Un-Terminator

Italy Makes A Call

So, what's the latest call on illegal rendition? Well according to Italy, it's a "bad thing". This revelation comes after the public airing of the story of Hassan Nasr, who was abducted from Italy in order to be "interrogated" in the glorious war on terror.

The abducted man, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, was taken from Italy by U.S. intelligence agents and handed over to Egyptian officials, where court testimony indicates he was repeatedly tortured.

Italy, which among America's European allies was more sympathetic than most to the broad "long war" strategy of the Bush administration, nonetheless became the first to challenge the rendition strategy when details of Nasr's abduction became public.

Nasr, who was living in Rome in 2003, was suspected of involvement in terrorist plots in Europe. He was a known member of the Egyptian terrorist organization, Gamaat Islamiya, which had assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981 and which murdered 58 foreign tourists at the Temple of Luxor in 1997.

The details of the decision to abduct Nasr remained vague throughout the trial, in part because the Italian Constitutional Court ruled that data on coordination between Italian spy agencies and the CIA was inadmissible.

But enough evidence existed to prove the abduction happened and to broadly implicate a range of American operatives. Other testimony established that Nasr had transited through Germany (an embarrassing revelation for a government which had been openly critical of the practice), and that he was tortured repeatedly upon his arrival in Egypt.

And this week an Italian court decided to do something about it.

The court convicted two Italian intelligence officials, plus 23 American intelligence agents - all of them in absentia - of aiding the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian-born cleric from the streets of Rome. Among those convicted was the CIA's Milan station chief at the time, Robert Lady, who received an 8 year sentence and, like the other Americans, will now be considered a fugitive from justice and subject to arrest on European extradition requests if they travel abroad.

- truthout.org/

So take that, anonymous American CIA officials. If you wish to travel to Italy on your current passports, you may well be put in an Italian jail.

At least for a little while, anyway, until the whole thing is eventually dropped.




The Future Is (Not) Set?

The Large Hadron Collider, under the fields of Switzerland and currently starting up again after technical troubles, has been the focus of a lot of conspiracy theories over the years. Huge explosions, black holes, destruction of the earth and so forth. But the latest one is a doozy. The primary goal for this device is to isolate the elusive Higgs Boson particle, a particle that not a lot is really know about. If the latest theory is correct, there may be a good reason for the lack of knowledge.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

- nytimes.com/

Despite I myself not believing in Time Travel, I have to say I find this theory fascinating, and kind of hope it's correct. A technology so fearsome it would doom mankind (assuming that hasn't already happened) being able to transmit it's effects through time as well as space, and prevent it's own discovery. You gotta admit, there's a certain poetry to it.



Film Review: Moon.

Moon is pure Science Fiction, and could quite effortlessly be an episode out of a larger franchise, perhaps something from a collection of Arthur C. Clark stories. Set in the future, it is concerned with the plight of one man, Sam Bell, and his solitary existence on a farm on the dark side of the moon. Giant automated machines dig chemical compounds out of the lunar soil and load up canisters that, when full, is Sam's job to retrieve and fire them off to the grateful earth and his employers. On a 3 year contract, Sam is approaching both the end of his scheduled time on the moon, and the end of his tether. He begins to see things, and get distracted by things, leading to an accident which uncovers a great secret.

Without giving away the twist, it's difficult to clarify exactly what this film is about, other than the obvious themes of loneliness and corporate inhumanity. But Sam's character arc is disjointed and, disappointingly, cut short. Despite we wanting him very much to succeed in his final quest, we don't actually get to witness him doing so. Despite wanting to see him find peace, we don't get to see that either. Instead we're restricted to both a glimpse of a man changing his attitude when confronted with the concept of solitude, and a look at a man falling apart, without really being there at the end.

Despite the care that's gone into it, it's not really a fulfilling film, yet I get the feeling it was meant to be. Sam Rockwell does a great job as a normal, flawed human cut off from the rest of the world and put into this crazy situation. The atmosphere is great, the music is great. It's just a pity the ending couldn't have been drawn out a bit more so we could get a better payoff for our investment. Three and a half Copies out of five.


- Peace out