Giulio Regeni: A name you should know. He was an Italian graduate student at Cambridge University who in January was conducting research in Cairo towards his PhD on Egyptian labor unions when, on the 25th of January, he disappeared and was not seen again until his body was found nine days later in a ditch along the highway between Cairo and Alexandria. It was clear from his corpse’s condition that he had been brutally tortured before he was killed. As it turned out, Italy’s development minister, Federica Guidi, was in Cairo with an entourage of Italian business leaders the day his body was found; they all immediately left the country.

In contrast, the Egyptian authorities were rather less punctual in investigating what had happened: it took them another five days for them to search his Cairo apartment. Nor were they very fast in finally delivering his body for shipment back to Italy so he could be buried at his hometown of Fiumicello, in the North. But obviously: whereas in a Cairo morgue only a handfull of officials such as the Italian ambassador to Egypt could have access to it, once back in Italy a much wider circle could see first-hand how brutally and cruelly he had been abused.

His death fits precisely within the recurrent pattern under the dictatorship of General Al-Sisi of those native Egyptians who somehow incite the ire of the authorities also suddenly disappearing, either for good or – if they’re lucky – emerging from local police stations having suffered brutal torture. Indeed, it is a fair complaint that the world only now has jumped up to denounce this inhuman behavior once it was finally a Westerner who was its victim. Still, how could it be otherwise that it was those authorities – with authorization coming from whatever level, high or low – who did this to Giulio Regeni? The EU Parliament, at least, is satisfied that the Egyptian government in fact was responsible, as it showed in its action today:

The Italian government itself, though, has so far been more careful than that, as it does truly want to find out what happened here. This recent piece in the Corriere della Sera gives some idea of its progress:

Headline: “The Regeni Case: Close-Circuit Camera Images Erased.” Lede: “Our investigators also did not succeed in obtaining the telephone traffic around the house.”

What? “Images erased”? We’re talking here of the closed-circuit surveillance camera images from the Cairo subway, which Regeni is known to have used that fateful evening of January 25th to get to wherever he was trying to go. Why were they erased?

Italian investigators requested acquisition of these recordings starting on 5 February, after the discovery of Regeni’s body, as decisive testimony for reconstructing the boy’s agenda and movements. The Egyptian authorities, however, took them [the recordings] only quite later, only on 13 February was it discovered that the images did not exist anymore, they were recorded over by more-recent ones.

That’s apparently what happens with those recordings, as a cost-cutting measure: after a certain period of time, they are recorded over. Too late.

And what about the mobile phone traffic, both around where Regeni resided in Cairo and the metro station. It’s no good.

The documentation submitted by the Egyptian authorities is inadequate. All that the [Italian] prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco has on his desk is a list of Regeni’s outgoing calls on the day of the 25th. The entire period before that is missing.

The bottom-line here is obvious: Egyptian officials are not interested in aiding the Italian investigation simply because they are the guilty ones. People around the world – academic researchers, potential tourist and the like – should realize very well from this incident that the only foreigners who are safe now within Egypt – presumably! – are those with diplomatic accreditation, but no others.

Verily, it’s an unpleasant sight in general, that of Kim Jong-Un laughing it up with his lackey Army generals.

It’s all the more disagreeable considering what the North Korean dictator and his hacker army have recently accomplished. You’re surely aware of what happened with SONY Picture’s upcoming movie “The Interview,” but have you seen this as well?

But wait: there’s more to drive Kim Jong-Un and his minions into absolute hysterics! The North Korean government has now begun to deny its involvement in the SONY Pictures hack – before, it had been deliberately vague on the subject – but has not stopped there. Here’s the statement released today by some government minister, as reported by the French 20 Minutes newssite:

Since the United States is spreading allegations without foundation and defaming us, we want to propose a joint inquiry. Without going so far as to resort to torture, as the American CIA has done, we have the means to prove that we had nothing to do with the incident.

That allusion to CIA torture was sly, no?, but the American government has simply brought that upon itself – and no, not by releasing that executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report, but by committing the torture in the first place.  “Contrary to American values” and all that . . .

Apart from this, though – it’s the OJ Defense once again! “What, me, guilty? Perish the thought! In fact, I am so innocent that I am dying to assist you in an investigation to find the true culprit!”

