This actually started during WWII and I've heard references to precidents existing even before. So, clearly you would need to look back some 6-decades or more...not just the last couple of years.
True enough... all these have been issues in the last couple of years, but they didn't all start then.
So has just about every significant world power (in one form or another) in the last century. What's you're point?
That it's a bad idea and in many cases a violation of the law as well as human decency? I'm not saying it's a unique problem, but it's a problem.
Does the name Nixon mean aything to you? Do the 1960's have any associative meaning in this context? This isn't exactly new. US History is ripe with examples of anti-American behavior by American leaders.
COINTELPRO was actually what I had in mind when I brought that particular issue up. It was supposed to be something in our nation's past... and something "we don't do anymore", like Japanese internment camps, or giving black people diseases to see what will happen. But it's still happening in this case.
Running with your logic, the President is showing his red, white and blue blood when the DCMA was signed into law but is anti-American because he wouldn't pass a bill which erroded the most basic of common sense;
I don't see how that remotely follows... I'm not saying that Congress can do no wrong, I'm saying if they don't have any power to reign in the executive branch (and at this point, they don't appear to) there's really no point to even having them. I mean, why have the pretense of a Republic when what we've got is an elected autocrat who appoints all the positions of real power?
there's no more legal basis for shutting eBay down because of that than there is shutting down a public school because some of the kids sell drugs in the hallways, or shutting down a Walgreens because the guy in the Santa Claus suit out front isn't really from the Salvation Army.
With all the other stories that've been breaking in the past few months of the NSA wholesale spying on American civilians, the real news here isn't just that the TIA is around. It's that the Senate ordered it shut down, and it wasn't.
Lets look at the past couple of years. The Executive branch has claimed the powers to: declare people including American citizens "enemy combatants" and hold them incommunicado overseas for however long they wish with no access to the US court system, wiretap American citizens within the United States without a court order or indeed any judicial review. Recently the Vice President has also claimed to power to unilaterally declassify anything that he wants.
The CIA has been caught running torture flights through allied countries without their apparent knowledge, running secret prisons in EU member states without EU knowledge, and to top it off, they were caught kidnapping people on the streets of Milan without the knowledge of the Italian government.
The Pentagon, the FBI and the California National Guard have all been caught spying on peaceful protesters on American soil, in spite of a law that specifically forbids this.
A few months ago... Congress passed a law banning torture. The President grudgingly signed this into law, but reiterated his belief that he wasn't personally bound by the ban.
Now we find out that while the Senate ordered a domestic surveillance operation shut down years ago because it was a threat to the privacy of the average American... the Executive branch has decided to keep it going anyhow, without anyone's knowledge.
What's the point of even having a Legislative or Judicial branch anymore? They have no real powers at this point.
The Executive branch can just arbitrarily declare people outside the judicial branch's jurisdiction to keep them out of the courts, and the whole notion of getting a court order for federal law enforcement action is now considered "obsolete".
The Legislature still theoretically gets to pass laws, but the executive branch can basically break them at will... and since the power of enforcing those laws falls within the executive branch's domain, is it any wonder that all these overt violations of the laws of Congress never amount to any meaningful charges?
In fact, we don't even know how far the executive branch's power goes at this point... nobody new the President had the power to wiretap without warrants. The Constitution never mentions it... in fact, federal law specifically prohibits it. Indeed, when the press first found out about this power, they were pressured to keep it a secret (which they did for over a year), and when the existance of this power was revealed to thew general public, members of the executive branch denounced the revelation of the power itself as unlawful.
they were always one of the more expensive dialup companies too and it hasn't hurt them any. People who want someone to hold their hand through the whole experience usually don't mind paying more for less.
That's a good point... me and my shuttlecock salute you:)
Seriously though, I wonder if there's been an example of any Islamist group actually getting after a company for this. It just seems to me the comparatively high number of muslim names that have the word "allah" in there somewhere makes such a filter seem to be discriminating against muslims rather than preventing such discrimination.
If I were them, I think I'd have a policy of not filtering the names and instead just have a conspicuous place to complain if someone's username is in violation of Yahoo's standards.
Hell, I'd hire her. It's nice to see someone who's not obsessed with that false politeness that passes for "professionalism" in this day and age.
Anyhow, nothing she wrote was that bad... she got a lowball offer and didn't feel the need to accept it. Then she got a pissy letter from the guy who just assumed she was going to accept and didin't like it.
