I’ll list here some of the publications that this “action shop” had available as I remember them. I’d forgotten about them because of what has been done to me … a crude attempt to shove my round sensibilities into their square hole … I even started thinking like the people and regimes that the Book Cellar was trying to educate people about … and protest against.

Where are you my Book Cellar friends ?

SchNEWS

Letters Page, The Observer, Sunday 15 February 2009.

The government would never condone torture

Your leader (“Tell us the truth about torture, Mr Miliband”, Comment, last week) suggested that I had “suppressed evidence” linking British officials to serious offences allegedly committed against Binyam Mohamed, and that my decision to seek public interest immunity against public disclosure of the documents might be from “fear of offending an ally”.

The truth is quite the reverse. The British government worked hard, and successfully, to have the material at issue provided to Mr Mohamed’s defence counsel. Since then, we have secured the agreement in principle of the United States to Mr Mohamed’s release and return to the UK. When the question of possible criminal wrong-doing by British officials emerged, the Home Secretary, with my full support and agreement, referred the matter to the attorney general. The British government abhors torture and would never authorise it or condone it. Where allegations are made of possible complicity, they should be properly considered by the correct authorities. That is exactly what is happening.

Public debate and accountability are important. But it is a basic principle of intelligence exchanges that the disclosure of intelligence from foreign countries must always be a matter for the country which issued the intelligence, not its recipient. That is important for our own intelligence, which is shared with other countries. That is the principle which has been defended in this case and, as the court said, to no detriment of Mr Mohamed.

Rt Hon David Miliband MP
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1

I have been tortured and I know others who have been and still are being IN THIS COUNTRY.

Torture is not an aberration within a system, but an integral part of a system. Kelman again:

The conditions conducive to the rise of torture as an an instrument of State policy are the authorities’ perception of an active threat to the security of the State from internal and external sources; the availability of a security apparatus, which enables the authorities to use the vast power at their disposal to counter that threat by repressive means, and the presence within the society of groups defined as enemies of or potential threats to the State … The recourse to repression is particularly likely in situations in which opposition represents a challenge to the legitimacy of those in power and thus a fundamental threat to their continued ability to maintain power, such as States in which the rulers’ legitimacy rests on unitary, unchangeable ideology (political or religious), or States run by a ruling clique with an extremely narrow population base (in socio-economic and/or ethnic terms) but with the support of military forces. ³⁷

The two key points of Kelman’s analysis are, first, to understand torture as “an instrument of State policy” directly sanctioned by authorities, and second, to see the authorities’ justification for the use of torture as a defense against perceived threats to their legitimacy.

Eleain Scarry, in her remarkable book The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World, defines torture as “the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power” ³⁸. Here the physical act – inflicting pain on a defenseless person – and the verbal act – the interrogation – combine to form a “grotesque piece of compensatory drama” the purpose of which is “the production of a fantastic illusion of power”. The interrogation is neither the true motive or the true goal of torture. The information gained is secondary to the fact of breaking the will of the prisoner ⁴⁰. Rare are the documented cases where tortured prisoners actually had information useful to the states intelligence desires, but the key here is the very nature of the state’s intelligence desires, namely the drive to crush any perceived threat to it’s legitimacy.

37. Herbert C Kelma, “The Policy Context of Torture”, 2005, pp 128-129.

38 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 1985 pp 27-35.

40 “It is not primarily the victims information, but the victim, that the torture needs to win – or reduce to powerlessness” (Peters, Torture, p. 164) “In compelling confession, the torturers compel the prisoner to record and objectify the fact that intense pain is world destroying . It is for this reason that while the content of the prisoner’s answer is only sometimes important to the regime , the form of the answer, the fact of answering, is always crucial” (Scarry, The Body in Pain, 29).

I had this done to me in 2003. A few months before I had been at a local party event in a local town square. The local party crew were trying to setup a sound system … party people and local activists were in attendance. It was also a protest against the Iraq War and an increase in local traffic as well as road building. Attempts were made to block the main road. Police were in attendance as well, seemingly to deal with traffic problems, but this was not the real reason. Also in attendance was a Police intelligence unit. Policemen dressed in black, semi military unforms taking carefully gathered photographs. I was no doubt in one of those photo’s, as were as many others.

The following is repulsive … so dial off if you just want to “have a nice day” !

A few months later after a carefully orchestrated campaign by the authorities and the “Mental Health System” I was characterised as “having gone mad” (for doubters, please note that the former Soviet Union and other regimes have been documented as using this technique to silence dissenters).

I was then systematically tortured using drugs. This technique is designed to look like something else. It is carefully shielded and deceptively presented to make it seem like (perversly) someone is “being helped”.

As in the quote from “Mexico Unconquered” (p. 69) above, I was was interrogated. I was asked the question “Do you hear voices” … I answered “I hear your voice” … at least partially not falling for what was going on. I probably should have stayed silent .. but that may have bought on even more brutal treatment … more drugs. I had drugs forced upon me against my will. I was so traumatised after being terrorised by these people for days that I think I took the drugs orally without much resistance. They would cause me much pain. Memory damage. Almost loss of life, although from the outside you seem to be “OK” because you’ve been given a huge tranquillizer … a sleeping pill.

