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.
@ Hasbarista :
“Zion Koan – If there were only 3.2 million jews in Europe in 1932..”
_________________
Sources for that figure, please.
Ben,
I suppose just because it is a very sensitive network. Someone produced animated maps from the data where elevated radiation readings over time are correlated with weather systems/rain. Although come to think of it I haven’t seen a new update in ages. And I’d like to see the same done with weather and radiation data from before Fukushima for comparison.
And, on a lighter note, I shall end a productive day (big bonus in shekels!) with a quotation from the very beginning of one of the late Bernard Levin’s best books. It reads as follows :
“It was a credulous age, perhaps the most credulous ever, and the more rational, the less gullible, the decade claimed to be, the less rational, the more gullible, it showed itself. Never was it easier to gain a reputation as a seer, never was a following so rapidly and readily acquired. Teachers, prophets, sybils, oracles, mystagogues, avatars, haruspices and mullahs roamed the land, gathering flocks about them as easily as holy men in nineteenth-century Russia, and any philosophy, from Zen Buddhism to macrobiotics and from violence as an end in itself to total inactivity as an end in itself, could be sure of a respectful hearing and a group of adherents, however temporary their adherence might prove.”.
The more educated of you will have guessed by now that this was a description of the 1960s.
But does it remind anyone of something…rather nearer at hand?
‘Night, all!
Yeah, habby.
It reminds me of Villager’s dribblings.
And invest those shekels wisely, with a view to the future.
No settlement investment, for example.
Recent conversation between Doug Scorgie (DS) and Habbakuk (H)
DS “What do you see as the best chance for peace between the state of Israel and a proposed state of Palestine?”
H “Don’t try to be cute, Mr Scorgie. Unlike you and your fellow Luminaries and Excellences, I am not so pretentious as to believe that I have the solution to all the world’s problems”
DS “All the world’s problems” Habbabkuk? I only asked about Israel/Palestine”
H “Oh, very sorry! I had, perhaps, naively, thought that Israel/Palestine was one of the world’s major problems? Perhaps I was misled into so thinking by the inordinately high number of posts on that subject on this blog. How silly of me!”
Tom Jones is scheduled to perform in Israel at Tel Aviv’s Nokia Arena on 26 October.
Here’s a Petition against His performing in Isreal
https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/sir-tom-jones-please-don-t-play-in-apartheid-israel-2
Annwyl Tom,
Please don’t whitewash Israel’s apartheid policies against Palestinians!
Your show will breach the Palestinian call to boycott Israel until it complies with international law and ends its human rights abuses of the Palestinian people. A performance in Israel today is akin to a performance in apartheid South Africa. Tel Aviv is today’s Sun City.
People in Wales – and everywhere – know you care about human rights and social justice, so we ask you to reconsider and to cancel your performance in Israel, especially as you signed a pledge not to play in South Africa during its apartheid era.
Did you know most Palestinians will not even be allowed to attend your concert?
It’s important to stress that Israel regularly uses performances by international artists to counter criticism and produce a glitzy image for itself, when in fact it’s a colonialist racist regime. Your performance will – whether you like it or not – be used by Israel to sanitise and divert attention from its war crimes and human rights violations.
Palestinians are treated as second class citizens in Israel and much worse in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, not forgetting the ongoing illegal siege of Gaza, collective punishment of a captive civilian population in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
@Karel
karel
11 Aug, 2013 – 9:04 pm
nevermind,
I appologize for posting my last contribution under your name. It was unintended. Your name somehow slipped it and did not notice it.
Not acceptable, would you like to ask Jon to take it down please.
Please respect that I do not post in your name, or pose my jism as that of someone else, so please, don’t hesitate.
Herbie-bore thanks for that comparison with Bernard Levin, i’m honoured. You’re definitely part of that cacophony i referred to above. Please try to help yourself first before you can help the poor Palestinian.
“There are no rules” – discuss?
Keep it up Habby! What a field of uncreative, predictable petty-posters we have had here having a field day.
Btw, loved your “Excessive focus on fucking” comment — consistent with the others, pity even our snipper, ultra-moderate Jon couldn’t see the humour in it. Astonishing how seriously some of these people take themselves, while unable to prove they’re making one gitmo of a difference to this conflicted world.
Ben,
http://p.twipple.jp/avaU5?p=b&utm_expid=30904704-6.OM8acBNlS7-nSSaVbx4SOg.1
Radiation monitor in Fukushima Prefecture Just after the quake on the 4th August. Japanese government monitoring. The next day the page said “malfunction”.
