CACI International is a US-based defence contractor. From August 2003 until the early autumn of 2005 it was contracted to provide “interrogation services” for the US Army at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. While CACI staff were employed as interrogators at Abu Ghraib, prisoners were humiliated and tortured there by US military police. Photographs of the abuse shocked the world and led to the conviction of a number of low-ranking US soldiers by courts martial.

CACI denies any responsibility for the abuse that was photographed and denies some other allegations of abuse. But it is trying to block lawsuits brought against it by former Abu Ghraib prisoners by claiming “official immunity”.

CACI staff interrogated people held without charge or trial at Abu Ghraib. Prisoners they questioned were deprived of human rights guaranteed in international norms. The “rules of engagement” at Abu Ghraib permitted sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and intimidation by dogs.

The next Scottish census will be run by CACI Ltd. CACI Ltd has been given an £18.5 million contract for key information technology work and other services for the 2011 Scottish Census. CACI Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of CACI International. That means that all the money it makes belongs to CACI International. But CACI International remains beyond the reach of Scottish and British law.

A REHEARSAL for the census will be held on 29 March 2009 in the west of Edinburgh and in Lewis and Harris. Participation in the rehearsal is optional.

The Scottish Government says it “understands the views” of people who have written to it about the contract. It says it has set up a new “contract structure” to “distance” CACI from personal data collected by the census. But it refuses to cancel the contract.

I personally find it unacceptable that Scottish taxpayers are being asked to support a company that has been involved in human rights abuses and, more importantly in my mind, is trying to use its status as a military contractor to shirk accountability. However you feel about the necessity of ignoring human rights for the greater good, and that’s a point of view I can understand even if I don’t necessarily agree with it, if such actions are required and needed then the perpetrator should have the balls to stand up and defend his actions rather than hiding behind some label of “official immunity” like a spunkless coward.

It isn’t too late for the Scottish Government to cancel the contract.

If you feel similarly about this issue, here is what you could do:

 1. Sign the online petition
 2. REFUSE to take any part in the census rehearsal being held on 29 March 2009

You can read all about it here, although I’ve mostly copied and pasted from that webpage.

“I want to get my comics box out this weekend…”

“And build your wheel.”

“Oh, but I can’t!”

“Need spokes?”

“I’ll probably have to order them. I’ll need to dismantle that wheel [pointing to the wheel sitting in the wheel jig on the living room floor] and take the hub and the new rim to a shop and ask them to measure it up and calculate my spoke length because I don’t have the kit to do it myself. My mate Graham in London is rebuilding his front wheel on Open Pro as well, and his is an On-One hub, but his bike isn’t as old as mine. Mine is the last of the 135 mil rear drop-outs… What? WHAT?”

“LAST OF THE ONE THREE FIVE DROP OUTS. Snerk.”

“Well, it is! They changed to 120 after that… Mroof!”

“What?”

“You’re being mean.”

“You were geeking at me.”

“I’m not a geek!”

And while I’m moaning about him to you, he comes through and says: “Well you did say last of the 351 [that’s 135, by the way] like ‘Last of the V8 interceptors.'”

His point?

My triathlon/physical training friends are divided into two sorts of people: those who use Polar and those who use Suunto. There are other fitness freaks out there using Timex but we don’t talk about them. Weirdoes.

I can’t remember why I went for Suunto, although possibly it was yet another instance of Munky and I converging on kit choice. I think he already had one, although his has an orange strap that is teh nasteh. Blech.

Or maybe it was that you can get much more functionality out of a Suunto than a Polar costing the same.

Anyway. My HRM is my biochip buddy. Along with the memory belt, which is the mutt’s nuts, it keeps track of my training and tells me when my heart is beating as fast as a hamster’s (that’s another of my superpowers: heartrate of hamster. I’m a fast beater) and has this nifty little widget called training effect, giving you a numerical value of the hardness of a particular session. I need this because I have a tendency to overtrain.

Although it would be much more helpful if I actually paid attention to it.

Recently I noticed that the day after a pool session the inside of the watch face was covered in condensation. Bah. It am be leaking!

This morning it stopped working because the battery had shorted, so I toddled off to the Suunto website and filled out a service request.

