The Grauniad - A Bad Day

The Guardian's nickname arises from its alleged tendency towards original and amusing typo errors. Everyone has a fave, for example the near-legendary occasion when they managed to review a production of Doris Godunov. One of the paper's former editors claims that the reason for this reputation is buried in a British Railways working timetable from the mid-1950s, back in the days when the paper was still the Manchester Guardian. As the paper was printed in Manchester, its first edition had to catch a specific mail train in order to hit the newsstands of London every morning. Therefore, all the paper's deadlines were defined by the time that crucial train pulled out of Manchester Piccadilly station on the 180 or so mile trip south. (One imagines steam in the coal-smoke darkness of the small hours in Mancland, men heaving bundles of Grauniads into the mail vans at the last moment before the whistle blew)

The northern editions didn't need such haste, and therefore they could go to press later. Vitally, this interval permitted the whole paper to be proofed before printing. The London edition, though, had to skip this process - it had a train to catch. Of course, all other national media were based in London, with the result that the Guardian's image was irredeemably marked by that damn timetable. Later, after the move to London, the revolutionary changes in publishing technology, there was no longer any such cause. But the typos had eaten deep into the paper's institutional culture, so much so that it seems to play up to it. Alone until recently among British newspapers, it publishes a daily corrections column. It even published a collection of the best corrections in book form. Despite this admirable commitment to typographical perfection, though, sometimes the old disease pops up and isn't corrected.

On Wednesday, then, the Grauniad succeeded in referring to the philosopher Ronald Barthes, and topped that by misspelling its own title as the Guardain. Neither have so far been corrected. Yesterday, in an article about environmental threats, it stated that the Greenland ice sheet contained 2.6 cubic kilometres of water. A fair drop, but hardly enough to raise the level of the Atlantic by 7 metres or to make up 6% of the water on Earth. But then again, journalists famously count like the rabbits in Watership Down: one, two, three, many.

Wonderfully, I searched the Grauniad's website (sorry, wesbite) for the typos and they are still there: Guardain

And it wasn't the first time either

Ronald Barthes

Depressingly, though, the Grauniad has corrected the online version of the Greenland teaspoon story, found here. That should have been 2.6 million cubic km. So you'll all have to trust me.

Grim...grim..grim

Human Rights Watch report on the men detained at "undisclosed locations" by the US intelligence services. (Thanks to Nick Barlow)

[Unfounded Speculation]I have a little theory about this, which I won't push too hard without corroboration. If you had to move prisoners around the world secretly, wouldn't a couple of aircraft not belonging to the government, unmarked, and registered under a flag of convenience be useful? You could always book the bill to some other major operation.

Michael Howard - A New Approach to Statistics

Answering heavy criticism of his speech to the effect that he walked around Brixton for two hours without seeing a policeman, Michael Howard yesterday penned an article in the Guardian ranting against what he calls "selective statistics". He is angry about the British Crime Survey, the scheme created by the Thatcher government in 1981 which questions a very large representative sample of the population about their experience of crime. Now, in Britain there are two measures of crime - the BCS, and the count of crimes recorded by the police. The problem with the latter, of course, is that it only counts those crimes that are reported to the police. Also, it is dependent on the policy of the police as to which crimes they consider worth recording. Mr Howard is currently mad keen on this one, precisely because it has gone up. This suits his political aims. The other measure, though, has been falling steadily since 1995. This of course does not.

Mr Howard has a simple answer. He wants to abolish the BCS.

Statistically, this is a remarkable act of stupidity. All statistics are a sample of reality. The ideal statistical measurement would count absolutely everyone or everything involved with total certainty. The purpose of statistics as a discipline is to approach as closely as possible to this impossible ideal while keeping the sample within the bounds of practicality. One principle emerges from this - the larger the sample, the more reliable the results. A second is that the sample must be as accurate a representation as possible of the population. Anything that tends to skew the make-up of the sample is destructive of accuracy. The recorded crime figures, for example, sample only those crimes that get reported (first principle) and are then contaminated by police policy (second principle). Further, the sampling effect of police policy can change. In 1998 the police began recording all common assaults (pushing and shoving) in the crime stats. Unsurprisingly, the figures went up simply because the sample had expanded. All these offences are classified as violent crimes, so the number of violent crimes surged as a whole new category was shoved in. The BCS has used the same methodology over time, so the figures are comparable with each other.

Howard claims that an estimated 12 million crimes are not picked up by the survey. Very true. But most of those 12 million are not picked up by the police count either, by definition, because the whole world of nonreported crimes are not! This is a definitional, arithmetical fact - without time, place or opinion. Howard points out that the BCS does not count murders, but then murders are such a tiny proportion of crime and so likely to be reported that this is insignificant. Does he really think the streets are littered with the literally millions of unreported murder victims needed to reverse the whole thrust of the figures? We are in the presence of a prospective prime minister who believes that it is better to use a less accurate statistical measure than a more accurate one, because the errors agree with him. I am reminded of a Russian joke about Brezhnev that puts him travelling on a train that breaks down. The General Secretary has the answer, though. He orders the curtains closed so the passengers can be told they are moving.

The situation with Howard is still worse, though. He does not want to give a false impression of progress but to give the impression of continuous deterioration. For his personal benefit, a continued supply of crime is necessary. If the rate of crime was not ever-rising, who would buy either he or David Blunkett's product of ever increasing authoritarianism?

Whoops! What did we do with that nuclear research centre?

Reuters

It seems that the looting of Iraqi nuclear facilities went as far as dismantling whole buildings.

"Satellite imagery shows that entire buildings in Iraq have been dismantled. They once housed high-precision equipment that could help a government or terror group make nuclear bombs, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report to the U.N. Security Council.

Equipment and materials helpful in making bombs also have been removed from open storage areas in Iraq and disappeared without a trace, according to the satellite pictures, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said.

While some military goods that disappeared from Iraq after the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion, including missile engines, later turned up in scrap yards in the Middle East and Europe, none of the equipment or material known to the IAEA as potentially useful in making nuclear bombs has turned up yet, ElBaradei said. The United States barred the return of U.N. weapons investigators after launching war on Iraq in March 2003, preventing the IAEA from keeping tabs on high-tech equipment and materials up to the present day.

Under anti-proliferation agreements, the U.S. occupation authorities who administered Iraq until June, and then the Iraqi interim government that took power at the end of June, would have to inform the IAEA if they moved or exported any of that material or equipment. But no such reports have been received since the invasion, officials of the watchdog agency said."

You honestly couldn't make it up.

Pushing the boundaries of weirdness

A curious tale reaches the Ranter from darkest Papua New Guinea, that nation the size of Germany but without roads and with betel nut, rugby league, over 700 mutually incomprehensible languages and a lot of pigs. It all started when a Cessna Citation business jet landed without telling anybody at the airstrip on Bougainville, home to the world's biggest nickel mine and a long-running rebellion. Due to rebels, neither the mine nor the airfield have worked since 1989. But that didn't put them off. Two men left the aircraft and headed for rebel country.