I don't recall a single incident ever in the history of the world where "radical Islam" killed someone named Callahan because the letters a l l a h appear in the name. Moreover, I've never seen evidence that any major company has ever been threatened for allowing someone named Callahan to go by their family name.
It's fun to bring up the spectre of radical Islam in every facet of modern society, but the facts don't support the notion that Yahoo would be placing itself at any danger in this case.
In fact, there are more than a few Muslim names which include those five letters in order, so if anything, Yahoo's setting itself up to look like they're discriminating against Muslims with this filter.
Try telling some girl named Jamallah Ali that her name can't be used on Yahoo because it's got a religious term in it, and see how she feels when her nextdoor neighbor and former NBA player God Shammgod gets in no questions asked.
So then your argument is, for the record, that if a government doesn't have a total monopoly on all internal press, it is disingenuous to suggest that they're already gone "too far" with their propaganda machine, even when a collection of perfectly accurate examples are provided?
It was meant as a quote of the BBC article, not a quote of Rumsfeld (it appears the BBC was paraphrasing)... sorry if it was confusing.
Interestingly enough, the wikipedia article you link to about the "correct usage" of Begging the Question (which I was, for what it's worth, aware of) mentions my usage as a "modern use", but whether it's a misuse is far less certain. I know a lot of people enjoy the feeling of correcting other peoples' use of language, and I don't want to deny you that pleasure so for the sake of argument lets just say I barely have a grasp on the English language and move on.
I stand by it. Al Jazeera's a perfectly legitimate source of information, and the story I linked to can be independently confirmed from a dozen other websites. I could've just as easily linked to the Fox News version of the same story, but that happened to be the one I had handy at the time.
Plus the CPU and drive are being used in other stuff as well... IBM's making servers with Cell chips in them and lots of sony partners are going to be making standalone Blu-Ray players.
What strikes me as a little weird is that the PS3 is allegedly going to launch about the same time as the rest of the Blu-Ray players, include all the same features, PLUS all the video game stuff... and yet the standalone Blu-Ray players are expected to retail for nearly a grand when they launch.
Now, I understand that the players are being sold for a profit while the PS3 is being sold for a loss... but if Sony's selling the PS3 for half the price of a standalone Blu-Ray player, who's going to buy the later? Less features at twice the price?
Actually it was my understanding that the $900 per unit costs were manufacturing costs, and did not include any R&D expenses. Though I'm sure some companies are passing along the costs of developing their components to Sony in higher costs for those components.
Mass acceptance of the PS3 probably does a long way towards cementing the Blu-Ray disc as the next generation video standard too. But still, I can't imagine Sony's going to allow thing to happen.
I know if I was a shareholder and the company is all but announcing that the only marginally profitable video game division is going to need to drive the entire company into a loss for a year or two I'd be very concerned.
The PS2 did as well as could ever be expected of the PS3, and it never exactly brought in enormous amounts of money. The PSP is a loss leader too, it's North American tie-in ratio is atrocious, and it's Japanese market share has it as a distant also-ran. Now the PS2, which had helped subsidize the PSP debauchle, is being replaced by an even bigger loss leader? I think Sony needs to re-examine to what end they're in this industry. Is being the market leader in home consoles really worth it if its not something you can make money on?
They're in the worst position of the three in consoles here. They're nowhere near as able to make back money on a console as Nintendo (whose first party titles are always top sellers), and Nintendo never sells systems for more than a cursory loss anyhow. Microsoft beat them to market with a comparable performer at what sounds like a lower price... and even though they're probably taking a hefty loss on it as well, they're much more able to afford it...
I would say the per game revenues will be lucky if they pay for the marketing blitz we're sure to see in the early goings. That sort of loss is flat out dreadful.
Unless they expect system costs to come down quickly and majorly, these numbers don't add up in a lot of ways. Say what you will about Microsoft's lack of a video game business model, they don't appear to be getting in this far over their heads. If Sony's truly dropping $400 or $500 a system just getting these things to market, their EBITDA only allows them to subsidize 10 million or so a year before they eat through the entire company's profitability. That may sound like a lot, but to keep up with past generations they need to sell about double that.
Sure, eventually prices will come down (some), but is Sony's front office so dedicated to the video game wing they're willing to sacrifice the whole company's earnings for a year or two until that happens just to keep their present position in a market that's already showing signs of contracting (at least in Japan)?
