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3,629 thoughts on “Amnesty International Conference on Torture

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  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Mr Goss

    “Are you offering to buy, Habby? Count me in.”
    ______________

    Why not. At least you could be sure that any drink I offered you would not contain polonium.

  • Herbie

    F. William Engdahl argues that Russia is enjoying something of a renaissance, under Putin’s leadership:

    http://journal-neo.org/2015/03/09/russia-s-remarkable-renaissance-2/

    Many of the attitudes on display in this forum seem to rely very much on memories of the gangsterism during the 1990s.

    Strange that, since that was very much a product of Western intervention in the economy and so on.

    And it’s precisely that which Putin has changed.

    Had he stuck with the gangsterism and Western intervention, he’d be a goodie today.

    Weird, eh.

  • BrianFujisan

    this might be a good book ( just out ) to give insight on the Debate..

    every wee bit may help.

    Macky Em ..GEEEEZA break

    Sqounk by Squonk’s own admission, is there for many diverse subjects, and not just Astronomy / Cosmology.

    Sqounk has been going to great lengths to Alert his Blog to much More than Politics… The Dude, or Dudette.. is very much a Humanitarian, Like most of us here.

    Talking of Humanitarians.. From the words of one of my fave writers / Scientists …a Cosmologist No less…Enjoy 🙂

    http://zenpencils.com/comic/100-carl-sagan-pale-blue-dot/

  • Resident Dissident

    “..we have to start work to bring Crimea back into Russia.”

    Bravo!

    No messing around there from Mr Golding who unlike the cloud of puffball dust has no problems whatsoever with breaking the ceasefire and establishing a land corridor to the Crimea. At least it avoids having to indulge in those little white lies used by Mr Putin in pursuit of the greater good.

  • Resident Dissident

    “Many of the attitudes on display in this forum seem to rely very much on memories of the gangsterism during the 1990s.”

    Some of us are more concerned about the gangsterism of the 2010s – have you seen where Russia is in the corruption indices at present – or perhaps you might wish to read Journalists without frontiers, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch – and of course there are no longer any shootings on the streets of Moscow.

  • Resident Dissident

    And still Mr Goss, Golding and Herbie and friends are silent on the death and subsequent trial of Sergei Magnitsky. So what precisely has Putin changed?

  • Resident Dissident

    “Many of the attitudes on display in this forum seem to rely very much on memories of the gangsterism during the 1990s.

    Strange that, since that was very much a product of Western intervention in the economy and so on.”

    And you don’t think that it might just have had something to do with the KGB and other parts of the nomenklatura dividing up the spoils? And please don’t try an pretend that Putin was an honest broker trying to clear it all up – you’ll be telling us next that he does it all for his officially disclosed and taxed salary of less than £100k.

  • Mary

    The US are piling in train loads of military hardware and 3,000 troops to Latvia.

    3000 US Troops Head to Eastern Europe for Exercises
    ABC News‎ – 15 hours ago
    The deployment is part of an ongoing U.S. military troop rotation aimed … and other vehicles and equipment arrived in Riga, Latvia, on Monday, …

    US army tanks arrive in Baltics amid mounting Russian invasion fears
    Ukraine Today‎ – 16 hours ago

    Troops and hardware from 3rd Infantry Division heading to Eastern Europe
    Stars and Stripes‎ – 15 hours ago

  • Mary

    There is a STW meeting on 26th March in Norwich. The speakers are Chris Nineham national vice chair of Stop the War and Muna Othman.

    ISLAMOPHOBIA & THE WAR ON TERROR AFTER CHARLIE HEBDO
    Islamophobia

    Thursday 26th March

    7.00pm Vauxhall Centre, Johnson Place, Vauxhall Street, Norwich
    http://norwichstopwar.org.uk/events/islamophobia/

    Good flyer.

  • Mary

    A message from 38 Degrees who received this from a member in Central Devon.

    ‘A message from Andy Burnham MP, (Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Health):

    “Do you remember the crucial vote to end Tory privatisation of the NHS we won back in November? You were one of the incredible 136,000 people who signed the petition that helped make it happen.