Later, the PNG government got wind of this. The pilots were arrested and the plane impounded. Investigations linked the whole thing to a curious tax-evasion scheme involving a self-proclaimed state, whose website can be found here: link Apparently, the passengers were on their way to visit a rebel who calls himself King of Bougainville, and is possibly the same man as a fraudster who was involved in various political scandals in PNG. This might be passing curious but no more, if it wasn't for a strange connection. The aircrew have claimed that their passengers were on their way there to discuss a contract to build clinics with a US firm called Majestic Capital Management. (Link)

Weirdly, the only Google results for this firm comprise a reference at a conference on Christians in business, a reference on a discussion forum devoted to scams, and two entries in lists of donors - to George W. Bush's reelection campaign. (Link to evidence) The passengers, for their part, are somewhere in the jungles of central Bougainville, perhaps heading for the Solomon Islands where they are said to have powerful contacts.

Now that's really weird. (edit: link restored)

Have the 'Kippers finally lost it?

Robert Kilroy Silk is quoted by the Torygraph as giving his reasons for supporting foxhunting, thus:

"When pressed, he declared himself against the death penalty, in favour of private health insurance (because he has it) and a supporter of hunting (because a vixen recently ate his 30 rare Vietnamese pheasants which were imported at great expense from Beijing Zoo to roam his garden).

He also denied that he was unpatriotic by living part of the year in Spain, where he has a £2 million villa on a 100-acre estate near Marbella. He insisted that his main residence was a 17th-century manor house in Buckinghamshire, home, incidentally, to Ozzy Osborne before him."

UKIP - in touch with ordinary folk. And entirely normal, whatever the sneerers may say. Link

Ding! Ding! Round 30!

FT link

One of those stories that never goes away. Yes, the US-EU trade dispute over both sides' alleged subsidies for civil aircraft builders is back on.

"In a dispute settlement case filed at the Geneva headquarters of the WTO, the US alleged that Airbus had received a total of at least $15bn in illegal "launch aid" from the France, UK, Germany and Spain, allowing it to overtake Boeing as the world's largest aircraft maker. The US also said it would terminate a 1992 bilateral agreement that had curbed but not ended subsidies, alleging minor violations by the EU.

The EU Commission responded immediately by filing a counter-case charging that Boeing had received about $23bn in prohibited subsidies since 1992 in the form of research and development assistance from US government agencies. The EU also challenged pledges from Washington state to offer about $3bn in tax breaks for Boeing production of its new 7E7 jet.
"

That both sides have offered their respective industries handsome sums in state funding cannot be disputed. However, it is at least arguable that the entire dispute is the creature of special pleading from both parties. Boeing, for their part, will want to keep well off the issue of its head-lock on US Air Force contracts, especially after the recent exposure of corruption around the giant order for KC-767 tankers. On that occasion, Airbus offered a variant of the A-330 with similar capabilities and much greater capacity and range. Boeing got the order, though, in a deal allegedly helped by the fact that they had a gap in work for the 767 production line until work on the 7E7 began. You can bet the EU representatives will do their level best to smear Boeing, the Pentagon and the Washington State authorities over the affair.

You can also bet that the US side will do their best to run down everything European. Great fun for journalists, sure. But the damage to transatlantic trade could be significant, especially when you take into account the currency factor. The huge US trade deficit has yet to push down the dollar by much chiefly because several big Asian economies have been intervening in the foreign exchange market to keep their currencies low against the dollar, boosting their export industries. It's in the nature of the game that currency intervention in this direction is unlimited - a central bank need never run out of its own currency. With a huge US budget deficit too, the obvious policy is to buy US treasury bills - after all, they bring in an income too.

The problem is, though, that the pressure must be released somewhere. If you are an Asian business left holding reams of your own currency (that is being artificially held low), you will have an incentive to convert it to euros. After all, the flip of the intervention is that any supplies you buy in dollars will be more expensive. The result, for Europe, is that the euro surges against the dollar, rendering EU exports to the US expensive. And US-EU trade questions that much more spiky.

A little question

If Michael Howard thinks two of his "10 words" for Tory campaigners should be "cleaner hospitals", and that if they don't fulfil their promises they will resign, doesn't that imply a commitment to end the practice of contracting out cleaning services in the NHS and to reintegrate all NHS cleaners on the same T&Cs as comparable NHS staff? Like their union, UNISON wants?

Hmmm...cleaning to be under the hospital's management control, more cleaning staff, and better washing facilities for visitors and staff - sounds like good common sense to me. Or does he have another magic solution? Whatever turns up on this theme in his "timetable for action", you can bet your blog contracting out won't be affected. I predict pictures of Matrons in 50s' fig. Maybe Hattie Jacques. Not much else.

What do I really think about Iraq?

An interesting question, brought up by the vote at the Labour Party conference last week. The conference delegates were faced with a choice between two motions - one demanding that a date be set for the withdrawal of British forces from Iraq, and one stating that British forces should "be withdrawn if the Iraqi government requests it". Obviously, the second option would have been seen very differently had it been put as follows - "that British forces should remain in Iraq indefinitely, unless the Iraqi government requests they leave", which your keen & agile minds will perceive as being much the same thing. I would strongly disagree with the "anti-war platform" for reasons of practicality, as I don't think that setting a date for withdrawal would be a good idea at all. You could call it the Kerry Problem ("How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"), which is that the intervening period will unavoidably be a grim and pointless struggle continuing until the last Warrior containing the last soldier drives over the border into Kuwait. Not only that, but the act of setting a date for departure forfeits any bargaining strength we may have, both in Iraq and with our gallant allies. This may be described as the Indian problem - once the decision to bring forward Indian independence was taken, partition could no longer be avoided as both parties knew that they could attain their minimal goals by waiting it out until the trumpet sounded.

Also, it is probable that the other side would intensify their efforts in the run-up to departure. Being the hard core who chased the British into the ships would count for plenty in the struggle for power afterwards. This might be called the South Lebanon problem. The Israeli army's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 was rendered much more bloody by this factor. There is also the issue of those groups in Basra who have so far been supportive. Will we have to take them with us? Or will they change sides, or simply be slaughtered? (All of these happened in South Lebanon.) What happens then? I still, faced with the option, would have voted for setting a date, as it was an opportunity to force accounting for the whole vicious disaster. (Dump the principle but stall the implementation...)

The problem is that absolutely no good option presents itself. Continued occupation? More death, and more aggravation, more waste, and probably more problems as yet unexploded. The provinces in the MND(SE) zone have recently been granting themselves susbstantial autonomy from Baghdad - will a oil-rich "Southern League" emerge? (Now that would be a classic case of short-term relief being long-term poison.) A timetable for unilateral withdrawal? Reasons above, plus the possibility of a "Southern League"/Shia rebel zone erupting between Baghdad and Kuwait. What else? UN peacekeepers? Who will provide them? Will they be effective? What will they do? What if they fail? This doesn't even take into consideration the possibility of either a post-election US offensive in al-Anbar and Baghdad, with the predictable Shia explosion, or a US scuttle.

