bombs, and guns and ammo. But the war industry wouldn't have made any profit. Can I be right?

Have you tried Mint.com -- its a quicken kind of service on line. This [free] service provides an alert to your phone or email everytime a transaction occurs that is outside the perameters you provide, like exceeding your budget for widgets. If someone can create this for millions of people making billions of transactions a day why couldn't they match 1 million people or 500K people [from the reports its hard to know whether there are two large databases or one is a subset of the other] to the passenger lists and pull aside anyone who sets off an alert. But if JM were managing the databases they would just break down or put out garbage.

I now realize how insane this note is and I will likely not send it but I had to put it down in writing to get it out of my head.