This is no more outrageous than some other stuff that's happened... in general the DHS operates like... well... every federal agencies every time it's revealed they're going impressively outside their jurisdiction (which seems to happen every other week these days). They shrug, stonewall, and wait for the public outrage to die down before quietly burying the story.
I would say at this point the best-case scenario is that the RIAA's heavy-handedness eventually starts to alienate customers (how this hasn't already happened is beyond me, but I've got a much lower tolerance than most for this sort of thing), and one or more of the major members sees a chance to engraciate themselves to disgruntled customers by openly bucking the trend and finding ways to offer customers more, rather than fewer, options.
I wouldn't lose sleep over the government's role in all this simply because they're so slow to react and so technologically ignorant. Even when they do choose to officially curb end-users rights in a big way (ala the DMCA), most people just ignore the new law and keep doing what they want with comparatively little fear of reprisal. At this point, the government's probably got every last one of us on some piddly little law (whether it's not reporting that dollar bill you found on the ground as income on your 1040 or ripping an audio CD), so the threat of being in violation of yet another law is going to progressively matter less and less.
I'm getting the sense here that the RIAA and the online downloadable music companies which are going to be their major source of future revenue are running at cross-purposes here.
The downloadable music companies like Apple have always tried to argue that deep down we knew there was something "wrong" with using the illegal download services... that it was not just marginally illegal, but immoral. The RIAA's ever broadening definition of what violates their copyright keeps cheapening that concept.
To be honest with you, once affordable legal downloads became available I started switching over to them for convenience sake, and also for the added bonus of not being in violation of any laws. But now the RIAA comes along and says "guess what, that Culture Club CD you bought 10 years ago and ripped onto your hard drive because you don't own any audio CD players anymore... that was a crime". Well, at this point I'm breaking the law anyhow. So my choice is to either shell out a few grand to replace ever cassette tape and CD I ever bought with iTunes, or to keep playing the ripped, but legally owned stuff, knowing that the RIAA is still going to bitch.
But you know what? This probably does have an effect on how I'm going to buy music in the future. If the RIAA is going to argue that downloading a bunch of Bjork songs off a P2P service is the legal equivalent to going to Best Buy and buying the CDs and ripping them to my hard drive... there's no good reason for me to shell out the money anymore, is there?
If you can't listen to music anymore without being a criminal, then why pay for the priviledge?
Well in the first place it involves trust, but it involves trust from an administration which frankly was willing to deport people to these countries without the agreements, so to me it begs the question: do they care if they're really trustworthy or not? Also, I'm not sure "making you a civilized place to dump the people we don't want anymore" really qualifies are becoming a responsible member of the international community. I mean, granted, it worked for Australia... but I digress
As far as using info gathered with torture, the very fact that the information came from torture is what makes it unreliable. I'm sure if you ask the prosecution, they'd argue that if it wasn't "likely to be true" the person would've never been subjected to torture in the first place.
If you want your legal system (not to mention your high-minded pretense towards human rights) to have any semblence of credibility, you probably shouldn't be so willing to throw away things like "gathering evidence" and "establishing a motive" in favor of just saying "He was a suspect, and he was tortured by... someone... and he confessed... case closed".
OK, I admit it was awkwardly worded... I did not mean to imply that the UK was deporting people in an effort to get them tortured (as the US does on a regular basis), there's no concrete evidence that I'm aware of that has ever been the case.
Nonetheless, the Blair administration can hardly be said to oppose torture. Ultimately in this case I think the best that can be said of them is that they are indifferent to the notion of torture... they want to deport these people, and the fact that those people are liable to be tortured is getting in their way from a legal standpoint. So torture is in this case inconvenient to them.
But I don't see any sign that they're making any but the most cursory attempts to prevent it, Blair has already said if it comes down to not being able to deport people to countries that practice torture or pulling out of the ECHR he's going to choose the later. The deals you mentioned have no legal force behind them... they are, at best, an effort to get around the politically explosive move of pulling out of the ECHR by giving the courts and the administration some plausible deniability. And the first time one of the deportees gets tortured to death in some Libyan prison, you'll get a disinterested shrug from Blair, and a reminder that 'things are different now' from his staff.
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This actually started during WWII and I've heard references to precidents existing even before. So, clearly you would need to look back some 6-decades or more...not just the last couple of years.
True enough... all these have been issues in the last couple of years, but they didn't all start then.
So has just about every significant world power (in one form or another) in the last century. What's you're point?
That it's a bad idea and in many cases a violation of the law as well as human decency? I'm not saying it's a unique problem, but it's a problem.