(Careful readers will note a certain symmetry between Tony Blair's problems after the announcement of a date for withdrawal from No. 10 Downing Street and the hypothetical ones of his army in a similar case.)

Bout's Antonov 12 in Baghdad - PICTURES

And here is the picture that places 9L-LEC in Baghdad on the 18th of January.



(Note: the photographer requested that I obscure his name)

Baghdad - 24th January, 2004. A giant Russian transport..

..rolls out at the US-run airport, with its Australian air traffic controllers and piles of junked Iraqi aircraft, high-security PX store and high-value detainee camp. The aircraft was an Ilyushin Il-76MD, serial number 83485313, registered S9-DAE and carrying the markings of an airline called Skylink. S9- is the international registration prefix for Sao Tome and Principe, a tiny island off West Africa that was also host to the now notorious British Gulf International Airlines until all its staff and assets transferred to a new registry, that of Kyrgyzstan. Strangely, through all this, the firm's base and offices remained right where they had been - in Sharjah.

Strangely, though, I can find no record of the aircraft ever being registered to Skylink, the name it proudly bore if not in very big letters. Neither does an Antonov An-12, registered 9L-LEC (Sierra Leone registry, dear God), that is also placed in Baghdad during January 2004 - perhaps not surprising, as the name appears to be signwritten using black gaffer tape or similar on this machine. This may begin to explain the third of the US Department of Defence fuel contracts at the heart of the story. Did contract no. TBTC01, to "Sky Traffic Facilitators" of Sharjah, cover the "Skylink" aircraft?

As another contribution to the mess, is it not curious that Iraqi Airways is operating a Boeing 737 registered in Sierra Leone (9L-LEG), leased from a Jordanian firm and previously owned by Trans Air Congo - also previous operators of 9L-LEC?

Swivel-eyed loons: Britain in Europe gets its act together

The Britain in Europe campaign has published a very good list of 25 reasons not to vote UKIP, here. Some of it is stuff previously covered here, but this was news to me:

"John Brayshaw was exposed on 5 February 2004 as being simultaneously Chairman
of UKIP’s Vale of York branch (since October 2003) and BNP National Treasurer
(since 2000). According to Andrew Edwards, he was also UKIP -BNP “pact liaison
officer for the north”. UKIP denied that they knew of his BNP links despite the fact
that he stood as a BNP parliamentary candidate in Bradford North at the 2001
general election. Brayshaw was eventually expelled from UKIP in 2004 when his
BNP membership became public knowledge."

CORRECTION: FRANK BARNABY

It's been brought to my attention that Dr. Frank Barnaby certainly doesn't believe in the "red mercury dirty bomb" story, as suggested below. See here


By the way, I hope the DESC employee who has been reading this blog enjoys it.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | SpaceShipOne rolls to first mark

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | SpaceShipOne rolls to first mark

Rutan's space ship has another successful trip to space.

Not at all surprising

An Iraqi National Guard commander, an ex-general in the ex-evil forces of the ex-regime, has been caught working for the other side.

"Lieutenant General Talib Abd Ghayib al-Lahibi led three Iraqi National Guard battalions in Diyala province, the volatile region north of Baghdad that includes the insurgent strongholds of Baquba and Samarra. The US military detained Lahibi on Thursday "for having associations with known insurgents."

This is pretty typical of this war. Much of the struggle is a struggle for loyalty, not for territory or force. The Shia uprising showed the benefit of trying to co-opt the bits of the police force that might agree with you and destroying the rest. The mirror image is the gold rush for the brains of the old regime - Ayad "al-Baathi" Allawi being exhibit A. The problem with this superficially attractive strategy is, of course, that betrayers can always re-betray. "You can rat, but you can't re-rat" never struck me as a very intelligent remark.

Hartlepool: Ordinary People Don't Care

....about Iraq. They care about being nasty to asylum seekers, and dog dirt. Everyone knows that, especially Labour's candidate for the Hartlepool by-election, Iain Wright.

"“I’ve met more than 4,000 people by now, and do you know?” Wright said. “Only two have even mentioned it. It’s local issues people care about; that’s why they want a local candidate.” Not five minutes later we met a man who had voted Labour all his life, but wouldn’t this time because of the war. “What an amazing co-incidence,” Wright marvelled afterwards. “He was the third.”

(from Backword)

A parallel experience: the other day I was listening to BBC Radio 5, running an interview with John Rentoul of the Independent on Sunday (and author of a life of Tony Blair) about Blair's party conference speech. Rentoul, who is a Blair loyalist (if his column in the Sindy is anything to go on), gave the usual spiel. Iraq? Mutter mutter middle-class mutter mutter oppositional mindset mutter lefties mutter mutter doorstep mutter antisocial behaviour mutter ordinary people. They opened the phone lines, and promptly enough some dozen callers popped up to rant and rail against "Taking us to war on a false premise!" and "Never voting Labour again...because of the war!" and "Bliar" - you know the stuff. Ha.

BBC NEWS: X-Prize craft begins space shot

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | X-Prize craft begins space shot

Good luck.

Viktor Bout aircraft in Kabul - 16th July 2003

One of British Gulf's Antonov 12s, registration EX-161, serial number 5343305 was photographed in Kabul on the 16th of July, 2003. Close examination of the photo gives the impression that the registration and titles were newly added. What significance the aircraft's name, "Fatima" (signwritten on the nose) has is currently unknown.


Click Here to view the photo

The image itself will be visible once arranged with the photographer.

Finally, print media discover the Viktor Bout story

Back, back, way back when, I did some research following up reports in the Financial Times and Le Monde that the US Government had been putting pressure on the UK to help keep gun-runner Viktor Bout off a UN asset freeze list, apparently because he had done the state some service in Iraq. It only took a little Googling and thought to discover a list of fuel supply contracts issued by the US Department of Defence's Defence Energy Support Centre that demonstrated conclusively that at least two (Air Bas and British Gulf International Airlines) and possibly a third Bout-related airlines were indeed working for the US Government. Applying the rules contained in the DOD instruction manual for these contracts, I was able to interpret the contract identification numbers (DODAACs), which showed that they were of the type used for supplying contractors on government service (a "T" DoDAAC) with fuel provided on credit at US Air Force bases. The first post, from the 21st of May, is here. Only some two other bloggers - Laura Rozen of War and Piece and Douglas Farah at link have picked up on the story. Farah, in particular, has moved the story on several times.

Today, it seems the print media are finally catching up. (After all, they could have Googled back in May and basked in the glory all summer, but..) US magazine Mother Jones is running a comprehensive story on the involvement of the US with Air Bas, in which they quote Bout's financial advisor, Texan accountant Richard Chichakli, as confirming the existence of US-Bout contracts. Richard tends to give good quote, as anyone who fossicks through my comments threads on the Bout issue will discover, and he was no different for Mother Jones:

"Victor said if anybody calls you, unless it’s Jesus himself, with an ID, don’t bring him to me"

Hmm...not at all rattled, then. Farah, for his part, has produced a long post giving detail of the TBTC-series fuel contracts (but no new information compared to my original posting, here) and, interestingly, claiming to have other documents placing Bout aircraft at various locations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The rest of the Bout posts are: 1st June, 4th June, 7th June, 8th June, 1st July, 24th July, 6th August, 9th August, 13th August, 21st August, 20th September and 26th September. Don't I wish this blog had a categorisation function like the Movable Type boys.