Now add to that some additional reporting from Le Monde of the North Korean government coupling this with threats of “grave consequences” for the US should it continue insinuating Pyongyang’s guilt. Le Monde:

[North Korea] promised Saturday to boost its nuclear capabilities in response to Washington’s hostile policy, arguing that it had become clear that the US has as its goal an invasion of North Korea under the pretext of non-respect of human rights.

That is some Grade-A chutzpah, there.

That’s the name for the spirit of divine retribution in Greek mythology, we are told, which exacted its vengeance against those exhibiting hubris, another classic mythological concept.

Nemesis is now knocking on the door of the British government, specificallly the British Ministry of Defense, as is apparent from revelations over the past weekend from the Süddeutsche Zeitung:

Abu Ghraib, it would seem, was no isolated incident; if these allegations hold true, then the British Army was itself engaged in the systematic torture of Iraqi prisoners – although not at Abu Ghraib, it had built its own prisons of horrors, most nearer to Basra. This included death while in captivity:

The 26-year-old widower Baha Mousa died after two days in British captivity. The autopsy reported 93 injuries – abrasions, lacerations and broken ribs. Listed cause of death: suffocation.

“A regrettable, isolated incident,” was the explanation for this from the British authorities. Others beg to differ, specifically the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), with offices in Berlin, which has teamed up with the Birmingham-based human rights law firm Public Interest Lawyers (PIL), in particular to prove not isolated but systematic mistreatment of detainees in British custody in Iraq to the satisfaction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. They’ve brought together testimony from 109 former prisoners, with complaints spanning various time-periods within 2003-2008, and at differing locations – which would seem to tend towards the “systematic.” (more…)

Hey, former President George W. Bush was hanging out at a few selected US media outlets last week, did you know? Granted, you had many more important things to do during that time – by definition – than to notice, but it’s true. He got himself out of his comfy Dallas townhouse and back into some degree of public exposure, mainly on the Today Show, on Oprah, and with Sean Hannity on Fox. He didn’t have much of interest to say – to the sharpest questions from his friendly, hand-picked TV hosts he usually replied with a plug to buy his newly-issued memoires, Decision Points to get an answer – but anyway, there he was again.

Over at the leading German daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung it was Nils Minkmar who drew the short straw to actually pay this man some token amount of the attention he was seeking in order to write about the brief book-tour. The result is The week of the retread (my own interpretation of the German word Wiedergänger), which turns out to be an excellent bit of coverage even as Minkmar’s distaste with the whole exercise comes through loud and clear. Of course he wouldn’t welcome George W. Bush’s reappearance: most of the European continent held Bush in rather low regard throughout most of his presidency and certainly do now, when they can be compelled to think about him at all. The lede:

The preparation for the TV appearances on the occasion of his book lasted two years. After three days no one talked about them anymore. The comeback with his memoirs was a PR-disaster, as is only fitting for George W. Bush

Minkmar does brieflly go into the bizarre “scoop” Bush had ready with which to reward his TV-hosts, namely the strange tale of his mother showing him the preserved-in-formaldehyde remains of a stillborn sibling. But it is rather two other elements that stand out. The first is rapper Kanye West; apparently it was his “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” remark in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster which moved NBC to invite West on the air after the Bush-Matt Lauer “Today” interview to give a response. There West managed to deliver a reasoned message on racism that completely overshadowed anything the ex-president had just said! If there was one name on people’s lips as a result of this book-tour, Minkmar claims, it was “West” and not “Bush.”

The second notable bit which Minkmar emphasizes is the torture issue, which inevitably reared its ugly head no matter how much Bush might have preferred to send such questioners off to consult his book about it instead. Minkmar asks, Wasn’t a government prosecutor listening in when Bush explicitly confirmed and defended his approval for torture techniques during his time in office? When, in response to questions of “Isn’t that illegal?”, he responded that, in fact, it must have been legal because his lawyers told him that it was? This hiding-behind-your-lawyer defense is particularly ironic, he notes, when contrasted with the tough, no-nonsense “Decider” persona which Bush was using the book and this book-tour to try to establish as how he will be remembered through History.

And indeed, that is what is important: not this brief and cynical publicity campaign, but George W. Bush’s historical legacy. Minkmar:

His appearances were deeply saddening for all friends of the United States. Here was a man challenged above his abilities, who took over at the beginning of the century an admired, young superpower and in just eight years plunged it into a financial, political and above all moral ditch. The judicial working-out of this era has hardly yet properly begun. That must change after this week.