    Well, since then, things have got ugly. Reeling from their defeat in the Commons, the Tories have come up with a new plan to stop our anti-privatisation bill: filibuster it.

    Before the bill can be passed, it has to be scrutinised by MPs in the “Committee Stage”. But rather than discussing the bill, Tory MPs are deliberately wasting time so we can’t get any changes agreed — and that means the bill can’t go back for the final vote in the Commons.

    Here are just some of the topics — completely unrelated to the NHS — that Tory MPs have been “debating” in the two days they’ve meant to have been talking about our NHS bill:

    Asterix the Gaul
    Affinity for Creme eggs
    French sociologist Emile Durkheim
    Tactics in the Napoleonic wars
    The history of papal doctrine
    Norse gods and their relationship to the Tory logo
    Drinking habits of William Pitt the Younger
    Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer
    Bringing candles into the committee room
    Why sleeping pills say “may cause drowsiness” on them…
    …and popular ’90s soft drink “Sunny Delight”

    It’s clear they’re going to pull every dirty trick in the book to stop us getting our bill passed before the election. So if we want to end the privatisation of the NHS, we’re going to have to do it ourselves, in government.”

    (I subsequently posted this message on to 38 Degrees in London – so I hope they got the message as well). 38 Degree members, it’s time to wake up and find a better alternative Plan B. Any ideas? We could all wait for 38 Degrees and its rapidly growing membership (thanks to our work on the streets) to politely ask all incoming newly elected politicians after the next election to try to behave themselves – that should work…. A great idea – why didn’t I think of it?

    The Tories are serious and they are ready to take our much loved NHS to the cleaners and give it away to some global finance company or foreign healthcare company (who love to treat patients for profit). PLAN B is out there somewhere just ready for activating.’

  • Jay

    @ Mary
    Millitary Conscription is enforced. We should be working the land with our energies to building and protecting. The burrows are being destroyed with bulldozers soon the combines will be moving in.
    There’s a pattern any agrarian society is commercialised world wide.

  • Macky

    @RD, Uzbek in the UK,

    Phil decided to leave my little dialogue with him just when it was getting to the crux of the matter;

    https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/02/amnesty-international-conference-on-torture/comment-page-16/#comment-513122

    Basically I was making the point that those of us opposed to US/NATO’s dangerous provocation of Russia, do so mainly by highlighting the lies & crude pro-war propaganda, which is aimed by Westerner Governments at their own populations, purely to sway public opinion in supporting whatever anti-Russian measures they are undertaking upto, & including war if necessary. These MSM propaganda “issues” are just smokescreens being used to hide & camouflage the real agenda in confronting Russia.

    This does not mean we support or are blind to the fact that the everything in Russia is far from ideal, although in the process of unpacking some of the demonising propaganda, it may appear to certain shallow thinking fools & certain sinister knaves, that this “proves” we “support” these Russian failings; One main Westerner MSM propaganda template is to personalize the target of their aggression into a single individual of demonic nature, even though a war against an individual is completely nonsensical, as you only have to see what has happened to Iraq, Libya or Syria to acknowledge this obvious truth.

    So in the standard psychological reverse projection, these knaves & fools with a whipped-up visceral hatred of Putin, call all those that don’t share their belief in the New Hitler Bogeyman, “Putinistas” and transfer the reverse of their feelings, so that everybody who doesn’t hate Putin, must therefore love him !

  • Clark

    Macky, you address this criticism to Resident Dissident and Uzbek in the UK, but by far the worst offender has been John Goss doing exactly what you describe here, but in the opposite direction. Anyone who has questioned Russian state propaganda has been very aggressively denounced by John Goss as “supporting fascists”. For this, you have made no criticism whatsoever of John Goss, but instead you criticise those who react to it.

    I have never seen you criticise Russian state policy in any way, though I have seen you defend it over and over. You changed your opinion of an article from “must read” to poor and out of date when I quoted its criticism of Russian economic policy factors as contributory to the crisis in Ukraine.