The same thing happened to me in 2005. As my memory came back about what had happened – I was taking their torturing drugs less and less  – I began to realise with rising horror what was going on. I made a strong verbal complaint in a local day care center about what was being done to people as well as trying to cut off contact with the local “carers”. I was threatened with my door being battered down. I was taken away in a Police van with blood still on the seats from … something .. probably some poor schmuck like me. I was put through the same regime again, although without the interrogation this time. Unlike last time I actively tried to avoid being drugged .. but I was threatened with being held down and injected. Fearing being smothered and suffocating to death I had to take the drugs. Early 2006 … I hesitate to say me … the drugs tried to kill me … I had a “suicide attempt” – read “almost being tortured to death by proxy”.

So to those who say “Torture does not happen in Britain” .. or that “The British Government does not condone torture” .. I would say you are fast asleep. I would also say that some people are wide awake and know this goes on but they condone it, or at least ignore it because it removes threats to their power.

British people may be shocked to read this. I am not against the people in this country. It is factions in this country that allow this to carry on … but it is also you … dear British people who allow it to carry on, because you hypnotise yourself everyday out of seeing these acts of torture for what they are.

Let battle commence !

But siriusly, this is something that has been confusing me. Take note of this Wikipedia Java page section …

.NET vs. Java and Java EE

See also: Comparison of the Java and .NET platforms and Comparison of C# and Java

The CLI and .NET languages such as C# and VB have many similarities to Sun’s JVM and Java. They are strong competitors. Both are based on a virtual machine model that hides the details of the computer hardware on which their programs run. Both use their own intermediate byte-code, Microsoft calling theirs Common Intermediate Language (CIL; formerly MSIL) and Sun calling theirs Java bytecode. On .NET the byte-code is always compiled before execution, either Just In Time (JIT) or in advance of execution using the ngen.exe utility. With Java the byte-code is either interpreted, compiled in advance, or compiled JIT. Both provide extensive class libraries that address many common programming requirements and address many security issues that are present in other approaches. The namespaces provided in the .NET Framework closely resemble the platform packages in the Java EE API Specification in style and invocation.

.NET in its complete form (Microsoft’s implementation) is only available on Windows platforms and partially available on Linux and Macintosh,^[30][31][32] whereas Java is fully available on many platforms.^[33] From its beginning .NET has supported multiple programming languages and at its core remains platform agnostic and standardized so that other vendors can implement it on other platforms (although Microsoft’s implementation only targets Windows, Windows CE, and Xbox platforms). The Java platform was initially built to support only the Java language on many operating system platforms under the slogan “Write once, run anywhere.” Other programming languages have been implemented on the Java Virtual Machine^[34] but are less widely used (see JVM languages).

Sun’s reference implementation of Java (including the class library, the compiler, the virtual machine, and the various tools associated with the Java Platform) is open source under the GNU GPL license with Classpath exception.^[35] The source code for the .NET framework base class library is available under the Microsoft Reference License. ^{[36] [37]}

The third-party Mono Project, sponsored by Novell, has been developing an open source implementation of the ECMA standards that define the .NET Framework, as well as most of the other non-ECMA standardized libraries in Microsoft’s .NET. The Mono implementation is meant to run on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, BSD, HP-UX, and Windows platforms. Mono includes the CLR, the class libraries, and compilers for C# and VB.NET. The current version supports all the APIs in version 2.0 of Microsoft’s .NET. Full support exists for C# 3.0 LINQ to Objects and LINQ to Xml. ^[38]

( Source )

A Java WW, from what I know. makes sense in terms of Java Webstart “just click and run application” style that avoids downloads. But despite all the very good reasons I wonder if it was a psychological mistake in terms of running an Open Source project and community. It appears that many people’s hard work was almost thrown out ! Development of .Net WW carries on though, along side WWJ.

Could NASA have sponsored the development of Mono and ported to other OS’s that way ? Thus keeping valuable code … and developers that they also need for WWJ development.

I wonder if I’m the only one having this realisation. I put the badly handled (if I may say so) move to WWJ down to another of the faulty decisions made in the Bush years. But these things happen and can be handled in a community where open and free expression is exercised.

So, of course there are global warming measurements, or chemicals that should not be spilled in the river … but what of people ?

Talk about getting the cart before the horse. If people are not well and listened to then how is society supposed to improve it’self ? If you can’t look after yourself then how do we help the Polar Bear ?

I hear so many (but not all) environmentalists bleating at people to “save energy”, or “do your bit for the environment”, but they are often ignorant of the issues effecting people. They proclaim environmental credentials but don’t seem to know anything about the environment that people live in. Injustice, hate, crime, mind control …. and no I don’t mean tin foil hats. I can only take an example that effected me …

According to some scholars of the Mayan tradition the people who built those pyramids in Mexico and Guatemela “dissappeared” (See some work by Jose Arguelles for example). Their traditions “live on” with some of the people in Mexico or other central American countries. I was looking at a picture in one of the albums on the Zapatista website…

See the man at the back. the woman by the window ? There they are … the ancestors of those people are the Mayans ! They never went away into some virtual New Age pipe dream. They are real and now. This is imperialist Crypto Racism. The situation that blights both Mexican and British or American or other people. We were lead into an illusion. The unreal. Where we were expected to wring our hands over the environment while somehow ignoring the very people living in that environment.

It’s about time we forgot about Polar Bears, or Seals, or even Penguins and concentrate on PEOPLE. We are part of the environment as well. Man did not leave the web of life.

Warm, personable, down to Earth, grounded. Calm. No preaching or emotional pleas. Just some well and interestingly explained insights into NASA research. We’re in new, unexplored territory as Dr. Waleed Abdalait said. Some clear conclusions for me but I’m not going to repeat them here. Take away what you will from this presentation.