PressEurop yesterday came forward with an obscure piece of news from Poland that may nonetheless soon resonate internationally. Citing an article in that day’s edition of the mainstream Polish national daily Rzeczpospolita, they noted that no less than Polish ex-President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, his ex-premier Leszek Miller, and an “ex-head of intelligence,” one Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, were facing the prospect of going before a State Tribunal on war crimes charges stemming from the secret prison they allegedly allowed the American CIA to set up in their country back when the “War on Terror” was at its height, and which might well have been the scene for prisoner torture.

Good work, that, although the PressEurop editors did somehow miss within that Rzeczpospolita piece the credit that journal was willing to give to its arch-rival Gazeta Wyborcza for actually getting the scoop, in the form of this article which appeared the day before the Rzecz report. Also, Zbigniew Siemiątkowski was not “head of intelligence” but rather Minister of the Interior; and there is another ex-Minister of the Interior who is under investigation in this connection as well, one Krzysztof Janik.

In any event, the combined reporting from Poland’s two most-respected national dailies provides a fascinating glimpse into a story with explosive potential that still is being treated as a Top Secret matter by the prosecutorial authorities involved. As the Gazeta piece reminds us, the first indication the world had that something funny was going on in Europe was the reporting in the Washington Post of early 2005 that alleged the existence of CIA-run “black site” prison facilities in European countries. The Council of Europe then took that as a cue to investigate on its own, and soon concluded that such installations were in place in Romania, Lithuania, and Poland. When questioned at the time, Polish authorities were noticeably unhelpful, eventually admitting only that yes, there was an airport in the northeastern Polish wilderness that the government had made available for CIA flights. (more…)

The memoirs of Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s supposed “Brain,” are now out. (Sigh . . . yes, I give you the link there to Amazon, even though they gravely miscategorized the work by not filing it under “fiction.”) The European reaction to this event is so far disappointing, in terms of any demonstrated willingness to call out pure hooey, bunk, baloney, poppycock for what it is, using any equivalent term in the local language.

We do have at least a start, with Marcus Ziener in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt of all places (The president’s eternal string-puller). He zeroes in (as does Rove in his book, apparently) on the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina – two of the George W. Bush administration’s biggest blunders, but not to hear Rove tell it. No, they were just unfortunate misunderstandings. Bush’s “Heck of a job, Brownie!” was nothing more than a gesture of morale support to a staff-member under pressure. And as for Iraq, the President was certain Saddam had WMD – he certainly would not have invaded the country at all had he known that he didn’t.

Up in his piece’s lede, Ziener makes the rather obvious observation that, with this book and the new publicity tour designed to sell it, Bush’s former leading political strategist is out to rehabilitate not only the reputation of the president he served, but also his own. Actually, it probably goes rather beyond that: when it comes to waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rove (along with some other involved officials, especially former VP Dick Cheney) apparently feels the need to take some pre-emptive action to ward off a potential criminal indictment for conspiracy to torture – a crime against humanity all of us can recognize when we see it, and contrary both to the Geneva Conventions and US law. This lashing-out is what we see in his statement yesterday to the BBC in which he asserted he was even “proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists.” (You can click the video on that BBC page to hear the words come out of “Turdblossom’s” very mouth; for me, hearing his voice this morning was all I needed to quickly switch to some other radio station.)

And again, reaction in the European press is disappointing so far. (Of course, less time has elapsed since Rove went on the BBC.) What there is, is generally just a straight transmission of his remarks, suitably translated. At least we do have Lidové noviny of the Czech Republic (Waterboarding is not torture, assets former Bush advisor). Yes, the report itself (from the Czech news agency CTK) just passes on what Rove has to say. But some on-line editorial assistant has also shrewdly inserted counterpoint in the form of a brief YouTube video about waterboarding from Amnesty International. (Check it out, if you want: it’s not so very shocking, even as it makes the point.)

UPDATE: Look, I don’t intend to touch Rove’s book with a ten-foot pole. But if you’re interested, I do have to admit that it’s still available from Amazon (at that link I gave you at the top of the post) for $16.50 with free shipping and mishandling (h/t to late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon).

