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.
Obama is due to speak about the situation in Egypt from his holiday location at St Martha’s Vineyard. Predictable words to follow.
Agent Cameron stopped off at the site of the Commonwealth Games 2014 in Glasgow on his way for more holiday, this time with friends in the Scottish Islands. Afterwards he and family go to Cornwall. The situation in Egypt is probably far from his mind.
In Glasgow he did some electioneering for next year’s referendum and for May 2015.
PM pledges Games will bring jobs to Glasgow
THE Commonwealth Games will be the focus of an international trade mission to bring jobs to Glasgow, the Prime Minister has pledged.
http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/pm-pledges-games-will-bring-jobs-to-glasgow-133350n.21864913
Habbabkuk you have taken the discussion full circle.
If it would only answer a single question!
BTW, have any of you noticed your firewall/ Malwarebytes blocking access to 216.18.164.32 AND/OR 5.61.32.44 ? Virus scans don’t seem to spot the downbook.exe file doing this. Trojan, if I am not mistaken. Check.
The BBC have been reporting the number of deaths in Egypt as 525 all day, as I said at lunchtime. However, the Muslim Brotherhood are saying the number is well over 2,000.
Their website in English http://www.ikhwanweb.com/
The BBC have Mishal Husain reporting live from Cairo. She is to be a presenter on Radio 4 Today in the Autumn. She is married to a lawyer who worked for Barings Bank but who now works for Neuberger Berman, global fund and wealth management.
https://www.nb.com/contact_information/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishal_Husain
If I was her, I would have this scrubbed from that entry immediately!
‘She has interviewed many high-profile figures including Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy US Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Pentagon adviser Richard Perle and Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame’
Just now on a conservative blog a commentator revisited some of their connectivity issues, strangely only affecting certain persons. She had heard that IP’s can be cloned and that untoward key-words and personal habits draw attacks (more like interference). Do they have enough personnel to harass individuals? There is entirely too much cheap money available.
“Those exchanges are likely the primary targets of the NSA’s Special Source Operations “one-end foreign” (1EF) network tap operations. The remaining sources are overseas taps, including “FORNSAT” satellite communications intercepts and data shared by friendly foreign governments’ own network surveillance—such as Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), as detailed in a report published today by Der Spiegel. There are also covert sites set up by the NSA’s Special Collections Service, likely including targeted taps of networks in even “friendly” countries.
The NSA has approximately 150 XKeyscore collection points worldwide. To reach 29.21 petabytes per day, XKeyscore sites pull in around 190 terabytes a day. And to keep the three-day “buffer” XKeyscore holds of captured traffic, that would mean the sites have an average of about 600 terabytes of storage—the equivalent of a fairly manageable 150 4-TB drives.”
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/the-1-6-percent-of-the-internet-that-nsa-touches-is-bigger-than-it-seems/
Obama’s speech here.
http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/president-obama-speaks-on-egypt/520ce147fe344420430001e0
Don’t know why I turned Martha of Martha’ Vineyard into a saint above!
Flaming June
Here in the UK we take it for granted that we have freedom of speech and personal privacy. The only reason why Morsi was removed is because the Muslim Brotherhood aggressively attacks the thought crime of other Muslims having and expressing alternative views to its own, and it exercises no restraint in spying on and physically attacking its critics in a covert and devious way.
No amount of victim playing by Morsi or the Muslim Brotherhood can rinse away the unpalatable truth about this. The Arab Spring was supposed to create a new start of freedom of expression and belief. Morsi rapidly showed himself to be both reactionary, resolutely opposed to freedom of action in the privacy of their own homes, which he started a program of eavesdropping to monitor, and worst of all, ready to attack all dissent with threats of violence and actual violence.
I’m sure most people here would resist this US created Islamo-Fascism if they tried it in the UK. Please don’t fall for the victim role-play by the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s like feminists dialling 999 to get rid of their husbands who object to their wives commiting adultery. Below the belt, unlawful, unreasonable, bullying. Muslim Brotherhood has only its own deviousness to blame for the current tragedy.
Has Suu-Kyi revised her opinion of him? Look at him in this video puffing up the World Service in June 2012. The BBC wallahs are seen promoting him. ‘See who we have to meet you’ stuff. DLT held her hand for an unnecessarily long time.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturevideo/tvandradiovideo/9341774/Aung-San-Suu-Kyi-meets-DJ-Dave-Lee-Travis.html
http://news.sky.com/story/1129093/dave-lee-travis-faces-12-sex-assault-charges
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vODaAK9kN5Q
Nice one, AA.
Unbelievably, the Guardian write about the risks of travelling to Egypt. Read some of the self-centred reader comments in spite of the deaths and spilt blood.
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/aug/15/egypt-travel-advice-safe-sharm-el-sheik
“Just now on a conservative blog a commentator revisited some of their connectivity issues, strangely only affecting certain persons. She had heard that IP’s can be cloned and that untoward key-words and personal habits draw attacks (more like interference). Do they have enough personnel to harass individuals? There is entirely too much cheap money available.”
IP addresses can’t be cloned, no two computers on the internet can have the same IP address at the same time.
