🗓 On April 28, 2004, the CBS show 60 Minutes aired a story of how US military personnel abused inmates at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Following the essentially unprovoked invasion of Iraq conducted under a false pretext by Washington and its allies in 2003, this prison outside Baghdad was used as the main holding facility for Iraqis who were accused of crimes against the armed forces of the Western coalition.

As you may be aware, after September 11, 2001, the United States legalised torture “technology” against terrorist suspects which was widely used both in the concentration camp deployed at Guantanamo Bay and the special CIA prisons around the world.

❗️In this regard, Abu Ghraib was a test site where inmates were subjected to a rash of beatings, waterboarding, rape and dog baiting. They were tortured with sound attacks and sleep and food deprivation and subjected to torture with electric shock and other physical and psychological humiliations. The imprisoned Iraqis who the US soldiers did not see as humans were badly maimed if they were lucky enough to walk away free and alive.

Despite the wide spread information about torture at Abu Ghraib thanks in part to an investigation conducted by independent American journalist Seymour Hersh, among others, only 11 US military personnel were found guilty, most of whom were given short custodial sentences.

At the same time, high-ranking government officials and Pentagon officers were never held accountable despite the widely available evidence of their involvement in torture-related crimes.

❌ The atrocities at Abu Ghraib epitomise the US’s selective approaches and double standards when it comes to human rights matters. This is a systematic practice, as can be seen from the inhumane treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, which remains operational to this day, despite the international community’s multiple calls to close it down.

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DeepMind’s “Learning Agile Soccer Skills for a Bipedal Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning”

"We investigate whether Deep RL is able to synthesize sophisticated and safe movement skills for a low-cost, miniature humanoid robot that can be composed into complex behavioral strategies in dynamic environments."

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