Despite further efforts and the valuable aid of several readers, I still have not been able to clarify why the US needed Viktor Bout's services. Interestingly, though, I have recently found a photo placing one of British Gulf's Antonov 12s in Kabul in July, 2003. (Edit: links restored)

The Great Mercury Plot!

Four men have been arrested on terrorism charges apparently after they were induced to attempted to buy so-called "red mercury" from a man who turned out to be Mahzer Mahmood, the News of the World's "investigations editor". The NOTW broke this story today under the headline "Dirty Bomb Foiled by News of the World". BBC radio news reported the arrests and the story without, however, either attributing it or making any enquiry into its credibility.

Red mercury - now, I personally never thought I'd hear that phrase again. If you recall, a spate of rumours ran around the world shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union that Soviet scientists had invented some sort of material known as red mercury, for which a fantastical variety of claims were made. Some said it might hold the key to anti-gravity, others that it was the most dense material known to mankind, still others that it was used to paint Soviet stealth aircraft. Most agreed that, whatever the exact details, it was some kind of weapon. Various stories suggest either that it is supposedly used to build a pure fusion weapon, which could theoretically be a very small neutron bomb, or that it is a chemical explosive powerful enough to initiate fusion.

Scary stuff, if it wasn't for the fact that nobody has ever seen any.

There were numerous cases of people claiming to have the stuff for sale to the highest bidder, but they all without exception turned out to be fraudulent. Tomato ketchup figured prominently in their wares. Most recent comment about it comes from highly dubious websites (one claims that Iraq possessed secret red-mercury fusion bombs capable of taking out the US's strategic deterrent systems...), and the vast majority of web search results for it relate to a computer game.

"Now you can experience the war against terrorism from the safety of your own living
room in Shadow Ops: Red Mercury!"

I thought the point of terrorism was that your living room wasn't safe, but let that pass. No doubt this obscurity is partly because it had its 15 minutes just prior to the internet, but most scientists in the field have long since considered it to be a myth. (Although Dr. Frank Barnaby of SIPRI apparently thinks it might be usable as a detonator.) For example, let's look at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from 1997, here.

"The asking price for red mercury ranged from $100,000 to $300,000 per kilogram. Sometimes the material would be irradiated or shipped in containers with radioactive symbols, perhaps to convince potential buyers of its strategic value. But samples seized by police contained only mercury oxide, mercuric iodide, or mercury mixed with red dye-hardly materials of interest to weapons-makers."

A couple of pars further down, another quote of interest to us:

"Indeed, authorities in Russia and Central Europe are hard put to identify any buyers of stolen nuclear substances who were not undercover police, intelligence agents, or journalists searching for a story."

This is the heart of the story, in fact. Mahzer Mahmood, for those of you unfamiliar with British tabloid journalism, has made a career of dressing up as an "Arab sheikh" and persuading celebrities to commit embarrassing acts (taking cocaine, usually) in front of a hidden camera. His triumph/nadir was the report that the NOTW had "foiled" a supposed plot to kidnap David and Victoria Beckham - a stellar scoop which backfired badly when the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case against the "kidnappers" on the grounds that the £10,000 Mahmood had paid to the key (indeed only) witness might possibly skew his evidence (Link). It didn't stop there. The witness, a Kosovar parking attendant, turned out to have previous convictions for dishonesty and had been treated for psychiatric problems. And - strangely enough - he was the first of the group to mention kidnapping or the Beckhams on the tapes provided by the paper. (Link) He had also previously taken part in two other NOTW sting stories. The whole thing was frankly sordid.

One feature of Mr. Mahmood's controversial career has been his impressive rapport with the police. After all, they turned out with a crack firearms unit for the Beckham story. Now, it would appear, they have gone one better with a major anti-terrorist operation. Let us get this completely clear - you cannot make a dirty bomb with red mercury, because a) mercury isn't radioactive and b) red mercury, in all probability, does not exist. As usual, Mahmood presented himself as the potential seller - posing important questions of incitement. It is outrageous that both the Metropolitan Police and the BBC seem to have gone along with this pathetic pantomime.

US reports on security in Iraq leaked

....and unsurprisingly, they show it's not very good.

Allawi told Washington Post reporters and editors on Friday that "for now the only place which is not really that safe is Fallujah, downtown Fallujah. The rest, there are varying degrees. Some -- most -- of the provinces are really quite safe."

The Kroll reports are based on nonclassified data provided by U.S.-led military forces, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, private security companies working in Iraq and nongovernmental organizations. The reports, which Kroll has refused to distribute to journalists, were provided to The Post by a person on the list to receive them. They cover the period of Sept. 13 through Sept. 22 -- but do not include Sept. 15, 18 or 19, for which reports were not available.

To many natives and foreigners living in Iraq, the portrait of progress that Allawi painted during his trip to Washington does not depict reality.

After his speech to a joint meeting of Congress on Thursday, Allawi described Baghdad as "very good and safe." In fact, during the period for which security reports were available, the number of attacks in the capital averaged 22 a day."

Which Spammer are you?

Which Nigerian spammer are You?

Taken it several times, but can't get Viktor out of it yet...mind you, the code for the result doesn't work but still pushes my sidebar out. So fuckem.

Wi-Fi and hostage takers

One little-publicised problem for the investigation of hostage-takings in Iraq may have been created by a lack of Internet security awareness among Western businesses operating in Baghdad. Although videos issued by the al-Zarqawi group tend to be uploaded to the websites they appear on at round about the same time of day - a regularity that on the face of it might offer valuable opportunities to investigators - so far, no-one has been able to trace the computer from which they were sent. Even if the site operator is speedily contacted and cooperative in providing the IP address used, this may only lead to a PC in a nameless cybercafe. If court action is needed to get the contents of the log, there is little hope of finding the culprit. You might have thought, though, given an idea of the time and the geographical area, that it might be possible to watch a fair number of cybercafes.

The new problem, though, wrecks it. I have been informed by a person with relevant skills that many of the Western firms still operating in Baghdad have set up wireless access points - some of them without configuring access control features like WEP keys, or leaving these set to default or easily guessed values. When this occurs in London, little harm is done except that warchalkers might leave a chalk mark on your building. Possibly the competition might interfere. If you have covered a chunk of central Baghdad with lovely free internet access, though, you have created the possibility that somebody might use your IP to post their latest hate-vid on the web. Investigation would lead to a dead end, especially as the killers could keep moving whilst they did the job.

Mechanical Pong!

A German computer science student has built an electromechanical version of the iconic video game, Pong! In a tribute to computing pioneers, Niklas Roy renounced the use of semiconductors, transistors and the like, building a form of computer out of old telephone relays to handle the logic. The game has identical user features to the electronic original - the display is the same black field with a white "ball" and two paddles, control is by joystick, points are counted up by two counters, and it goes - well - "pong!"

