CAT got your tongue?

Photo from: pixgood

“If the two sides do not reach a consensus soon, the [Senate Intelligence] committee and its members will be left with only extreme options. One would be to release the heavily redacted version [of the torture report] that the CIA has already agreed to, which would be a capitulation on the part of the committee. The alternative would be for Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) or another member of the committee to read the report — or sections that the committee believes should be released — into the Senate record, as then-Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) did with the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
     [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein's optimism about the [CIA torture] report's release has been stifled in the past by the tense negotiations. In September Feinsetin said she expected the 500-page document to be public within two to four weeks. Two months later, negotiations are still ongoing — and based on reports of Tuesday night's meeting, not going well.
     Despite a committee vote in April to release the 500-page executive summary of the five-year, 6,000-plus page study, a public version of the document has been hamstrung for months by disputes over aspects of the report that the White House and CIA wish to suppress.”
— Ali Watkins, Huffington Post
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“The international community watched closely this week as representatives from the U.S. government defended its compliance with the Convention Against Torture (CAT) in front of the United Nations Committee against Torture. […]
     Since the U.S. last reported to the committee in 2006, more evidence of violations have been reported by the media or alleged by human rights groups. But the U.S. has done little to demonstrate that it is holding the top officials who gave the orders to torture accountable. Groups like the Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions say that the United States is shielding those responsible, which is in direct violation of its CAT obligations.
     'It’s is at the heart of everything,' Deborah Popowski, a clinical instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and a member of Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions said in an interview with Newsweek. Referring to what she called the ‘legal framework the U.S. government built to shield itself from liability’ (a mixture of legal opinions that distort laws governing torture and the use of the Military Commissions Act to retroactively redefine war crimes to impede prosecution), she added that by choosing to immunize those responsible, [the U.S. government] 'legitimizes their actions and the legacy lives on, the precedent is set.’”
— Lauren Walker, Newsweek
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and the two shall become one

Original photo (top) from Life of Elvis

"In the two-room shotgun house built by his father in readiness for the birth, Jesse Garon Presley, his identical twin brother, was delivered 35 minutes before him, stillborn." — Wikipedia

When I was a lad, every week my Uncle John (in Liverpool) would send us a rolled up bundle of Daily Mirrors (along with the Bootle Times, a suburban Liverpool weekly that was full of back-burner info about this up-and-coming local rock band, the Beatles).
     It was around the time of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann's trial in Israel and I have a distinct memory of a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" Daily Mirror article that used an effective image of the mass murderer Eichmann to illustrate Hannah Arendt's famous insights about "the banality of evil" in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
     By making a mirror image copy of the photo and superimposing each half of it onto copies of the original, the newspaper's production department created a "Evil Eichmann" and a "Good Eichmann."
     The pure, bilateral symmetry of a child's face is something that changes as we mature (for many reasons)— a fact that was exploited to produce the dramatic effect in the Daily Mirror back in 1962. But the pictures (above) of Elvis Presley when he was eight years old are particularly interesting because they show this asymmetry at such a young age.
     Facial asymmetry also explains why so many people don't like photos of themselves. We are used to seeing a mirror image of our own faces; a right-reading image in a photograph always seems a bit alien to us.

Adolph Eichmann (from: Wirtualna Polkska)

More face photograph manipulations here...

"Studies have shown that there is surprising agreement about what makes a face attractive. Symmetry is at the core, along with youthfulness; clarity or smoothness of skin; and vivid color, say, in the eyes and hair. There is little dissent among people of different cultures, ethnicities, races, ages and gender."— Sarah Kershaw, The New York Times
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