  • Mark Golding

    Reasoning, rationale, thinking and Scrutiny – Vladimir Putin 27th February 2014

    Mindful of the illegal war in Iraq, the massacres in Libya, the proxy terrorist murders in Syria and the transfer of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine under the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin contemplated the events in Kiev that were developing very quickly and violently. Vladimir saw no willingness on Ukraine’s part to achieve a peaceful settlement and that the continued use of force may lead to a dead end.

    At the end of February 2014 Vladimir Putin received an urgent telephone call from Yanukovych basically revealing that his life was in danger and appealing for help to escape to Russia.

    Vladimir recalled the time when an elated Viktor Yanukovych had called in February 2010 with specifics of the election observations and a conclusion that showed at least a 75% pro-Russian majority from the citizens of Sevastopol, Kerch, Simferopol, Feodasiya, Dzhankoi and Alushta settlements.

    It was at that moment Putin said, he knew that it was time to begin work on the return of Crimea to mother Russia, because “we cannot quit this territory and the people who live there, to fend for themselves under the ‘steam-roller’ nationalists in Kyev.

    Vladimir Putin agreed to the request with the condition that Yanukovych as the legally elected President signed an order to transfer Crimea after a referendum and a pre mandate survey compiled by expert MOD administration sociologists to examine public consent. It was to be with no blood-shed and no special services. Indeed in a humble manner, Putin said he met with four of his closest colleagues to discuss and make that crucial, far-reaching and historic decision.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ksyi5bIHX4&feature=iv&src_vid=g98qms8uuTg&annotation_id=annotation_3194380119

  • Macky

    Clark; “Macky, you address this criticism to Resident Dissident and Uzbek in the UK, but by far the worst offender has been John Goss doing exactly what you describe here, but in the opposite direction. Anyone who has questioned Russian state propaganda has been very aggressively denounced by John Goss as “supporting fascists”. For this, you have made no criticism whatsoever of John Goss, but instead you criticise those who react to it.”

    You are making the mistake of missing the most fundamental of all points; it is Russia that is being attacked. My priority is to avert war, and the misery is brings to all, whereas your priority seems to be to aid, intentionally or otherwise, the pro-war propaganda. Russia is not perfect, but its people don’t deserve the Iraq or Libya treatment, which is where your echoing of pro-war demonisinsation is heading for; all these people that chose NOW as the time to focus on Russian faults, are playing into the Neo-Cons hands as useful idiots, at the very least. Re John Goss, I think you will find that he was righting calling people expressing support for the Kiev Junta, as supporting fascists, and rightly so.

    Clark; “I have never seen you criticise Russian state policy in any way, though I have seen you defend it over and over. You changed your opinion of an article from “must read” to poor and out of date when I quoted its criticism of Russian economic policy factors as contributory to the crisis in Ukraine.”

    And you have never seen me criticise Burundi’s State oppression of its opponents and critics, but that doesn’t mean I agree with it ! I repeat the essential point again, demonizing a country that is presently in the cross-hairs of the Neo-Cons, is not only foolish, but morally complicit in war-mongering.

    I’ve answered this nonsense before;

    https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/02/amnesty-international-conference-on-torture/comment-page-14/#comment-512725

  • Iain Orr

    Mary – Many thanks for your 9.40 am posting of comments from Devon about the current Commons debate on the NHS. Such filibustering will be documented in Hansard and should be used to highlight how for some MPs the NHS is a trussed suckling pig waiting to be roasted.

    By chance, I’m going this evening to my first meeting (as a local patient member) of a King’s College Hospital NHS Trust “community event”. One point I will be raising is that the KCH Stroke Unit that diagnosed and treated me flawlessly last December is to be disbanded. Specialist stroke care is to be moved to St Thomas’s Hospital. Ironically, only last week the KCH Stroke Unit was named as the top performing one in the UK, having been given a score of 95.8% by the Royal College of Physicians’ audit. The combined stroke and death risk for carotid endarterectomy (the operation I had) at KCH is 0.8% while at St Thomas’ it is 2.5% according to the National Vascular Database. For those who can do so from personal experience, grateful for other examples of managerial or political ineptitude in performing procedures on the NHS which carry an unacceptably high risk of lasting impairment or death.