OK, Fred. Take your word for it. No ‘Dopplegangers’ either?
“In their strategy against the July 3 coup, the Brothers and their allies have relied on an implicit threat of violence or social breakdown (and the riling of their camp through sectarian discourse pitting the coup as a war on Islam, conveniently absolving themselves for their responsibility for a disastrous year) , combined with the notion of democratic legitimacy, i.e. that they were after all elected and that, even if popular, it was still a coup. On the latter argument, they may have gained some ground over time both at home and abroad. But on the former, they got things very, very wrong: their opponents will welcome their camp’s rhetorical and actual violence, and use it to whitewash their own.”
http://arabist.net/blog/2013/8/14/it-only-gets-worse-from-here
Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)
13 Aug, 2013 – 9:05 am
“Leaving aside the question of what is meant exactly by “internally displaced” : 700.000 to almost 5 million (I leave aside the population of Gaza, which had an indigenous population even before 1948) is a pretty impresssive reproduction rate, I must say.”
Habbabkuk I’m sure you already know but just in case:
Internally displaced (also known as present absentee):
A present absentee is a Palestinian who fled or was expelled from his home in Palestine by Jewish or Israeli forces, before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, but who remained within the area that became the state of Israel. Present absentees are also referred to as INTERNALLY DISPLACED Palestinians (IDPs). The term applies to the present absentee’s descendants too.
Present absentees are not permitted to live in the homes they were expelled from, even if they live in the same area, the property still exists, and they can show that they own it.
[Some still have keys to their homes that are now lived in by Jews.]
They are regarded as absent by the Israeli government because they left their homes, even if they did not intend to leave them for more than a few days, and even if they did so involuntarily. [i.e. forced out].
@Habbabkuk
“I leave aside the population of Gaza, which had an indigenous population even before 1948.”
Doug Scorgie:
Habbabkuk you’re not seriously trying to resurrect that old LIE about a land without people for a people without land are you?
We all know it’s not true!
Fred said, “IP addresses can’t be cloned, no two computers on the internet can have the same IP address at the same time.”
… but one can have a “man-in-the-middle” type attack, whereby a user thinks they have connected to a given remote machine. In fact, they have connected to an agent’s machine, and that in turn has connected to the original destination, the given remote machine.
All comms now takes place through – and at the discretion of – the agent “MITM” machine. This can merely observe, or could block – or alter – anything that they find interesting. ARP spoofing abilities are provided by utilities such as Ettercap, which will work quite happily even through SSL and HTTPS protocols – usually because the end users have no idea what the certificate warnings are talking about.
These are not exactly difficult to set up, particularly with spook-friendly ISPs, or even not so coorporative service providers being threatened with charges over their thwarting national security agents.
The biography of that author of the piece on The Arabist is http://arabist.net/amrani/
He writes for rather West-centric publications. Foreign Policy is in the Washington Post stable. Does that mean that Amazon’s Bezos now owns it?
When I see Shillary there I shudder. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Policy
Bloody hell! No hiding place. No privacy. Not even if you own a narrowboat or use the UK’s canals and rivers.
14 August 2013
Google Trekker to capture our canals and rivers
For the first time the Google Trekker, which enables the capturing of Street View imagery via a backpack in remote locations, will start to capture the country’s 200-year old canals and rivers. The Trekker will be on loan for the first time in the UK, to document our canals and rivers.
http://canalrivertrust.org.uk/news-and-views/news/google-trekker-to-capture-our-canals-and-rivers
The Canal and River Trust is a ConDem invention which replaced British Waterways and other bodies.
The great and the good. You can always find a Price Waterhouse Cooper or KPMG connection in biographies like these.
http://canalrivertrust.org.uk/about-us/governance/trustees
Note the jargon, Partnerships. Strategy…. Wait for the developments as spare land and assets are flogged off.http://canalrivertrust.org.uk/media/library/1420.pdf
Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)
13 Aug, 2013 – 9:21 am
“The so-called “one state solution” is still advocated by various commentators (including some Palestinians and Israeli activists)”
Doug Scorgie:
Yes Habbabkuk there are advocates for a one-state solution (I am one); that is a single democratic, secular state encompassing the whole of historic Palestine (i.e. Judea and Samaria and Gaza and what is now called Israel) with equal rights for all citizens.
People who supported a two-state solution in the past, including myself, now see that such an outcome is impossible because of the expansionist policies of the Zionists and the “facts on the ground” that are the settlements and outposts.
A viable Palestine (what’s left of the West Bank and Gaza) is simply untenable.
The Zionists who claim to be in favour of a two-state solution are, in my view, liars.
What they want in fact is a one state solution of their own; which is the whole of historic Palestine as a Jewish state.
For example:
“ In 1977, when Menachem Begin of Likud brought his party to power for the first time in a stunning election victory over Labour he did not annex the West Bank and Gaza to Israel after he took office, reflecting a recognition that absorbing the Palestinians could turn Israel into a bi-national state instead of a Jewish one.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel
The Zionists still want to establish their “Greater Israel” but without the Palestinian population.
Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)
13 Aug, 2013 – 9:21 am
“Suhayl has already demonstrated that Israeli Arabs enjoy greater civil rights than their fellows in the surrrounding Arab states, not to speak of the West Bank or Gaza.”
Doug Scorgie:
The Arab dictatorships (beloved of the west) trample on everyone’s rights not just Arabs.
The point that you miss Habbabkuk is that Palestinian Israeli’s do not have the same rights as their fellow Jewish Israeli’s.
Also as regards the West Bank, it is not the Arab administration that tramples on the rights of Palestinians but the Israeli occupation forces.
Gaza is under siege by the Israeli state.
What about the rights of the Palestinians to vote for their own government in the West Bank and Gaza?
Trampled on by Israel and the west.
An interesting article here:
“A War On Terror Or An Assault On Liberal Values? – Analysis
August 14, 2013
The war on terror and the global financial crisis have tilted the balance of authority on the side of the state, which the liberating forces of cyber space have only partially counteracted. Can we prevent this seeming convergence between democratic societies and authoritarian states, so that the forces of liberalisation can prevail over the forces of incipient oppression?”
Read full analysis
http://www.eurasiareview.com/14082013-a-war-on-terror-or-an-assault-on-liberal-values-analysis/
Conclusion:
“The answer may lie in the ordinary citizen and his refusal to surrender more of his precious freedoms to fear. There has to be a citizenry that is fiercely protective of its hard-won fundamental rights and the right of every human being to respect and dignity. The greatest danger lies in our becoming complicit in our own enslavement because of fear. I think it was Huxley who said that what is worse than a society where books are not allowed, is a society where people themselves no longer want to read books. That would be the ultimate historical and human tragedy.’
“OK, Fred. Take your word for it. No ‘Dopplegangers’ either?”
When you type an address into your browser the IP for that address is got from a DNS server then sent to a gateway, probably your ISP. Your ISP’s server has routing tables listing who they are directly connected to and who they are connected to etc. and works out which server to send it to next which then does the same.
You can’t have one IP address in the tables for two physical locations or none of the various routers in the ISPs, universities, companies etc. will know where to send each packet of data.
If you use Windoze open a command prompt and type “tracert craigmurray.org.uk” and you will see all the different servers each of your packets goes through to get here. If you use Linux chances are you already know it’s traceroute for you.
“… but one can have a “man-in-the-middle” type attack, whereby a user thinks they have connected to a given remote machine. In fact, they have connected to an agent’s machine, and that in turn has connected to the original destination, the given remote machine.”
See my later post.
Tracert, or Traceroute lists every server a packet goes through, you can do a whois on them and find out who they are.
On the first nights of prayers in Ramadhan the police parked video-taking police cars, in addition to portable equipment outside my local mosque in the Midlands. This was to provide security after the false flag bombs planted by Ukrainians.
what sheer and utter pig-swill. They are obsessed with categorising us Muslims so they know how to divide and rule, and defeat us. They utilise the tensions between different communities to set the different groups spying on eachother. That is every group, from the most sincere and pious, not just one group, all liaising with police and being paid, in money or in kind.
The Qur’an calls this selling your afterlife for your worldly life for a miserable price. I can’t say that the Muslim Brotherhood are the worst offenders, because they are all doing it. The only problem with MB is that it went to Morsi’s head that he was now over the police and over the military.
Dreoilin
14 Aug, 2013 – 10:48 am
“Is there any connection between fracking and sinkholes??”
Certainly something that should be considered Dreoilin.
Research definitely needed.
As I suspected, Michael Hastings was not speeding.
“The footage appears to confirm eyewitness reports that the car suffered an “explosion” before it hit the tree, suggesting some kind of incendiary device was planted on the vehicle.
By measuring the distance traveled by the car on the surveillance clip and the time that elapsed before the explosion, Professor Mehrabadi was able to calculate that the car was only traveling at a speed of 35 MPH, and not speeding as some reports claimed.”
http://www.infowars.com/report-michael-hastings-was-investigating-cia-director-john-brennan/
John; Kimberly Dvoiak may be a disinformation agent. Weeks ago she claimed from a source close to the tamily, that Hastings cremated remains were returned and that the family had not given permission. Her ‘source’ came out publicly saying this was false. She does not respond to questions as to that fact. Yet she continues to file questionable stories.
BTW; The traffic video showed a speed of at least a hundred miles an hour.
Just wondering…Are there posters who go through the thread to get the gist of comments, or do most just go to the end and scroll up a little?
Ben, you might be right since many US reporters are CIA agents. However she puts her reputation at stake and the reputation of Professor Mehrabadi, who did the calculations. Many people are suspicious that Hasting’s wife was an agent.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-michael-hastings-widow-20130807,0,891165.story
Sure, Fred – but the point was that this gets the non-IT literate people who hardly know how to open a ‘doze command tool, let alone run traceroutes and understand what they mean. I doubt that even the most savvy individual would monitor every single site they visit, on every hit, to check the route was exactly as expected.
Hey Ben: most likely posters will have been along most of the way through already, or they only go back up a short way. I’ll wager some posters just bung something down, and don’t look for anything except responses to their own posts. It’s got to be more work than it’s worth to show up and read through 10 pages of rambling comments.