Blimey. After putting in my serial number and choosing the problem from the list, I was supplied with a bunch of paperwork to print off and a phone number for DHL. They’ll come to my work on Tuesday, pick up my WRISTTOP COMPUTER (can’t call it a watch, apparently, or they won’t carry it), take it to Finland where the biochip buddy elves will get to work on it, then bring it back to me 7 days later.

I’m amazed by how simple it all is.

I don’t know what Polar’s customer service is like, but Suunto’s rocks.

At the weekend I acquired my favourite tracks from LBP and stuck them on my “Happy Bum” playlist on my MP3 player. This week I started running to that instead of Podrunner (sorry Steve).

Only problem is that, no matter which particular track I’m listening to I get a constant stream in my head that looks something like this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSBOM32NEoo]

I can’t keep grinning when I’m running, dammit. It makes it hard to breathe and my teeth are getting cold!

Random item found in the shop that I just had to have:

Ah, the power of twitter.

A friend recently advised me to protect my updates so that they don’t appear to the public. But then I wouldn’t have discovered LittleBigPlanetoid and thus how to export photos. I mean, it’s not like they announced the ability or anything.

But now, oh now I can export photos from LitleBigPlanet and this awesome piece of news is going to cause the creation of hundreds of avatars and inspire much more use of the photo feature. It has also cheered me up immensely, as I was a bit disheartened by the loss of Shackleton’s cycle computer yesterday (fortunately I know he’d recently completed his 6000th mile, so when I replace it I just add Saturday’s ride to the mileage and adjust the odometer to match).

Now. Photos!

I can see a LBP montage desktop wallpaper coming on.

It’s so sweet.

After being ridden to North Berwick in just under two hours (we were hardly gurning it!) our bikes huddle together while we head to the pub opposite for noms.

Can’t remember the name of the place. Very friendly, but all I can say about the food is that it is edible. If you’re really hungry.

Don’t know why the kiddies were pointing. Maybe they’d never seen fixed gears before.

Anyone got any recommendations for a good place to buy 2032s? I get through shedloads of them, largely as a result of Fingal’s OS1.0 chewing through the bastard things like they’re going out of fashion. It’s great having a computer that makes me feel like my bike talks to me, but it’s power hungry. I also have a plethora of backup photons that need three of the damn things each, and they are all currently too dim to be useful.

If it’s possible to get rechargeable ones, that would be the icing on the battery-powered cake, that would.

The suggestion from a Ceefax correspondent that we rename the smear test meets with a derisive response at SYB.

Admittedly I am neither a woman nor a psychologist, but I really do think a smear test should be called something else — I’m sure it’s not as horrible an experience as it sounds.

As a matter of fact DM, Merseyside is quite right. It’s not as horrible an experience as it sounds. It’s far, far worse.

“Smear test” evokes something innocuous, such as fingerprick test; or, for those who know too many inaccurate misogynistic jokes, something to do with sitting on a glass slide. What it in no way evokes is the experience of lying on a sheet of paper, naked from the waist down, being told to bring your knees up, tilt your pelvis and relax while a cold metal cone is inserted into a very sensitive place and cranked open like a car jack before your cervix is scraped with something resembling a lolly stick.

If you’re lucky you’ll get a sympathetic and sensitive nurse, who bothers to ask whether you’ve had kids rather than going for the larger sized speculum on the basis that you’re old enough to have had them, and who pays attention to quirks of anatomy rather than just shoving harder upon meeting resistence.

As weeza says:

May I suggest DM undergo the cotton-bud-in-the-japs-eye test simultaneously with a prostate exam, whilst fourteen med students with clipboards and rubber gloves look on and he is told to ‘just relax’ on a paper sheet with his ankles behind his head and a bright light shining on his nether regions? Just for comparison’s sake?

On one memorable occasion a German gynaecologist told me to stop complaining, it couldn’t possibly hurt, there are no pain nerves up there.

He was male. Otherwise he’d have known better.

kurreltheraven alerted me to an interesting feature on googlemaps. Now we just need to get them to implement directions by bike and we can go!

Anyone got a pedalo?