The workings are obscenely complicated, as the game is actually played twice - once by an intricate assembly that contains the actual bats and balls, and then again by the markers on the display that represent their movement. It's a fine reminder of just how insanely difficult anything like this was until comparatively recently. Some very serious things were done, though - the RAF experimented with a computer constructed from telephone exchange technology to calculate interception vectors from radar data in the 1930s, until Henry Tizard realised that a simple mental method would do better. Later, at the end of the 1960s, the Hawker Siddeley Trident airliner had a crude moving-map navigation display, portraying information from radio-navigation instruments as a position on a chart. Unlike today's systems, though, "moving map" should be read literally - it was an actual paper chart on rollers, which unsurprisingly frequently tore or tangled.

What Roy's mechanical video game reminds me of most of all, though, is the very dawn of computing. In action (you can find the video here) it looks like nothing other than a power loom. The very first data processing machine, of course, was Jacquard's loom with its patterns on punched cards, that inspired Charles Babbage. The cards, of course, remained a current form of data storage until relatively recently.

Knight Ridder story on UK/Iraq

Interesting follow up in the light of my recent post.

"Three British soldiers were killed, one of them in a two-and-a-half-hour battle in downtown Basra that resembled the movie "Black Hawk Down," Wilde said.

"That made it just absolutely clear that the middle of the city was under Sadr militia control," Wilde said.
British troops, however, held back, choosing to nibble at the edges of militant strongholds rather than risk massive civilian casualties in an all-out assault.
"It was very hard to take for the blokes," Wilde said. "They'd lost some mates and were very ready to roll the place up."

Analysis: this may be another explanation for Jackson's trip to Iraq recently, as well as trying to relieve discontent over the decision that at least one soldier will be prosecuted by the civilian authorities over a shooting in Basra.

Hometown Blog

Yorkshire Soul of Ilkley, thanks for the link.

Army fired 100,000 rounds last month in Iraq

D'you think they'll fire a special commemorative bullet for the 100,000th shot fired in a month in the British zone of Iraq? Like they used to with the 100,000th (or whatever) car to run off a production line? The BBC has an excellent story here which, among other things, points out that the British battalion in Amara (1st Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment - "Camilla's Killers")was involved in 853 contacts in the month. The British Army has not engaged in such sustained combat since the Korean War.

This doesn't suggest it will get any better. More broadly, the Government has been throwing off mixed signals about the future lines of policy in Iraq lately - last week, Geoff Hoon suggested that the number of British troops might be substantially reduced at the next relief, due in November. But, during the weekend, the Independent on Sunday reported, quoting Chief of the General Staff General Sir Mike Jackson, that a major British deployment to Afghanistan was in prospect for the beginning of 2005, probably involving the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps HQ, a British infantry brigade and supports, plus other NATO contingents. A figure of 8,000 UK personnel was given. Jackson also suggested that this could be done without prejudice to the Iraq operation, as long as it was "a one off". "Sources" further said that some 1,000 troops might be sent out as a reinforcement to Iraq. This is an unremarkable claim, as the Army always maintains one battalion group (the Spearhead group) on high readiness to reinforce British units on operations overseas - if things were to go badly in southern Iraq, this force would be available.

At the same time, conflicting rumours have filtered out from the States. It is suggested either that a major offensive is being planned to retake Fallujah, Ramadi and other towns, involving a large reserve call-out timed to occur after the election (well..), or that perhaps the US Government is considering an early scuttle from Iraq. No-one seems as yet to have suggested both, so I might as well start this hare running myself. Expect the US to announce a large mobilisation immediately post-election in the event of a Bush win, to invade Fallujah, Sadr City, and Ramadi en masse to Finish the Job, and then to withdraw all forces by spring. (For International Relations/Strategic Studies/History geeks - they might even call it DUCK HOOK II.)

There is absolutely no reason to believe this, but the fact it sounds about as likely as all the other options they really are suggesting tells us what we need to know. They literally don't know what to do.

Bush, Barnes and the National Lottery

How George Dubya Won The Lottery Game For GTech Interesting Greg Palast story on former National Lottery operator GTech, and how Dubya avoided the war.

"Why did the Texas government work so hard at saving GTech's licence? An unsigned letter to the US Justice Department, which was evidence in the civil suit, points to one lobbyist to whom GTech paid fees of $23 million (£14.2 million) - Barnes.

The letter accuses Barnes of using his knowledge of Bush's draft-dodging to lock in GTech's exclusive deal with Texas. In court papers filed in a racketeering suit brought by discharged regulator Littwin, Barnes concedes steps one and two: he got Bush into the Guard; and he received millions from GTech."

Interested? Why not read the rest....

"Reform consisted of shuffling the organisation chart and changing the name to NatLot. The Texas Model remained in place, as did GTech. How did that happen? Let us just call it Texminster, a combination of telepathy and coincidence common to the politics of two continents."

Bout Contracts - Review post

Reviewing the vexed topic of the Viktor Bout contracts with the US military...it strikes me that we can draw some parallels between reports. Doug Farah reported that one of the contracts was given to Jetline and subcontracted to Skylink (Farah). The original fuel contracts (to BGIA and Air Bas) make no mention of either Jetline or Skylink, however there is a third "TBTC" contract, TBTC01, for a firm called Sky Traffic Facilitators with an address in Sharjah. It seems likely that there is some connection with the other two. Now - if we consider that each of the fuel contracts matches one contractor and hence at least one contract - this suggests that at least 3 contracts exist. One involves British Gulf International Airlines, one Air Bas, and one Jetline/Skylink. Is it possible that Sky Traffic, a charter broker, were responsible for setting up this latter contract?

Another explanation would be that the Ilyushin 62 variously registered EL-ALM, 3C-QQR, or 5A-DKT, serial no. 4648414, which seems to have been used first (as EL-ALM) by Jetline and then transferred to Air Bas (as 3C-QQR), before returning to Jetline as 5A-DKT, was involved, and Jetline was acting as a front for Air Bas, a much more notorious operation. If the aircraft was transferred to AB, then it would have been AB buying fuel in the UAE - either in reality or because the aircraft had been operated by them all along.

Smoking memos

It's just a pity when the Torygraph gets the dirt about the lead-up to war with Iraq before the rest of us. A cache of documents leaked to the rag show that, as early as March, 2003, Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning (a performer in the Hutton inquiry, if you recall) was able to tell Condoleeza Rice that the prime minister

"would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a parliament and a public opinion that was very different from anything in the States."

The next day, the British ambassador in Washington reported to Manning that

"We backed regime change but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option."

