Apology

Body language, 20 September2017. Photo by AFP via Getty Images/Brendan Smialowski, from Newsweek.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has tendered an "unreserved" apology to a Libyan couple, the Islamist politician and military leader Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar, for the UK's participation (giving a tip to the CIA) in a "rendition" operation in 2004, when they were kidnapped in the Kuala Lumpur airport, hooded and shackled, and flown by "Coalition of the Willing" forces to a black torture site in Thailand and thence to a Qadhafi-run prison where they were tortured and Belhaj was held for six years (Boudchar, who was pregnant at the time of the kidnapping, was released after she'd given birth), and offered them a compensation of £500,000, although they hadn't actually asked for a settlement.

“The UK government’s actions contributed to your detention, rendition and suffering. The UK government shared information about you to its international partners. We should have done more to reduce the risk that you would be mistreated. We accept that this was a failing on our part.

“Later, during your detention in Libya we sought information about and from you. We wrongly missed opportunities to alleviate your plight. This should not have happened.”

She said: “On behalf of her majesty’s government I apologise unreservedly. We are profoundly sorry for the ordeal that you both suffered and our role in it. The UK government has learned many lessons from this period. We should have realised much sooner the unacceptable practices of some of our international allies, and we sincerely regret our failures.”

Note that this is notwithstanding that Belhaj really was a Taliban affiliate who'd been engaged in training Arabs to fight in Afghanistan. That's not why he was kidnapped anyway; it was to gratify Muamar al-Qadhafi:

Two weeks after the couple were taken to Libya, Tony Blair paid his first visit to the country, holding a now infamous summit in the desert with Gaddafi and announcing that Libya had joined the fight against extremism and terrorism. Simultaneously, a lucrative gas exploration deal was signed by the Anglo-Dutch oil company Shell.

It is really striking to me that May makes this gesture of rejecting the practices of US spy agencies in the Iraq War on moral principle in the week Trump's candidate for DCI, Gina Haspel, testifying in the Senate on her fitness to hold the position, is unable to do that. And rejects that the UK should have cooperated with those practices in even the smallest way, in the week that Trump cuts out of the P5 + 1 agreement, like a formal declaration of the outlaw status of the United States. She, and her government, have "learned", later than they should have, that US practices are "unacceptable", not regrettable or deplorable or what have you.

The timing is probably coincidence—these things take a while to prepare and don't get trotted out spontaneously—but it still sounds like a breakup letter.

Gimme that old time profound commitment to justice

Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Wikipedia.

One thing I didn't quite like about the Jon Stewart movie Rosewater (and I should say I thought it was a lot better as a movie than merely politically worthy—very strong and moving) was the scenes where the detained-without-trial prisoner Maziar Bahari interacts with his dead father and sister, which I could understand as a kind of metaphorical cinematographicization of his thought processes in isolation and a dramaturgical necessity—not much you can do to work some dialogue into solitary confinement—but had a somewhat stagy, artificial feeling. I might have felt differently if I'd read Bahari's book, because it looks as if these scenes may have been not so much a dramatization as a representation of what he really experienced, according something I learned today, from Mark Danner's brilliant review of another detainee memoir, by the Mauretanian prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary:

Cheap Shots and Big Times

Scott Shane went full Driftglass this morning, writing a report on the Big Dick's pro-torture appearance on Meet the Press (which the real Driftglass couldn't make himself watch, like me, and had to report out of the written-language coverage). He wasn't trying to be funny or anything, at least most of the time, but a few items really stood out for me as pretty grand in the guignol department.

Via TransmissionAtelier.

Language, language

“Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” Mr. Cheney said in his latest interview defending the C.I.A. program. “There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation.”

No, that's not torture. It's bad, it's morally wrong, it's illegal in most states (not sure about Texas), it's premeditated murder, aggravated by being a hate crime. It's just that torture is something different. Like I'm really against burying people alive but I don't call it child rape. As Merriam-Webster put it, simplifying down a bit from the legal definitions,

Heck of a job, capitalism!

Capitalists of the world, unite! Viktor Deni, 1920. Via.