Does the name Nixon mean aything to you? Do the 1960's have any associative meaning in this context? This isn't exactly new. US History is ripe with examples of anti-American behavior by American leaders.
COINTELPRO was actually what I had in mind when I brought that particular issue up. It was supposed to be something in our nation's past... and something "we don't do anymore", like Japanese internment camps, or giving black people diseases to see what will happen. But it's still happening in this case.
Running with your logic, the President is showing his red, white and blue blood when the DCMA was signed into law but is anti-American because he wouldn't pass a bill which erroded the most basic of common sense;
I don't see how that remotely follows... I'm not saying that Congress can do no wrong, I'm saying if they don't have any power to reign in the executive branch (and at this point, they don't appear to) there's really no point to even having them. I mean, why have the pretense of a Republic when what we've got is an elected autocrat who appoints all the positions of real power?
except for Amazon, Yahoo, uBid, etc...
there's no more legal basis for shutting eBay down because of that than there is shutting down a public school because some of the kids sell drugs in the hallways, or shutting down a Walgreens because the guy in the Santa Claus suit out front isn't really from the Salvation Army.
With all the other stories that've been breaking in the past few months of the NSA wholesale spying on American civilians, the real news here isn't just that the TIA is around. It's that the Senate ordered it shut down, and it wasn't.
Lets look at the past couple of years. The Executive branch has claimed the powers to: declare people including American citizens "enemy combatants" and hold them incommunicado overseas for however long they wish with no access to the US court system, wiretap American citizens within the United States without a court order or indeed any judicial review. Recently the Vice President has also claimed to power to unilaterally declassify anything that he wants.
The CIA has been caught running torture flights through allied countries without their apparent knowledge, running secret prisons in EU member states without EU knowledge, and to top it off, they were caught kidnapping people on the streets of Milan without the knowledge of the Italian government.
The Pentagon, the FBI and the California National Guard have all been caught spying on peaceful protesters on American soil, in spite of a law that specifically forbids this.
A few months ago... Congress passed a law banning torture. The President grudgingly signed this into law, but reiterated his belief that he wasn't personally bound by the ban.
Now we find out that while the Senate ordered a domestic surveillance operation shut down years ago because it was a threat to the privacy of the average American... the Executive branch has decided to keep it going anyhow, without anyone's knowledge.
What's the point of even having a Legislative or Judicial branch anymore? They have no real powers at this point.
The Executive branch can just arbitrarily declare people outside the judicial branch's jurisdiction to keep them out of the courts, and the whole notion of getting a court order for federal law enforcement action is now considered "obsolete".
The Legislature still theoretically gets to pass laws, but the executive branch can basically break them at will... and since the power of enforcing those laws falls within the executive branch's domain, is it any wonder that all these overt violations of the laws of Congress never amount to any meaningful charges?
In fact, we don't even know how far the executive branch's power goes at this point... nobody new the President had the power to wiretap without warrants. The Constitution never mentions it... in fact, federal law specifically prohibits it. Indeed, when the press first found out about this power, they were pressured to keep it a secret (which they did for over a year), and when the existance of this power was revealed to thew general public, members of the executive branch denounced the revelation of the power itself as unlawful.
they were always one of the more expensive dialup companies too and it hasn't hurt them any. People who want someone to hold their hand through the whole experience usually don't mind paying more for less.
That's a good point... me and my shuttlecock salute you :)
Seriously though, I wonder if there's been an example of any Islamist group actually getting after a company for this. It just seems to me the comparatively high number of muslim names that have the word "allah" in there somewhere makes such a filter seem to be discriminating against muslims rather than preventing such discrimination.
If I were them, I think I'd have a policy of not filtering the names and instead just have a conspicuous place to complain if someone's username is in violation of Yahoo's standards.
Well, that sort of eloquence is hard to argue with.
Hell, I'd hire her. It's nice to see someone who's not obsessed with that false politeness that passes for "professionalism" in this day and age.
Anyhow, nothing she wrote was that bad... she got a lowball offer and didn't feel the need to accept it. Then she got a pissy letter from the guy who just assumed she was going to accept and didin't like it.
I don't recall a single incident ever in the history of the world where "radical Islam" killed someone named Callahan because the letters a l l a h appear in the name. Moreover, I've never seen evidence that any major company has ever been threatened for allowing someone named Callahan to go by their family name.