Here’s an alert to all cinema-goers in the UK, starting in May: that mineral water ad you think you are seeing prior to the theater’s main attraction might turn out to be something quite different. The on-line Frankfurter Rundschau has the details (Amnesty International Shows Torture in the Cinema): from 9 May Amnesty International UK will be paying to have a 90-second block played in British cinemas that provides a good up-close look at what waterboarding is all about. As FR reports, for a brief while the images there on screen are quite disturbing. But that is on purpose: as Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen states, “The film shows what the American intelligence services would gladly keep secret – the gruesome sight of an almost-drowned human being.” (more…)

Hey, at Guantanamo Bay they’ve been able to get useful information out of the detainees! So reports the Belgian Dutch-language newspaper Het Nieuwsblad: “GUANTANAMO BAY – Interrogators at Guantanamo Bay have elicited useful information from detainees. Not by mistreating them, but simply by asking questions. So says former interrogator Paul Rester.”

The rest of the brief article has mostly to do with various other pronouncements from Rester. The very next paragraph is great: Rester complains that his profession has gained a bad reputation due to all the reports about the CIA mistreating detainees in various secret prisons. “His work is little appreciated by the public and that sticks in Rester’s craw.” (more…)

The current crisis concerning the situation in Iraq (e.g. continuing open rebellion, uncertain transitional government to which to “transfer sovereignty” on 30 June, just to name a few of the headline things) is hardly going unnoticed in Poland. This is another country which has significant numbers of troops on the ground there, in fact right at the main hot spots, i.e. in the Shiite-dominated south. Back in the early days of the occupation – back when sectors were being chosen for Coalition allies – that area was considered a safe bet to stay “cold.” After all, the country’s Shiite majority had long been oppressed particularly egregiously by Saddam, no?, and so should be particularly grateful and cooperative in the aftermath of his toppling. But that’s just another aspect that has gone wrong with the “plan” – and while we’re on that topic, check out this.

I thought about making this entry the latest in €S’ “Poles in Iraq” series (it would be entry number X – yes, we number them here like the NFL numbers the Super Bowls), but that’s not quite going to fit. (more…)

Raise a cheer for freedom of expression in Germany! – or perhaps rather to that country’s notoriously-rigid labor laws. It now seems that Defense Minister Peter Struck will not be able to relieve Michael Wolffsohn, history professor at the German armed forces university in Munich, of his post.

With this we’re back to the topics of torture and prisoner abuse that continue to dominate the news. For Wolffsohn got into trouble last week for remarks he made during an appearance on the German N-TV television channel, according to this report from the FT Deutschland, where he termed “legitimate” the use of torture or the threat of torture in the fight against terrorism, “because Terror has absolutely nothing to do with the normal basis, that is the normal value-basis, of our civilized order.” (more…)

Danish premier Anders Fogh Rasmussen is scheduled to visit President Bush at the White House on May 28. Indications are mounting that the meeting might be a bit less friendly than usual, given the Iraqi prisoner treatment scandal that erupted last week. Of course, this top-level visit was planned months ago, so that latest unpleasantness is by no means the meeting’s motivation. But prisoner treatment is not the only burr under the Danish saddle, by far. To a great extent (although with less visibility, since there’s less world interest), the Danes are in the same boat as the British: having unreservedly backed the Americans in the approach to and conduct of the War in Iraq, they are now reaping that whirlwind, particularly in view of the failure to turn up of the weapons of mass destruction that were to many the war’s main justification. In April Danish defense minister Svend Aage Jensby resigned as pressure mounted within the Danish parliament, the Folketing, over the present government’s allegedly misleading behavior that led Denmark to support and participate in the war – although admittedly only to the extent of the dispatch one non-combatant ship. (Still: an example of the enforcement of public official accountability that other countries would be wise to follow? You make the call.) (more…)

EuroSavant is back now, from an extended period of travel to Segway in cities located elsewhere in Europe. Fortunately, the scandal that erupted last week over the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American (and seemingly also British) military personnel in Iraq shows no signs of dying down soon. I write “fortunately” not only from the immediate consideration that there is still plenty of coverage and commentary in the European press, but also because indeed this matter should not “die down” until all has been investigated, all has been revealed, and all those guilty have been relieved of their positions and punished. Some say that that would mean no such “closure” until Election Day next November.

As I make my way back into the €S groove, I have to shoot first at the big, obvious targets and leave subtlety (e.g. finding that telling commentary in some otherwise-obscure journal appearing in a more-obscure country) for later. What more obvious source to go to for non-English-language comment than France’s leading newspaper Le Monde? With its editorial from Sunday entitled Responsible Ones, Le Monde certainly does not disappoint. (more…)