Month: February 2011

Meet the new boss

~ susie

Dave Bry at the Awl:

“The extraordinary rendition program landed some people in CIA black sites—and others were turned over for torture-by-proxy to other regimes. Egypt figured large as a torture destination of choice, as did Suleiman as Egypt’s torturer-in-chief.

At least one person extraordinarily rendered by the CIA to Egypt — Egyptian-born Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib — was reportedly tortured by Suleiman himself.

… In October 2001, Habib was seized from a bus by Pakistani security forces. While detained in Pakistan, at the behest of American agents, he was suspended from a hook and electrocuted repeatedly. He was then turned over to the CIA, and in the process of transporting him to Egypt he endured the usual treatment: his clothes were cut off, a suppository was stuffed in his anus, he was put into a diaper—and ‘wrapped up like a spring roll’. In Egypt, as Habib recounts in his memoir,My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, he was repeatedly subjected to electric shocks, immersed in water up to his nostrils and beaten. His fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks. At one point, his interrogator slapped him so hard that his blindfold was dislodged, revealing the identity of his tormentor: Suleiman.”

—Oh, no. At Al-Jazeera, UC Santa Barbara professor Lisa Hajjar writes an extremely damning of portrait of the spy man overseeing Egypt’s “transition” to democracy. I’d like to be more optimistic about this. But it’s awfully difficult.

Egyptians, not Muslims or Christians

~ susie

What a shame we can’t have this kind of unity here:

Michael Mounir said after the prayers that the Egyptian regime has persecuted everyone, Muslim and Copt alike, which was proved by the fact that during the past 12 days, while the police and security forces had removed themselves from the scene, there had been no attacks on churches. Rather, Muslim youth had undertaken to guard them. In the past, he said, despite the presence of security forces, churches and Copts had suffered massacres, the most recent having been on New Year’s day.
Continue reading “Egyptians, not Muslims or Christians” →

‘I ask myself why’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Juan Cole, who will be my guest on Virtually Speaking Susie tonight, writes:

I ask myself why.

Why would authorities in a European county like Switzerland entertain the idea of trying George W. Bush for torture if he came to give a talk in that country;

But, European countries are supporting Omar Suleiman for interim president of Egypt, even though he was the one who undertook the torture for Bush? Suleiman tossed some 30,000 suspected Muslim fundamentalists in prison, and accepted from the US CIA kidnapped suspected militants, whom he had tortured. Some were innocent. One, Sheikh Libi, was tortured into falsely confessing that Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that straight into Colin Powell’s speech to the UN justifying the Iraq War.

I ask myself why.

If Frank Wisner, President Obama’s informal envoy to Egypt, is a paid lobbyist for Egypt and says things like that Mubarak must stay, which Obama then has to deny …

Why didn’t Obama send an envoy from Human Rights Watch instead?

I ask myself why

If Bush and the Neocons installed a pathbreaking democracy in iraq . . .

– Why does its prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, have to pledge not to run for office again (taking a leaf from the books of the rulers of Yemen and Egypt? Why does al-Maliki have secret prisons where people appear to have been tortured? Why is he taking over independent commissions such as the electoral commission?

I ask myself why.
Continue reading “‘I ask myself why’” →

Fracking and earthquakes

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Energy company representatives are, of course, skeptical of any relation between their hydraulic fracking and the recent swarms of earthquakes in Arkansas. They call the reports “anecdotal” — hey, what could go wrong, right?

GUY, Ark. — Everybody around here is getting used to the earthquakes, and that does not sit well with Dirk DeTurck.

Dirk DeTurck pointed to drilling equipment from his home. “I think people are getting comfortable” with earthquakes, he said.

He sent out 600 fliers and made, well, had to be around 100 phone calls, trying to attract people to his meeting on earthquake preparedness. And yet on a recent Tuesday night, he stood in the local school cafeteria and looked out at only a dozen or so people, including two women from the local extension homemakers club who had scheduled their own meeting on the topic a couple of weeks later.

“I think people are getting comfortable,” said Mr. DeTurck, a former Navy mechanic. “I mean, they have in California. They’ve become real comfortable with the shaking.”

Whether they have become comfortable is debatable, but the people of Guy, a town of 563 about an hour north of Little Rock, have had to learn to live with earthquakes.

[…] Mr. DeTurck and many others described a boom followed by a quick, alarming shift, a sensation one man compared to watching the camera dive off a cliff in an Imax movie. Some say they have felt dozens, others only four or five, and still others say they have only heard them.

They do, however, have similar suspicions about the cause.

Several years ago, the gas companies arrived, part of a sort of rush in Arkansas to drill for gas in a geological formation called the Fayetteville shale.