The Respectability of Torture
St Mary’s University College, Thurs 1st August, 7.30pm
Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, was a whistleblower who was removed from his ambassadorial post by Tony Blair for exposing the Tashkent regime‟s use of rape and systematic torture, including the boiling to death of political opponents. He has also spoken out against Central Asia‟s appalling dictatorships, regimes which are allies of the West, involved in torture and rendition, and was accused of threatening MI6‟s relationship with the CIA. Now a human rights activist, author and broadcaster, he outlines the dynamics of torture and the hypocrisy of incriminated Western governments.
My first public appearance for a while will be in Belfast on 1 August where I shall be giving a talk. Long term readers of this blog will recall that, while my focus is largely on international affairs, the domestic political achievements I most hope to see are a united Ireland and an independent Scotland.
Dreoilin, yes that laughable ‘cold war mentality’ comment was the first thing that caught my eye too on the report. Russia’s response that Snowden was not our fault is genuine and diplomatically moderated. Also the words to the effect that the US doesn’t want to treat Russia as an equal partner.
Agree with Mary’s observation re Obama throwing his toys out of the pram.
Are there any statesmen left in the world?
Finally, thank you for your contributions y’day. Just to close the loop on K….perhaps a video may be easier to follow than reading, in which you are not alone in finding difficulty in following the style thereof. If so here’s one in case:
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-video/how-does-one-learn-about-oneself-part-1-of-4.php
On meditation, most ‘schools’ of so-called meditation are techniques of self-hypnosis. They can be very therapeutic, calming and even help lower blood pressure and improve the quality of one’s sleep (i note you don’t seem to have a problem on that front as you’re often up late!). I’m useless the next day if not asleep by 11 at the LATEST!
Whereas this kind of meditation is concentration and therefore exclusive, true (deeper) meditation is attentive and inclusive. Transcending the self comes through self-knowledge, seen in the mirror of relationship rather than shutting the world out etc. I hope i’m not boring you and certainly not trying to persuade anyone, just sharing in the context that you had taken the trouble posting y’day and creating understanding.
Villager @ http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/07/feile-an-phobail-belfast/comment-page-5/#comment-422388
Still preaching and lecturing I see.
Any motes in your own eye?
Mary, you’re just deflecting.
I believe it was y’day that Technicolour pointed out something re my own tone, you can re-trace if you want, it was very slight. But she held up the mirror to me, i acknowledged and thanked her, and that was the end of it. Are you truly interested in furthering harmony in this world, or are you content with just airing your bitterness with it?
Dreoilin, at 12:04pm, today. You’ll know of the Glasgow Media Group’s in depth research on this very subject, I guess. I’d thoroughly recommend all these books to anyone interested in the subject.
http://www.glasgowmediagroup.org/content/view/20/37/
“Well Bush isn’t going to Sweden or any other place except Texas, for a long, long time.”
Yeah, but he likes Texas, and it’s very big and it’s got all the stuff he likes as well. He doesn’t even like other stuff anyway.
Nevermind There was an item on the BBC London News about a campaign to stop an incinerator being built at Sutton in Surrey on an area of land designated as wet grassland. The Veolia man from the South London Waste Partnership, involving the four boroughs of the four councils of Croydon, Merton, Sutton and Kingston, talked about the benefits of ‘green calories’ for the local residents. Wonder when they thought that up?
The proposal is described here. http://www.stoptheincinerator.co.uk/SLWP.html Note the incineration of hazardous and radioactive waste!
Thought you would be interested in view of your own fight in Norfolk.
“I am talking with the DC lawyer Mark Zaid and he is of the opinion Manning’s sentence will end up around 45 years. We have a friendly bet. I say it will be 90 or very close to 90.” Ben, earlier today.
Manning and Blair should swap places.