It's fun to bring up the spectre of radical Islam in every facet of modern society, but the facts don't support the notion that Yahoo would be placing itself at any danger in this case.
In fact, there are more than a few Muslim names which include those five letters in order, so if anything, Yahoo's setting itself up to look like they're discriminating against Muslims with this filter.
Try telling some girl named Jamallah Ali that her name can't be used on Yahoo because it's got a religious term in it, and see how she feels when her nextdoor neighbor and former NBA player God Shammgod gets in no questions asked.
Wow... it's fun to pull numbers out of your ass, isn't it?
Saddam was in power for over 20 years, so you've just made the claim that he killed over a million Iraqis.
Care to try desperately to back that up with some dubious sources?
So then your argument is, for the record, that if a government doesn't have a total monopoly on all internal press, it is disingenuous to suggest that they're already gone "too far" with their propaganda machine, even when a collection of perfectly accurate examples are provided?
I mean, just so we understand the rules here.
It was meant as a quote of the BBC article, not a quote of Rumsfeld (it appears the BBC was paraphrasing)... sorry if it was confusing.
Interestingly enough, the wikipedia article you link to about the "correct usage" of Begging the Question (which I was, for what it's worth, aware of) mentions my usage as a "modern use", but whether it's a misuse is far less certain. I know a lot of people enjoy the feeling of correcting other peoples' use of language, and I don't want to deny you that pleasure so for the sake of argument lets just say I barely have a grasp on the English language and move on.
Well... so long as it's the last time.
I stand by it. Al Jazeera's a perfectly legitimate source of information, and the story I linked to can be independently confirmed from a dozen other websites. I could've just as easily linked to the Fox News version of the same story, but that happened to be the one I had handy at the time.
Plus the CPU and drive are being used in other stuff as well... IBM's making servers with Cell chips in them and lots of sony partners are going to be making standalone Blu-Ray players.
What strikes me as a little weird is that the PS3 is allegedly going to launch about the same time as the rest of the Blu-Ray players, include all the same features, PLUS all the video game stuff... and yet the standalone Blu-Ray players are expected to retail for nearly a grand when they launch.
Now, I understand that the players are being sold for a profit while the PS3 is being sold for a loss... but if Sony's selling the PS3 for half the price of a standalone Blu-Ray player, who's going to buy the later? Less features at twice the price?
Actually it was my understanding that the $900 per unit costs were manufacturing costs, and did not include any R&D expenses. Though I'm sure some companies are passing along the costs of developing their components to Sony in higher costs for those components.
Mass acceptance of the PS3 probably does a long way towards cementing the Blu-Ray disc as the next generation video standard too. But still, I can't imagine Sony's going to allow thing to happen.
I know if I was a shareholder and the company is all but announcing that the only marginally profitable video game division is going to need to drive the entire company into a loss for a year or two I'd be very concerned.
The PS2 did as well as could ever be expected of the PS3, and it never exactly brought in enormous amounts of money. The PSP is a loss leader too, it's North American tie-in ratio is atrocious, and it's Japanese market share has it as a distant also-ran. Now the PS2, which had helped subsidize the PSP debauchle, is being replaced by an even bigger loss leader? I think Sony needs to re-examine to what end they're in this industry. Is being the market leader in home consoles really worth it if its not something you can make money on?
They're in the worst position of the three in consoles here. They're nowhere near as able to make back money on a console as Nintendo (whose first party titles are always top sellers), and Nintendo never sells systems for more than a cursory loss anyhow. Microsoft beat them to market with a comparable performer at what sounds like a lower price... and even though they're probably taking a hefty loss on it as well, they're much more able to afford it...
I would say the per game revenues will be lucky if they pay for the marketing blitz we're sure to see in the early goings. That sort of loss is flat out dreadful.
Unless they expect system costs to come down quickly and majorly, these numbers don't add up in a lot of ways. Say what you will about Microsoft's lack of a video game business model, they don't appear to be getting in this far over their heads. If Sony's truly dropping $400 or $500 a system just getting these things to market, their EBITDA only allows them to subsidize 10 million or so a year before they eat through the entire company's profitability. That may sound like a lot, but to keep up with past generations they need to sell about double that.
Sure, eventually prices will come down (some), but is Sony's front office so dedicated to the video game wing they're willing to sacrifice the whole company's earnings for a year or two until that happens just to keep their present position in a market that's already showing signs of contracting (at least in Japan)?