Villager
I didn’t compare you with Levin. I compared you with the subject of Mr Levin’s fine prose.
“It was a credulous age, perhaps the most credulous ever, and the more rational, the less gullible, the decade claimed to be, the less rational, the more gullible, it showed itself. Never was it easier to gain a reputation as a seer, never was a following so rapidly and readily acquired. Teachers, prophets, sybils, oracles, mystagogues, avatars, haruspices and mullahs roamed the land, gathering flocks about them as easily as holy men in nineteenth-century Russia, and any philosophy, from Zen Buddhism to macrobiotics and from violence as an end in itself to total inactivity as an end in itself, could be sure of a respectful hearing and a group of adherents, however temporary their adherence might prove.”.
Isn’t it curious that you’d think I compared you to Levin himself.
“They have been hauled over the coals for PPI fraud; they have engaged in other forms of interest-rate product fiddling; a few years ago, a subsidiary of Barclays – Barclays Private Bank – was exposed as having been used to launder drug money from Colombia through five accounts linked to the infamous Medellín cartel. By an ironic twist, Barclays continued to entertain the funds after British police had become involved after a tip-off, from HSBC. They have been fined for their part in the LIBOR rigging, and more recently, Barclays and four of its traders have been fined a total of $488m (£322m) for manipulating the energy markets in the United States.”
http://rowans-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/barclays-bank-bare-faced-hypocrites.html
The Kennedys vs Israel’s Lobby: How Israel gained Control of American Foreign Policy
[Editor’s note: Neither of these articles is of recent vintage: the first appeared on 28 August 2009, the second 13 September 2009. But their significance has grown over the years and they deserve a wide readership today.]
The lobby’s accolades for the late Ted Kennedy and his support of Israel mask the generally unknown conflicts fought by the senator’s older brothers. It is likely that lessons from the fiercest of all battles, fought behind the scenes by President John F. Kennedy alongside his brother and Attorney General Robert—guided the younger sibling’s political choices. Details of the JFK-RFK duo’s effort to register the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) parent organization, the American Zionist Council (AZC) as an Israeli foreign agent were shrouded in mystery until declassified in mid-2008.
Between 1962 and 1963 Senator J.W. Fulbright uncovered a massive network of financial “conduits” moving funds directed by the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem to Israel lobby startup groups across the United States. Even as JFK attempted to place Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons program under US inspection, RFK ordered the AZC to openly register and disclose all of its foreign funded lobbying activity in the United States.
The DOJ and AZC fought their secret battle as Fulbright’s hearings disclosed the immense proportions of the Israel lobby effort. Nathan B. Lenvin, a DOJ attorney who had been after AIPAC’s founder Isaiah Kenen since 1951 to continue registering as a foreign agent after he left the employ of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs took copious notes of the many meetings, AZC’s offers of limited registration and the DOJ’s counter offers.
But the law enforcement effort ended in tragedy. JFK’s assassination on November 12, 1963 in Dallas meant RFK’s political cover for the prosecution was gone and his days at the DOJ were numbered. He left to run for a New York senate seat. In 1965 the DOJ allowed the AZC to file a highly redacted and non-standardized FARA declaration in secret. The AZC then shut down and transferred lobbying activity to AIPAC, which refused to register.
RFK’s assassination in 1968 was followed a few months later by the quiet death of the 58 year old Nathan Lenvin during a DOJ recruiting trip in Chicago. Low level DOJ officials involved in the AZC registration battle such as Irene Bowman were gently eased out, while high officials willing to defer to the lobby, such as Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and J. Walter Yeagley, moved on to stellar careers.
As details of the secret DOJ-Israel lobby showdowns continue to emerge, it is hard not to conclude that the younger Kennedy’s renowned accommodation, mastered as a child from within the shadows of his siblings, was as much a survival strategy as the hallmark of an effective politician.
And a little Further down the page, of this same Article –
The American Zionist Council
According to Pulitzer Prize winning author Seymour Hersh, President Kennedy was profoundly committed to nuclear nonproliferation and was categorically opposed to nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which meant opposing Israel’s nuclear program. Hersh states that JFK exerted heavy pressure on Israel to stop the program and was serious about it. At the time Kennedy was in the middle of crises mode with the Russians in trying to arrange a nonproliferation treaty with them and therefore Israel’s nuclear program would be a big embarrassment. In addition to being an embarrassment it would open up the possibility of a nuclear conflict with Russia, given her allies in the Middle East, something made all the more believable in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis that almost resulted in a nuclear war between the two giants. John Kennedy had nightmares about the prospect of nuclear proliferation, saying “I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, 15 to 20…. I see the possibility in the 1970s of the president of the United States having to face a world in which 15 or 25 nations may have these weapons. I regard this as the greatest possible danger and hazard.”