  • Mary

    Yes Iain. The ConDem agenda for OUR NHS is:

    Demoralize (the staff and the patients)

    Dismantle

    Destroy

    ~~

    I was very sorry to hear that you had been ill. I had no idea. Hope that you are fully recovered now. You have been through the mill.

    Did you mean December 2014? If so these are early days for you.

    Some info in case others wish for it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carotid_endarterectomy

  • lysias

    Let us look at the testimony of someone who personally experienced Soviet tyranny, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “Men Have Forgotten God”:

    It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.

    The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy. Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies…

    For a short period of time, when he needed to gather strength for the struggle against Hitler, Stalin cynically adopted a friendly posture toward the Church. This deceptive game, continued in later years by Brezhnev with the help of showcase publications and other window dressing, has unfortunately tended to be taken at its face value in the West. Yet the tenacity with which hatred of religion is rooted in Communism may be judged by the example of their most liberal leader, Krushchev: for though he undertook a number of significant steps to extend freedom, Krushchev simultaneously rekindled the frenzied Leninist obsession with destroying religion.

    But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells–they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity.

  • Mary

    $3 a gallon! Here in leafless Surrey the price for a litre gas risen in the last month from 104.9p to 111.9p today???

    ‘The Exxon Gas Price Spike?
    by James Hoover / March 10th, 2015

    American motorists have recently gone through a bipolar gasoline market. From the heights of a national average gas price of $3.49 per gallon on March 8th of 2014, $2.18, a month ago, to $2.45, today. But such gyrations don’t reflect the huge difference in prices from state to state, especially in the last few weeks, California bearing the brunt of it.

    California on March 8th topped off at $3.43 per gallon, with the national average at $2.45 and Wyoming’s tiny market spending a mere $2.14 a gallon. I believe that this disparity is no accident and primarily relates to price manipulation in a gold-mine state that consumes more fuel than any other, and with special refined fuel requirements, can rather easily be set up for oligopolistic control.’

    /..
    http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/03/the-exxon-gas-price-spike/

  • Resident Dissident

    “Thanks Macky for the F. William Engdahl article which not only should Resident Dissident read for his own education but which particularly Uzbek in the UK is in dire need of reading.”

    Strangely enough I find Larouchies such as Engdahl rather too rightwing fro my taste – Macky and his fellow Lepeniste Mr Goss obviously have no such qualms.

  • Macky

    @Lysias, thank you for the Solzhenitsyn extract; it reminds me of the dabates I was having around the issues of the Carlie Hebdo murders; I was using the Russian example to argue that the French attempt to exclude the role of religion using their Laïcité principle, is bound in the end for the same failure.

    Highly ironic that the new militant, mostly Right Wing, Atheism as represented by the likes of Christopher Hitchens & Richard Dawkins, puts them in the same groups as Communists & Stalinists !

  • RobG

    If folks want a somewhat different (American and expert) perspective of what’s going on in the Ukraine I will offer two speakers from the recent Caldicott Symposium in New York, which I believe I mentioned before on here.

    Firstly, Bill Hartung, from the Center for International Policy, giving a talk called ‘Inordinate Power and Pathological Dynamics of the US Military Industrial Complex’.

    Caldicott Symposium 2015 Bill Hartung Part 1
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFpTiut-loc

    Caldicott Symposium 2015 Bill Hartung Part 2
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9_QPN9j8-A

    Secondly, Robert Parry Investigative Journalist, Consortium News – ‘Ukraine and the Human Factor : How propaganda and passions can risk nuclear conflagration’.

    Caldicott Symposium 2015 Robert Perry Part 1
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uhMuG0IZMc

    Caldicott Symposium 2015 Robert Perry Part 2
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiNMIC0GfNk

    Each speech at the Symposium ran to about 20 minutes. YouTube will no longer allow me to upload videos that are longer than 15 minutes unless I give them my telephone number (ha!), so I’ve had to do the speeches in two parts.