Update. The Environment Agency have given approval. It is now up to Boris Johnson to give the final say!
http://www.suttonguardian.co.uk/archive/2013/07/25/10571980.Environment_Agency_gives_permission_for_South_London_incinerator_to_operate/
Karel, not only have you pointed at the smoking gun, but further you have overlooked that facts have no bearing on the stories in the medjia. What does it matter that Schrödinger was not Danish? He has at some time talked to Bohr and that is good enough! Also facts in favour of nuking Denmark are; The place is full of Danes, it has not got much in the way of army and air force, their national language is not English, it is closer than Austria, and most of all bloody Danes have asked for it!!!!
Now that out of the way , fall in line and behind your government and let us go and nuke the Danes the cat killing bastards! Think of the domino effect, if we let Denmark kill off cats, then soon Sweden, Norway, Iceland and even Ireland will join in killing off cats!!! The civilisation as we know would end, and Whiskas cat food company would go out of business, also the cat littler companies will be out of business too, and what about the thousands of people earning their livelihood from making scratch poles?
John Newsinger (author The Blood Never Dried) writes:
David Miliband: working for the man
The news that David Miliband was giving up politics and going
to work for a charity came as something of a shock for many
people. Here was the archetypal Blairite, a man apparently
only concerned with power, money and being of service to the
American Empire, and he was giving it all up. Had we all got
him wrong?
This was the man who had famously been exposed as
not having any idea of the level of JobSeekers Allowance at
the hustings during the campaign for the Labour Party
leadership! And once he had lost that election decided to
devote himself to making money, lots of money. In 2011-2012,
he earned a modest £446,000 on top of his paltry £65,000
MP’s salary. Oxford Analytica paid him £55,000 for eight days
work and the venture capital outfit, Vantage Point, paid him
£92,000 for four and a half days work. He seemed to be the
classic Blair clone, busy enriching himself while supposedly
representing a poor working class area, creating that
interesting New Labour phenomenon whereby the local
Labour MP is one of the richest people in the constituency. And
now here he was, giving it all up.
/..
http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster65/lob65-david-miliband.pdf
~~
Chuka Umunna who has been campaigning against the growth of betting shops and payday loan shops in his constituency has accepted a donation of £20,000 from the chairman of Gala Betting.
Not embarrassment. Hypocrisy more like.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/embarrassment-for-rising-star-of-labour-and-betting-shop-critic-chuka-umunna-after-he-accepts-20000-gift-from-gambling-executive-8748755.html
Thanks Villager. Sure, I’ll watch the video.
One of my offspring wants me to try meditation. His intentions are the best, but I think I’m a bad candidate.
Breaking: A plane from Ireland has made an emergency landing at Philadelphia due to an ‘unspecified threat’.
Welcome Dreoilin. Everyone has their own path. ‘Meditation’ or not, some quiet time each day, even just sitting in one’s own garden or living room or wherever is a good way of slowing down the chatter of the brain, in order to go faster/sharper otherwise. I certainly sense the latter in you although as one gets older we risk becoming more dull. I think what i call ‘self-study’ is more important in baring and being aware of one’s own conditioning.
If you care to share this link with yours who practices meditation, it is in my experience one of the most effective schools/techniques. Though my point remains its no substitute for self-study and one needs to go beyond these meditations and not get hooked on it like a drug.
http://www.dhamma.org
Pleasant evening — befitting to end with a ‘spiritual’ (loaded word) song!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoDY8ce_3zk
[This song always makes my hair stand on end — its what Einstein called a ‘cosmic religious feeling’. And if there’s any thing at all in String Theory, whose mathematical equations assume there are 10 to 12 dimensions in the Universe (we live in 3 and allegedly ‘know’ 4 thanks to Einstein), we actually ‘know’ so little. And yet we think that Knowledge is King! ]
Odd comment by Swedish FO Carl Bildt on Obama’s upcoming visit to Sweden, given the info Kempe supplied about Bush’s visit in 2003.
https://twitter.com/carlbildt/status/365110038186041345
Sorry, scratch that. Kempe stated that visit was in June 2001.
LOVE that song, Villager. One of my favourites. Thanks for posting.