(You can get the quotes here, but the Torygraph requires a tiresome info-grabbing registration process)

Now, we have already seen plenty of evidence that decisions had been taken long before the dossiers appeared. After all, back in March, I reported on the Commons Defence Committee's report on the war with Iraq, and specifically the fact that the MoD had been discussing the question of UORs - Urgent Operational Requirements, a procedure for buying extra kit needed for an, er, urgent operational requirement in a hurry - as early as May, 2002. (Linky) Also, General John Reith, chief of joint operations in the Permanent Joint HQ, Northwood, stated that he became aware of planning in May although the UK only became involved later (but had already begun buying more kit? Eh?). Planning is said to have "crystallised" in the summer. The mysterious White House Iraq Group, also involved in the Valerie Plame case was established in August, as was Ali C's Iraq Communications Group.

Was the clever plan, in effect, to have Tony Blair act as PR man for a war with Iraq, using his excellent spin team and coordinating through the Coalition Information Centre staff?

Depressing/worrying

Is this worrying, or am I just feeling a tad paranoid? Simbaud quotes this, referring to a CBS news report on the 17th:

"FBI field offices and Homeland Security agencies will be advised of "extraordinary measures" that will go into place "beginning the first week of October through the elections" . . . .

Specifically, the plan calls for "aggressive - even obvious - surveillance" techniques to be used on a short list of people suspected of being terrorist sympathizers, but who have not committed a crime. Other "persons of interest," including their family members, may also be brought in for questioning, one source said . . ."

Further down the blog, we find a reference to this. Obviously far too tinfoil'n'tongs to be worth believing. I hope.

Faulkner and the Great Fox Hunt

William Faulkner once said (note - I may be misquoting) "The past is never forgotten - it is not even past". Who could disagree with that after this week? I could vaguely recall, back at the start of the week, caring about fox hunting (or in fact *not* fox hunting) in about 1998. But, what with war and security theatre and real problems, I'd rather lost interest. Could anyone really justify putting through a hunt ban when there is officially no parliamentary time for new corporate manslaughter legislation, to say nothing of the Euro, serious action on renewable power, regionality etc? I was in the mood to write it off as one of those things (like the €) that should have been dealt with in 1997, when the momentum was with us and Blair hadn't yet stripped open his mask to show the hideous rubbery chops and green fangs now familiar to millions. But, yes, I feel induced to care again.

I've said before that every nation has at least one issue that it considers capital, that divides it utterly, and that no-one else in the world can understand, still less care about. Foxes are exhibit A. It is astonishing how much old blood has boiled up over this, even in the last week. Some of the divides:

Every great political question begins and ends in the tenure of land - Gladstone You may disagree - I usually do - but the conflict between what survives of the old landed interest and the (essentially bourgeois) political system of modern Britain was well to the front. Add to this, the tradition of Labour/Left campaigning over access to the land. Walking used to be an ideology in the UK, with ferocious campaigns by people from the industrial cities of the North for access to the moors owned by the rich. In all the fuss you might have forgotten that the Right to Roam legislation comes into force this week - you can bet the protestors didn't. Yet another old classic is evoked by the odd social milieu of the Commons raiders - 5 out of 8 or thereabouts can claim to know Prince Charles. Ye gods, a King's Party? Is this 1776? And, right down in the deep play, there is one of the eternal questions of political philosophy - majority decision vs minority rights. Not to mention the Commons and the Lords. Is this 1911? And police vs protestors. It's quite astonishing how this has reactivated so many of the founding conflicts of British political history.

Some of the cliches and habits that came up have been interesting, too. The Tories' Alan Duncan - a former oil trader, most rural of all occupations, despite his description as a "pro-hunting shires Tory" - thought the police had been "lippy, surly, provocative and menacing". Don't be sulky to Memsahib now. And what was Sir Max Hastings thinking about this:

"Soon, the only survivals of a batty yet wonderfully colourful heritage will be pubs named the Fox And Hounds. Perhaps Mr Tony Banks and his friends will feel more comfortable when these, too, are suppressed, replaced by some ideal New Labour niterie christened The Halal Butcher."

Why the Halal butcher specifically, may I ask? Why not the Spin Doctor or the Foreign Fighter? Or the Unattributable Briefing? The Doctor Kelly? Enough already. By the way, when I did in fact live in The Countryside, I knew where my nearest halal butcher was. I can't say that here in The Suburbs. Funny, eh, rather like the fact I've still never met a hunt in the flesh. Probably never will now, unless "they" decide to stage one as a protest on the M25.

A Small Protest Wave

Looking at the news lately, you might think there was a degree of discontent in the air - first of all, the chap with the sledgehammer outside Downing Street, then Fathers4Justice climbing Buckingham Palace, now foxhunters invading the House of Commons chamber while their comrades fought it out with the cops outside. Not that I agree with them, but this quote from one of the chamber invaders has a certain resonance:

"The government - they've mucked up pensions, they've mucked everything! There is no democracy!"

Well, you can see his point of view, what with the revelation that British officers were present at Abu Ghraibh -and isn't the degree of Anglo-American respect shown here great! Link

"Col Jordan was questioned in February by Major General Antonio Taguba, the US officer in charge of the investigation. Asked who was then his supervisor, he replied: "Colonel Campbell James, British colonel, just came on board".

Asked whether he worked directly for him, Col Jordan responded: "I work directly, sir, I'm gonna tell you, on paper I work directly for him. But between you, me and the fencepost, I work directly for Gen Fast and keep Col James informed because [of the] British versus American pecking order"

What bothers me is the degree of fury and spectacle devoted to fox hunting and the failure of all the constitutional defence systems to deal with this.

BTW, I said that the glass barrier across the House wouldn't work, didn't I?

Secretary claims documents faked - but true

Link
"I think it is plain and simple. Bush didn't think that he had to go by the rules that others did,” says Knox.

Why Bush wouldn't have joined the National Guard today

Phil Carter has an excellent post on the radical changes to the US National Guard that have seen it go from an organisation you might join to avoid going to war - to one that certainly will send you to war. The US now has 168,915 reservists on operations overseas, largely due to reforms that transferred a large section of the army's rearward organisation into reserve units. This is similar to the British Army's hugely increased use of Territorials since the two Conservative defence reviews of the 1990s radically cut the support services, but there is an important difference. In the UK, reserve-isation went further while at the same time the Territorial Army was drastically altered - losing its larger formations and HQs, cutting down its combat arms, and reducing in size.

One of the ideas behind this has been that the TA's infantry units are less likely to be needed as whole battalions, and more likely to be used either as replacements or to backfill Regular units up to their war establishment strength. This has brought predictable problems - breaking up units (especially ones with traditional identity) has been bad for morale and recruitment. The USNG, for its part, has much more material (Harriers!) and even forms full divisions. Most TA members now deploy only in companies if they are lucky. But, at the same time, the Army has been depending on TA manpower more. Each relief of the British force in Basra requires a callout of around 1,100 [Edit: an error of fact crept in here. Sorry.] reservists, and the legal requirement that they cannot be mobilised again for a set period after completing a tour means that this source of soldiers is being used up. Just another great idea, especially as the prospect of even more frequent callouts is reportedly causing friction with employers...