    If interested, and if it’s easier, you can find these videos embedded on my blog, with some context from moi, in a post called ‘The Caldicott Symposium 2015’.

    You can find a complete list of speakers, the subjects covered and video of the entire Symposium here:
    http://totalwebcasting.com/live/hcf

  • Resident Dissident

    “Highly ironic that the new militant, mostly Right Wing, Atheism as represented by the likes of Christopher Hitchens & Richard Dawkins, puts them in the same groups as Communists & Stalinists !”

    Might I suggest that you find one example of where Hitchens has denied the freedom to practice religion in the way that the Stalinists did – he frequently argued that a secular state was the best defence of religious freedoms (usually from other religions/sects trying to take away the religious freedoms of others – something that is of course not unknown in Putin’s Russia) and of course would defend his freedom to attack what he saw as the many absurdities of religion in general. But I defy you to point out where he ever advocated the measures used by the Stalinists to suppress religious freedom – because he simply didn’t.

  • Summerhead

    Looking at this squabbling about Ukraine and Russia makes me wonder if anyone here is capable of thinking beyond the dichotomous view of the world promoted by the corporate media. How on Earth does being opposed to the activities of the Ukrainian government make one a supporter of the Russian government or its figurehead, Putin? Does Putin’s wrongness (if it is thus as purported by various armchair war enthusiasts on this thread )? I have no doubt that Vladimir Putin has ordered all kinds of things that a normal, good person would never consider doing, but then again, I doubt if there are many national leaders who could deny the same. For those screaming “whataboutery”, that’s a bit like screaming “conspiracy theorist” at anyone who dares to express an opinion that doesn’t conform to the corporate narrative. It would be interesting to hear from the experts on this threat how they would like to see Russia run within the bounds of realpolitik. I personally think Putin is managing the most impossible and dangerous job with a great deal of skill. In the real world, the one that spins, he has to keep the oligarchs and corporations happy just as in every nation on Earth, and he has inherited a country which is in fact an empire with a long history of authoritarianism and zero history of real democracy. Do the experts think he should capitulate and let NATO and its corporate interests just take over Russia? And what do you think the Russians living within the borders of the new state of Ukraine should do? Allow their language to be suppressed? Allow fracking companies to steal land and pollute their water? Allow GMO firms like Monsanto to make land grabs and destroy their independence? Allow the IMF to impose their austerity measures on an already impoverished population so as to further enable the robbing of the poor by the rich?

  • Resident Dissident

    Macky

    Rather than your cod psycology perhaps you might wish to give us your thoughts on what those Russians, and indeed Ukrainians and others in the former Soviet satellites, should do if they wish to object to the manner in which their country is being run by the Putin regime or the continuing interference of said regime in their countries which are supposedly independent. Do you really think, especially given past history and in particular the role played by other KGB operatives in the past – they should just sit back and thing of the greater enemy while their own liberties take a back seat. Perhaps it is because people like Evgeni and Uzbek in the UK, and myself (and also Craig) to a much lesser extent, have some experience and knowledge of what has happened in the Soviet Union and subsequently that we are not prepared such things to be ignored to play your game of international power politics aimed at the Western democracies.

    My guess is that the outcomes would have been considerably better in places like Iraq and Syria if a lot more attention had been paid to the thoughts of the progressive voices opposing those countries dictators in the many years before it all blew up into a military conflict. I do at times get the impression that you and your ilk get a certain degree of schadenfreude when after many years of playing your silly games and ignoring the local population it all blows up into a military conflict which you can blame on the old enemies.

  • lysias

    The Soviet Union of old was Communist, militantly atheist, and totalitarian. Whatever one thinks of today’s Russia, it is now none of those things. The fact that it is now once more Christian suggests that there are limits to the wrongs that it will do.

    At the same time, capitalism, after its Communist rival was defeated (and long after the other rival fascism had also been defeated), has dropped the moderation it had to adopt while it had rivals, and has exposed its true, ugly nature, which seems at least as uninterested in freedom as Putin’s Russia is. Indeed, it is now well advanced on the road to its own variant of totalitarianism.

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