Israel is an institutionally terrorist state with the evil seed (eg Tzipi Livny)of the original members of the haganah/stern/irgun terrorist gangs of the 1940s (that invented the King David type hotel & car bombings), mostly in charge of its politics. Now can we have the kapos at this blog rebut this statement, Jon can increase their blogging rations if they succeed.
Aha, found the answer to my question about Carl Bildt’s comment:
http://www.thelocal.se/49510/20130807/
Shooting demonstrators, eh? Well, that’s Sweden’s reputation as a bastion of liberal democracy confirmed then.
The article goes on
Russia having failed miserably the horse-trading stakes recently, they are no longer Obama’s BFF and he is going to jump into bed overnight with dear Carl Bildt to see if he’ll come up with the goods…
Habbabkuk,
Komodo @ 7 Aug, 2013 – 9:53 am draws your attention to similarities of the situation in the Warsaw ghettos in the 1940s and present day Gaza.
Yet you don’t answer any of the points made. His post is well referenced for you to check and make your own contribution but you seemingly ignore his comments.
However you reply to an earlier comment made by Karel
Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)
7 Aug, 2013 – 11:51 am
You say:
“It would have been difficult for the inhabitants of the ghetto to be woken up by the sound of jets, given the years in question. On the other hand, quite a few of them didn’t wake up at all every morning, but I suppose that’s just a vulgar detail.”
You must agree that your reply is flippant and not a contribution to the discussion of the statement: that there are parallels to the treatment of Jews (and Gypsies) in Warsaw by the Nazis at the time and the treatment of the inhabitants of Gaza by the IDF today.
Gaza and the Warsaw ghettos have similarities; they are not exactly the same for obvious reasons but you won’t concede the similarities even when they stare you in the face.
I await with interest a comprehensive rebuttal of Komodo’s points by you Mr Habbabkuk.
Arbed, let’s let Snowden share the credit with Putin to upset Obama’s plans.
Dedicate this one to Snowden. I’m taking him at face-value….and commiserate his suffering.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh44QPT1mPE
Snowden, Assange, Manning > help hold the mirror upto and redefine > the New World’s peoples’ > Uncle SAM.
We owe a debt to them to keep us aware we are not Free, yet. We owe Obama the Old Uncle Sam’s boot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdB-8eLEW8g
“Yeah, but he likes Texas, and it’s very big”
I remember having a (rather fraught) conversation with some U.S. Republicans on a blog when one of them asked me (I can’t remember why now) why in Ireland we didn’t have different laws in different parts of the country – like in different states in the U.S.
So I worked out the sq mileage and went back and told them that all of Ireland would fit into Texas 10 times and (for example) into New South Wales 11 times. Imagine driving just outside Dublin into Wicklow and having a different set of laws to deal with!
But it was the first time I fully realised (in arithmetic terms) just how great the differences are.
——————————————–
BTW, you’d never know now, driving north from Dublin, if or when you were crossing the border into the UK. It was by sheer accident that I saw something at the roadside written in Irish, and followed not long afterwards by a sign that mentioned the UK, and I then realised we had ‘crossed over’. On the way down, there was nothing at all to distinguish the border and no way of knowing when one had technically changed countries – except that the speed signs switch from mph to kph when you’re in the Republic.
So very different from the way it was in the 70s. Watchtowers, barbed wire, huge fences, armed soldiers everywhere. I won’t say it became the norm, but it was something always anticipated/expected when one travelled to or through the North.
I wonder is Craig back home, or was he hijacked by the hospitality in Belfast.
Suhayl,
Only caught your comment now. Thanks for the link!
“Manning and Blair should swap places.”
I was checking out the extradition agreement between the Hague and US, and unfortunately it seems trafficking in children is the only venue, Suhayl.
I had thought if USG continues to insist on Assange facing charges, and he actually returns to Sweden, it might be an insurance policy if the quid pro quo is getting Bush/Cheney extradited.
Just another crazy idea.
@ Ben Franklin: “Did they exclude scaphism as a treatment for re-programming, NR?”