It had to happen - Viktor Bout spam

"ATTN: PRESIDENT /CEO,
> TRANPARENT ENTERPRISE.
> LIBERIA.
> I am ENG.VIKTOR BOUT, former special adviser on Diamond matters to the
> former head of state of government of liberia President Charles Taylor.
> Because of my strategic position in the former government and also being
> a close confidant of the former head of state, I was able to acquire
> personally
> the sum of $51,000,000,00 USD (fifty one million united state dollars
only)
> presently lodged in a security deposit in Europe..."

Classic spam! From 419legal.org

Not again.

An esteemed colleague, My Way of Thinking, has blogged reasons why, in his view, the Left should not support John Kerry. Oh God, are we on to this again? It's a trope that some people on the left always argue that we should stand aside and let the latest bunch of bastards do as they like because the alternative isn't left wing enough, or worse, that letting things get worse will lead us to a "revolutionary situation". This is at best silly and at worse an attempt to deliberately force the people we claim to represent to suffer for our own ambitions.

Personal note: I recall meeting the Austrian writer Robert Menasse during a demonstration outside the Austrian Federal Chancellery in 2002. He announced that the FPO should be tolerated because this would force the Socialists to be better. I told him this was like cutting off your fingers to have stronger hands. Only kater did I learn that the German anarchist poet, Erich Mühsam, had written much the same about Hitler - before he was thrown in Dachau.

Guy Fawkes - Hoist with own petard....

All righty then, get a dose of this!

"Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush documents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he had not considered one of the machines whose type is not logged in his database: the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the Bush memos to Selectric Composer samples obtained from Interpol, the international police agency, Bouffard said his view shifted.

In the Times interview, Bouffard had also questioned whether the military would have used the Composer, a large machine. But Bouffard yesterday provided a document indicating that as early as April 1969 -- three years before the dates of the CBS memos -- the Air Force had completed service testing for the Composer, possibly in preparation for purchasing the typewriters.

As for the raised ''th" that appears in the Bush memos -- to refer, for example, to units such as the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron -- Bouffard said that custom characters on the Composer's metal typehead ball were available in the 1970s, and that the military could have ordered such custom balls from IBM."

So, the original source for the whole story has coughed to being WRONG. And further, perhaps you ought to have read this before spamming away? Or perhaps even this? Or yet, this? BTW, the Washington Post story linked to by Insta is not sound. If the fact that CBS's chap only saw copies of the documents is meant to prove anything, we ought to give a tad of consideration to the fact that the experts who claimed they were forged had also only seen copies. I see no mention of this. Oh, but the Post has managed to ask "prominent conservatives" and Laura Bush for their view, giving this as if it were information of any value whatsoever. And our old friend the logical flaw has still not left the building: see the continuing and fallacious use of "we can do it now on computers and therefore it can only have been done in this manner"-type arguments.

If you have better information, why is there none of it on your blog?

Eh?

The New York Times is reporting that the US Govt is increasingly concerned by the apparently increased possibility of a North Korean nuclear test. However, they are also very keen to play down the gigantic explosion reported in NK on Thursday. Of course, there is no possible way a bang that created a mushroom cloud of 2.5 miles' diameter and a crater visible from space could be a nuclear weapon! What else it might be seems unclear - one commenter suggested a large steam locomotive boiler, but I have a little difficulty accepting that in the light of reports of a 3.7 Richter earthquake being associated with it. (German speaking link, referring to Chinese sources) That would be quite a big train, no?

(edit)It is reported that it took place near a missile base - a slightly less scary explanation might be an accident with liquid fuel, as occurred on a couple of occasions in the cold war.

Really, this is not good enough

Now, I've just spent a good hour composing a long post about the Bush documents, but Blogger had one of its increasingly frequent crappy fits and the lot vanished. So, I'll keep this short.

The fact you can recreate the documents in MS Word is no kind of argument that they were created that way. Why should it be at all remarkable or even interesting that a higher level of technology can replicate a lower level of technology? This is like arguing that, because you can heat your house with central heating as well as with a fire, anyone who says they lit a fire is a liar. (Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo should be especially ashamed of this logic fart) The rightwingnuts who all sprinted off to try it themselves even admit the problem - try this link (tongs recommended).

"I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoft’s Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date “18 August 1973,” then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian."

Well, what a surprise that it turned out to look much the same. After all, what does MSWord do as a default? It produces an A4 page very similar/identical to a letter produced on a typewriter. Where do you think those standard settings originate from? Any Word document produced on a printer capable of producing fonts, on A4 paper, from whichever version of Word, with the same text in, will look much the same and much like the same document typed on a fonted typewriter. There's a reason your keyboard starts QWERTYUIOP. Times New Roman type was introduced in 1931. IBM introduced proportional spacing in 1941, and superscript/subscript type in the 60s. That word processing - a technology whose standard operating assumptions are taken from typewriting - will produce something similar is no proof of anything. (And if you doubt this stuff, then why am I touchtyping, and why do I start hitting the keys like a crazy drummer once the speed picks up?)

BBC NEWS Downing Street hammer man arrest

BBC NEWS | Politics | Downing Street hammer man arrest

"A man has launched a sledgehammer attack on the security gates at the entrance of Downing Street forcing Whitehall to be closed off on Friday."

I think I can relate to that...

Thesis

I have completed and submitted my dissertation!

Update: a reader has requested a copy, which can be found here.

Boom! Bush's personnel files out

Records Say Bush Balked at Order (washingtonpost.com)

Key papers concerning Bush's (lack of)military service have been published. His CO, Lt.Col. Jerry Killian, is quoted as suspending young George from flying due to "failure to perform" and "failure to take his annual physical as ordered". Killian also seems to have been concerned about the lad's skiving and pressure apparently placed on him to let Bush off.

"In another "memo to file," dated Aug. 18, 1973, Killian complained that he was under pressure from his superior, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, to "sugar coat" Bush's officer evaluations. "I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," he wrote in a memo titled "CYA.[CYA=Cover your ass. ed]" "I will not rate."

Heh heh heh heh heh.....in fact, here's a killer quote from the text.

"1. Staudt [the big boss] has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush. I’m having trouble running interference and doing my job. Harris gave me a message today from Grp regarding Bush’s OETR and Staudt is pushing to sugar coat it. Bush wasn’t here during rating period and I don’t have any feedback from 187th in Alabama."

Odd: mystery cinema discovered under Paris

This is very cool indeed

More mobile masts may be better

Interesting link to an article by Jan Engvald of Lund University in Sweden, who recently visited this blog. He basically makes the point that, if you are worried about radiation from mobile phones, you should welcome more base stations - the technology is designed to save battery life, so the closer a phone is to a base station, the lower the power used. More stations - less radiation.

German supermarket attempts to ban word

Linky (German)

Metro AG, a German supermarket operator, is suing the publishers of the Duden Dictionary of Foreign Words for defining "metro" as "the underground railway, especialy in Paris and Moscow". Not only that, but they have also had a pop at the public transport services of Hamburg, Munich and Berlin for using the M-word. God help us if they get their hands on Fritz Lang's copyright.

Who will get Richard Perle first?