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/08/11/the-kennedys-vs-israels-lobby-how-israel-gained-control-of-american-foreign-policy/
interesting link, Someone, thanks
On Plutonium…
On anti-nuclear web-sites it is often stated that 1 millionth of a gramme of plutonium will kill you. On pro-nuclear sites that is ridiculed. So where does it come from?
Well if you go back to the original US experiments where beagle dogs were forced to inhale plutonium you find that they scaled their dog experiments to human estimates. 1 millionth of a gramme was the absolute minimum they estimated MIGHT just give a human fatal lung cancer. 27 microgrammes was the estimated 50% lethal lung dose for a human.
So a millionth of a gramme almost certainly won’t kill you and the pro-nuclear faction are right on that. But 27 times that or more inhaled probably will and the pro-nuclear faction don’t point that bit out. Take comfort from that or otherwise…
AA @ 12:05 It’s amazing how the gauge-minders minimize a threat from small quantities of P.
Anything which kills you slowly is fine. It’s only bad if it kills people quickly.
Where does depleted uranium factor?
Ben,
The heavy metal Uranium binds to things in the cells you don’t want it to. Doesn’t matter whether it’s depleted or not. But biological only effects are drifting further from my level of confidence to comment on. Which isn’t necessarily too high to start with. Too much information is missing or challenged.
That’s what I thought, AA. I’ve always believed ” DU” was an oxymoron, especially when the metal is vaporized into a fine dust and breathed into the lungs. If this is out of your expertise, you might want to comment to Mark Golding who is quite familiar with birth defects in Fallujah.
Ben,
Yes I’m well aware of the Fallujah birth defects. Lots of depleted uranium certainly used in Iraq but I sometimes wonder if there wasn’t something else more classified at play as well.
That’s not to say, by the way, that depleted uranium isn’t bad enough on its own. But maybe other “toys” added to the mix.
“Lots of depleted uranium certainly used in Iraq but I sometimes wonder if there wasn’t something else more classified at play as well.”
Just out of curiosity, what other ‘toys’ enter your imagination?
Britain’s foreign aid has gone to al-Qaeda: report:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/08/11/somalia-al-shabaab-aid_n_3738901.html?utm_hp_ref=uk
Ben,
A few of the world’s tv news networks speculated about that for a short time back then when maybe something went wrong. Then they didn’t a very short time afterwards.
“US Military asks BBC to stop rebroadcasting Iraq footage” or words to that effect appeared on the BBC newsticker. Then it stopped.
Perhaps I just lost it and imagined it all. In any case it is not a subject I want to go into.
” In any case it is not a subject I want to go into.”
S’ok. I’m always trolling for information. Eventually it’s gonna catch up with me but I believe, similar to Muslim belief, ‘It is written’, and my fatalism is tied in with my refusal to anonymize and use uselessly encrypted email. I do not fear it.
“Radiation monitor in Fukushima Prefecture”
Reuters
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/uk-japan-fukushima-panel-idUKBRE9740H420130805
Ben,
Despite my handle I’m not especially anonymous to any trackers. I honestly don’t know what I saw one weekend night (before the UK got up and after the USA had gone to bed).
It happened just before the death of David Bloom was announced – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bloom
I really don’t want to speculate and hope it was just a coincidence. But a nagging doubt won;t go away.
AA; I understand. Some nightmares endure.
Herbie,
Many thanks for that electronicinfitada link:
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/architects-help-envision-palestines-landscape-after-apartheid
It’s inspiring to see what creative minds can do even in appalling situations.
The ludicrousness of the Israeli position was highlighted when Suzy Harris-Brandts told of a design which solved the problems of demolished houses and damaged sewage disposal systems, in which rubble would be re-organised to form filtration beds for waste matter and so purify and recycle it. A house constructed on the site of a demolished building will itself be demolished; but, she wondered, would the new waste filtration system be considered construction by the occupiers and would they then demolish the demolition rubble!
Brian Israel and Tom Jones deserve each other. Two old ‘has beens’ well past their sell-by date.
Doug Scorgie I note you did not get an answer from the persistent troll on Israel always failing to recognize international law. The simple answer is that Israel knows no law.
~~
Ed Snowden’s father has obtained a visa to visit Russia to see his son. Brilliant but I hope he is not tracked to Ed’s location. We don’t want any Mossad style extra judicial assassinations taking place.