Just in time for the Friday Cat...

This is Maher Arar. Maher Arar is the Canadian man who was held at JFK airport in New York, while en route from Zurich to Montreal, on suspicion of terrorist links. He was flown to Jordan in a private CIA jet, and then taken to Syria to be interrogated by the Far Falestin, the Palestine branch of the Syrian military intelligence. There he was tortured, of course.

October 11 to 16, 2002

Early the next morning Arar is taken upstairs for intense interrogation. He is beaten on his palms, wrists, lower back and hips with a shredded black electrical cable which is about two inches in diameter. He is threatened with the metal chair, electric shocks, and with the tire, into which prisoners are stuffed, immobilized and beaten.

The next day Arar is interrogated and beaten on and off for eighteen hours. Arar begs them to stop. He is asked if he received military training in Afghanistan, and he falsely confesses and says yes. This is the first time Arar is ever questioned about Afghanistan. They ask at which camp, and provide him with a list, and he picks one of the camps listed.

Arar urinated on himself twice during the interrogation.

Throughout this period of intense interrogation Arar was not taken back to his cell, but to a waiting room where he could hear other prisoners being tortured and screaming. One time, he heard them repeatedly slam a man’s head on a desk really hard.

After a while it became evident that Arar had nothing to do with terrorism. He is now safely home in Canada, and a public inquiry is being held into his case. It seems like that enquiry is bogging down in government secrecy.

Tim Ireland, a.k.a. Manic, the guy whose blog inspired me to start blogging myself, is taking on Tony Blair. Why? People involved in this campaign pretty much want to get rid of Blair and bring a halt to his style of government. We hope that includes you. Common beefs include Iraq, the erosion of civil liberties, Blair's almost unquestioning loyalty to the Bush administration and the Blair government's ongoing swing to the right.

The goal is to significantly reduce Labour's majority in British parliament, in the hope that this will lead to the weakening of Blair's position within the Labour party, and a viable leadership challenge. To attain this goal they want people who live in 'safe' Labour seats or marginal ones to vote for the candidate most likely to beat the Labour candidate in the upcoming election.

Tim is an internet consulancy guy, and he is making use of everything the interweb has to offer. Apart from the 1984-inspired action website Backing Blair he uses blogs, groups on meeting.com and postings on messageboards. This is mixed with old-fashioned sticking up of posters. And when enough people donate money, they will be driving around in propaganda trucks.

I'm having trouble with the concept of voting for "anyone but xyz", but probably that's the only way you can make yourself heard in the election box in a country with a two- or three party system. And it's really necessary to protest, before Blair becomes worse than Margaret Thatcher.

We urge the European Patent Office as well as national patent offices to immediately stop granting patents on business methods and data processing methods in whatever verbal clothing, and to apply Article 52 of the European Patent Convention correctly according to conventional methods of interpretation of law.

We urge the members of the EU Council of Ministers to refrain from any counter-proposals to the European Parliament's version of the draft, unless such counter-proposals have been explicitely endorsed by a majority decision of the member's national parliament.

We urge members of national parliaments to formulate clear national policies on the limits of patentability and to make sure that their government's representatives in the European Council are faithfully implementing these policies.

We demand that all legislative proposals, including those from the European Parliament and the member states, be rigorously tested against a test suite of sample patent applications to see whether they would beyond any doubt lead to the desired results and would not leave room for any more misinterpretations

I know, Brussels is far away, but you can at least Join the list of supporters of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure.

The Register: European software patent law hangs in the balance