That’s one I never heard of. Do all state agencies consult Wikipedia for creative and historically correct tortures now? Supposedly, Afghans employed particularly cruel ones against captured Soviet troops and Iran used a quicker variation of scaphism, involving super-glue, no boats or bees needed, on condemned gay men.
A link from Medialens about the situation in Libya. Copy to Cameron and Hague perhaps??
Libya is dying
Posted by Hidari on August 7, 2013, 9:21 pm
After its de facto invasion by the combined forces of the American Empire and Al Qaeda, Libya is now dying, but no one cares.
“A country of more than six million people, Libya seems to have been fatally destabilized by the war to remove its dictator, and it is increasingly out of control. Militias that arose on various regional battlefronts found themselves in possession of vast arsenals and large swaths of territory. Despite the orchestration of parliamentary elections and the assumption of nominal rule by civilian politicians in Tripoli, those militias have not stood down; instead, they have used their force and their firepower to try to effect change in the capital, even, on several occasions, besieging government buildings with arms. They have also fought one and other over long-held regional enmities; the most recent such armed battle occurred last month.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/can-libya-be-saved.html
Villager,
Heart of Gold, one of my favourites. Thanks muchly for that link.
https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Daigniere-TLS-Secrets-Slides.pdf
Interesting. Suggests there is already a way to break “Perfect Forward Secrecy”/Diffie-Hellman connections by (mis-)use of an efficiency protocol update that effectively downgrades security.
For the paranoid this is simply avoided in Firefox – about:config and set security.enable_tls_session_tickets to false
In case anybody’s wondering I’m not personally doing anything I need to legally hide. I wouldn’t be posting this stuff here if I did. Just don’t see why I shouldn’t expect https to be as secure as it can be between client and server. And the default client and server settings in most browsers and servers don’t do that.
‘Hackers post story of tactical nuclear strike against Syria on Channel 4 blog’
“Hackers from the Syrian Electronic Army have once again claimed a high profile scalp, compromising the blogs at British broadcaster Channel 4.
“The hackers, who back the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, took over the blog of the station’s veteran news presenter Jon Snow and posted a story about a tactical nuclear strike against Syria.
Continues
http://grahamcluley.com/2013/08/hackers-tactical-nuclear-strike-channel-4-blog/
and my silly pic tonight is specially for Komodo
https://twitter.com/dbbandit/status/364954089437675522/photo/1
“She has been unresponsive to requests for clarification, and continues to publish unsubstantiated stories.” — Ben
I was just watching Michael Hasting’s wife talking to Piers Morgan and saying it was a tragic accident.
http://www.infowars.com/michael-hastings-wife-says-suspicious-crash-was-tragic-accident/
Maybe that’s what she believes, or maybe she was threatened. Who knows. I’m guessing it’s one of those cases where we’ll never really know. If there was any evidence to be found in the car it’ll have been incinerated.
Is that what you’re thinking Ben?
that was Dvorak the reporter I was referring to, Dre.
And yes, I want to give the widow the benefit of the doubt. She did slap down Geraldo Rivera on a very nasty tweet.
I just think it’s weird we haven’t asked her the pertinent question; She should know. What was Michael doing at 4 am that required 100 mph through city streets?
Komodo: This has become unnecessarily tedious, for some reason you put out insults to all cyclists yet get all huffy when objections are raised to your ludicrous generalisations.
Do you really think having a CBT makes learner scooters behave responsibly? Ever noticed them tailgating despite poor brakes, having scant knowledge of the rules of the road, and putting themselves at ludicrous risks? Come off it – a heck of a lot of them are no better than the cyclists you detest.
Your arguments about the acuity of horse-riders and horses generally would be better addressed to someone disputing them.
60mpg might be reasonable from your motorbike – that’s about the same as my old diesel car. All my motorbikes do worse than this. My cycles, on the other hand, take vastly smaller resources per mile. Bicycles are a heck of a lot more sustainable, and maybe your problem is that there are insufficient cycle lanes to avoid confrontation with motor traffic, and impeding the god-given right of cars etc. to trundle along at least until they hold each other up.