This is no more outrageous than some other stuff that's happened... in general the DHS operates like... well... every federal agencies every time it's revealed they're going impressively outside their jurisdiction (which seems to happen every other week these days). They shrug, stonewall, and wait for the public outrage to die down before quietly burying the story.
then you're going to miss out on the latest developments in keyboard speed-typing.
I would say at this point the best-case scenario is that the RIAA's heavy-handedness eventually starts to alienate customers (how this hasn't already happened is beyond me, but I've got a much lower tolerance than most for this sort of thing), and one or more of the major members sees a chance to engraciate themselves to disgruntled customers by openly bucking the trend and finding ways to offer customers more, rather than fewer, options.
I wouldn't lose sleep over the government's role in all this simply because they're so slow to react and so technologically ignorant. Even when they do choose to officially curb end-users rights in a big way (ala the DMCA), most people just ignore the new law and keep doing what they want with comparatively little fear of reprisal. At this point, the government's probably got every last one of us on some piddly little law (whether it's not reporting that dollar bill you found on the ground as income on your 1040 or ripping an audio CD), so the threat of being in violation of yet another law is going to progressively matter less and less.
I'm getting the sense here that the RIAA and the online downloadable music companies which are going to be their major source of future revenue are running at cross-purposes here.
The downloadable music companies like Apple have always tried to argue that deep down we knew there was something "wrong" with using the illegal download services... that it was not just marginally illegal, but immoral. The RIAA's ever broadening definition of what violates their copyright keeps cheapening that concept.
To be honest with you, once affordable legal downloads became available I started switching over to them for convenience sake, and also for the added bonus of not being in violation of any laws. But now the RIAA comes along and says "guess what, that Culture Club CD you bought 10 years ago and ripped onto your hard drive because you don't own any audio CD players anymore... that was a crime". Well, at this point I'm breaking the law anyhow. So my choice is to either shell out a few grand to replace ever cassette tape and CD I ever bought with iTunes, or to keep playing the ripped, but legally owned stuff, knowing that the RIAA is still going to bitch.
But you know what? This probably does have an effect on how I'm going to buy music in the future. If the RIAA is going to argue that downloading a bunch of Bjork songs off a P2P service is the legal equivalent to going to Best Buy and buying the CDs and ripping them to my hard drive... there's no good reason for me to shell out the money anymore, is there?
If you can't listen to music anymore without being a criminal, then why pay for the priviledge?
Well in the first place it involves trust, but it involves trust from an administration which frankly was willing to deport people to these countries without the agreements, so to me it begs the question: do they care if they're really trustworthy or not? Also, I'm not sure "making you a civilized place to dump the people we don't want anymore" really qualifies are becoming a responsible member of the international community. I mean, granted, it worked for Australia... but I digress
As far as using info gathered with torture, the very fact that the information came from torture is what makes it unreliable. I'm sure if you ask the prosecution, they'd argue that if it wasn't "likely to be true" the person would've never been subjected to torture in the first place.
If you want your legal system (not to mention your high-minded pretense towards human rights) to have any semblence of credibility, you probably shouldn't be so willing to throw away things like "gathering evidence" and "establishing a motive" in favor of just saying "He was a suspect, and he was tortured by... someone... and he confessed... case closed".
Actually the official line from the FO right now is "no cases of 'extraordinary rendition' flights which the government was unaware of".
OK, I admit it was awkwardly worded... I did not mean to imply that the UK was deporting people in an effort to get them tortured (as the US does on a regular basis), there's no concrete evidence that I'm aware of that has ever been the case.
Nonetheless, the Blair administration can hardly be said to oppose torture. Ultimately in this case I think the best that can be said of them is that they are indifferent to the notion of torture... they want to deport these people, and the fact that those people are liable to be tortured is getting in their way from a legal standpoint. So torture is in this case inconvenient to them.
But I don't see any sign that they're making any but the most cursory attempts to prevent it, Blair has already said if it comes down to not being able to deport people to countries that practice torture or pulling out of the ECHR he's going to choose the later. The deals you mentioned have no legal force behind them... they are, at best, an effort to get around the politically explosive move of pulling out of the ECHR by giving the courts and the administration some plausible deniability. And the first time one of the deportees gets tortured to death in some Libyan prison, you'll get a disinterested shrug from Blair, and a reminder that 'things are different now' from his staff.
*sigh*
We've already gone over this in a different branch of this thread.
(I don't know why everyone keeps doubting me when I say stuff like this, it's not like I don't do this for a living.)