Gail Collins writes:

One of the most unnerving parts involves the fact that the waterboarding, ice baths and wall-slamming were conducted under the direction of an outside contractor. It isn’t the first time the government turned to private enterprise and wound up with a human rights disaster — think Abu Ghraib. Or Blackwater.

Actually Abu Ghraib is a part of it (torturers there were trained by torturers from Guantánamo from the private enterprise torture-training program)—it represents, perhaps, the very beginning of the Bush administration drive to privatize everything they could from State Department security (that's where Blackwater came in) to Social Security (sorry, not privatization but the proposed "introduction of private accounts" which is totally not privatization except to the extent that it is that did not actually get done anyhow, though the former president persists in regarding it as his top achievement in domestic policy).

Businessy risk

Via.

Look out, it's America's worst law professor!

DECEMBER 10, 2014 11:00 AM

Ignoring Risks to National Security 
The Feinstein report reflects the Democratic party’s contempt for U.S. intelligence agencies. 

By John Yoo

Happened to catch this minutes after seeing Valerie Plame getting interviewed on MSNBC—remember her, the Cheney administration (Karl Rove in particular) got pissed off with her husband for casting doubt on its account of Iraq's imaginary uranium shopping and decided to punish him by revealing her identity as a CIA operative running a clandestine network in Iran, thereby destroying her career and incidentally wrecking for years the US ability to collect intelligence from inside Iran, a country said to be kind of important.

Ex-VP Nabbed in Flagrant Truthfulness

Image credit to UrantianSojourn.com via TPK at Kos.

Out of his own mouth:

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.” (New York Times)

Yes, I think at the very least Cheney himself and his office, and the Office of Legal Council, and various people in the Department of Justice, must have known exactly what kind of violence the CIA was perpetrating in our name, right from the Memorandum of Understanding of September 17 2001, as Emptywheel was explaining a couple of years ago:

White House Fool Report: Ugh, lawyers

Barrel pillory, from Deadly Planet.

Hey Mr. President, you wouldn't be airing out the linens and dusting up the old black sites and revving up the racks and thumbscrews for a spin, by any chance? Because Charlie Savage is reporting in the Times that

President Obama’s legal team is debating whether to back away from his earlier view [on the United Nations Convention against Torture]. It is considering reaffirming the Bush administration’s position that the treaty imposes no legal obligation on the United States to bar cruelty outside its borders, according to officials who discussed the deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

Not drowning but waiving

My Heart is a Ticking Time Bomb by txgirlinaz at DeviantArt.

Over at the National Review, Andrew McCarthy chides Sarah Palin for making "jokes" equating waterboarding with baptism as not wrong but impolitic,

since they manage to provoke devout Christians and authentic Muslim moderates as much as they do jihadists

but finds it important to remind everybody that he doesn't believe the waterboarding performed by the CIA amounted to torture, because if you're being responsible you'll stick to legal definitions, as in the US Criminal Code, according to which torture only takes place in the event of "severe mental pain or suffering", that is,

Sacramentary

If Sarah Palin were in charge, I hear, our enemies

would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.

Just a few random thoughts on the combination of torture with the Sacraments:

Baptism

Ice baptism at Epiphany, apparently a problem.

Because if anybody expected the Spanish Inquisition, it'd spoil the surprise!

And speaking of CIA, their torture psychologist James Mitchell has called up The Guardian to complain about the vicious way he is (apparently) characterized in the Senate select committee report as a, um, torture psychologist:

Facepalms and headbangs

Foreign Policy magazine's blog, Passport, reports a new use by US forces of heavy metal music as an implement of psychological pressure, from their friend Mikko Hyppönen, a Finnish security expert, who received an email from an anonymous Iranian nuclear scientist:

I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom.

According to the email our cyber experts sent to our teams, they believe a hacker tool Metasploit was used. The hackers had access to our VPN. The automation network and Siemens hardware were attacked and shut down. I only know very little about these cyber issues as I am scientist not a computer expert.

There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC. 

A lot of people think these stories are kind of amusing, every time they come out, which is surprisingly often. I don't exactly; used in combat, the music may not be so evil, although [jump]

From Vulture.