Will it be the Canadian police over his involvement with Hollinger (including a $3.1 million performance bonus for running a venture fund that lost 24% of its value every year) or the FBI on the AIPAC/Pentagon spy scandal? My view on the spy story is that it's not so much about the information that got out than about the information that got in. According to reports, one of the men accused of passing classified papers to Israel (as well as to Ahmed Chalabi, who passed them to Iran) also took part in a meeting with the Italian military intelligence service where the now-infamous fake documents concerning uranium and Niger were first brought up. The real story may be that they planted the story with the Italians and Chalabi in order to feed it back into the government as "confidential information from our allies". There is a well known tendency to give information more credence if it appears to come from secret sources - what you might call the "stolen kisses are sweetest" theory of intelligence failure.

Edit: Juan Cole seems to feel something similar:

"That is, the information circuit may have been ingrown among the Neoconservatives, the Israelis and Chalabi's people."

Torture - not just evil, stupid too

"American interrogators working in Iraq have obtained as much as 50 percent more high-value intelligence since a series of coercive practices like hooding, stripping and sleep deprivation were banned, a senior American official said Monday.

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the American commander in charge of detentions and interrogations, said that the number of "high-value" intelligence reports drawn from interrogations of Iraqi prisoners had increased by more than half on a monthly basis since January. That was when American officials first disclosed that they were investigating abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American military police and intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib.."

Well, it's about time too, seeing as last month had the highest rate of attacks on coalition forces since the war began (no less than 87 contacts daily on average). What with Chalabi's brother on a murder rap, Chalabi himself and half the Pentagon suspected of passing classified information to the Israeli secret services, you can see why they'd need some "dignity and respect", the official term for the new interrogation policy.

Bloodbath and a propaganda point

I'm not going to try to say anything profound about the Beslan school massacre. All anything I say will do is to repeat that this is a horror so depraved it's blank, like trying to talk to a fish. What answer can there be to this? Discussing the grim politics that took Russia to this point is superfluous, and anyway the killers can hardly have believed they had any chance of seeing their demands granted. In fact, one of the most sinister facts was the degree to which they didn't seem to care if the Russians made concessions - they gave a phone number out as a contact but switched it off, sent out a video tape that reportedly turned out to be blank. All that was left was the blood. Very likely, they sought out North Ossetia with a view to stimulating an anti-Muslim pogrom; it has been a long standing aim of the Chechen rebels to broaden the war by revolutionising the Muslim republics to each flank, and a new civil war there would serve well. But I'm not sure this is really worth discussing.

The discussion will happen though. Vladimir Putin's "official aide on Chechnya" was translated on the BBC last night as speaking of "contracted gunmen" from abroad being among the killers. A curious statement, this. That English formulation can surely only translate the Russian "kontraktniki", a term for mercenaries hired by the Russian military to do their dirty work in Chechnya. Can they really mean that they were hired to carry out a mission which would involved the near certainty of killing several hundred children and then being hunted down by the Alpha Group? Clearly they are people who will do this, but I'm damn sure they aren't in it for the money. More like the Russians are trying - as if it was necessary - to demonise the Chechens still more. Kathryn Cramer covers this angle with reference to possible mercenary involvement. However the report she links to comes from a Russian "security source" too, perhaps the same one. How they can know that they were mercenaries so quickly, before they can even give accurate casualty figures for the victims, is a mystery.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Laura Rozen on breaking out the story on Douglas Feith's staff, the AIPAC and the fake "uranium from Niger" documents. Good work!

Sorry

No blogging for the past week. I've been away.

It's Over. EFTA is not repeat not coming back.

Here at the Ranter, one of my regular targets is the delusion held by many Conservatives that somehow, if they could just get into the Foreign Office, they could create a mighty alliance with such great powers as - er - Denmark and Estonia to rewrite the European Union treaties in such a way as to make it "Atlanticist" or "liberal" or "sceptical" - all of which are code for "not having any enforcement mechanism so we can discriminate against the New Europeans". There are numerous flaws with this - the first being the assumption that the Central Europeans are all really shire Tories struggling to get out, the second that there is sufficient common ground between them as well as between them and the UK for a coherent alliance, and the third being that such an alliance would have the power to achieve this substantial geo-political revolution - which lead me to conclude that it is a Napoleonic neo-imperial delusion that really ought to be dumped. Tories have been going on about this sort of thing since the late 1950s without ever producing anything of substance, but they seem to find it impossible to revise their beliefs on the subject whatever happens. The Atlantic-whoops-Mediterranean-whoops-Eastern-whoops-Central-whoops-New Europeans will all agree with us and won't join! They did. They will agree with us and form a loose trading block! They didn't. They will refuse the Euro! They didn't. They will refuse the draft Constitution! One of them nearly did but in the end - they didn't! Each and every Conservative leader has brought this stuff up and been crushingly disabused, or have simply declined to try. But, despite the utter failure of this "policy" at every opportunity, it still keeps turning up like a bad cent. (Recall IDS's trip to Prague - thought not.)

In a rare variant of this phenomenon, the Plastic Gangster notes an article in the grindingly rightwing US National Review which shows an American who believes in it. This very rarely happens in real life, so we ought to Read, Mark, Learn, and Inwardly Digest whilst the opportunity presents itself. PG wisely points out that the central tenet of the current Tory view - a supposed UK/Italian/Polish alliance - is not worth banking on, as it relies on a tenuous personal link between Blair and Silvio Berlusconi, perhaps Europe's least popular politician and a man sitting atop one of the most pro-European electorates around. PG goes on to criticise the stereotype assumption that Poland is "pro American" and will stay that way, especially when the EU subsidies begin to flow. This, I think, is quite right, but more importantly there is little community of interest between Poland and the UK in some crusade to kill the EU. Poland - agricultural, Catholic, security importer, EU net beneficiary. UK - industrial/services, Protestant but frankly heathen, security exporter, EU net contributor. Poland has every direct financial reason to maintain and uphold a mercantilist view of Europe. What about Italy? Well - mixed industrial/agricultural (although very subsidy intensive in the south), net beneficiary, Catholic, passionately pro-EU - can anyone else see where this is going?

Basically, we can't split off nice cosy little clubs within the EU of people who stroke Tory egos. We will just have to do business with them all. Is that so hard to grasp?

What you can, and cannot, bring into Canada (NON SERIOUS)

The Smoking Gun has a list of pornographic comics and films that were either seized or permitted by Canadian Customs on the US border. "Housewives at Play" - verboten! "Housewives and Hot Moms at Play" - all well and good. How d'you reckon they work these things out?

Jetline and the Caribbean

Some time ago it was suggested to me that the US Government fuel contracts with Viktor Bout's airlines had some connection with the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British tax paradise in the Caribbean. You may recall from the Ranter passim that the contracts were numbered in the series TBTC followed by 2 digits. The first two letters give the status of the contract, and the second in this case might mean the Turks and Caicos. (I'm indebted to Nicholas Confessore of the Washington Monthly for this suggestion.)

I've yet to find any connection, but reviewing the story, I am interested to note that our latest suspects, Jetline International, are operating an aircraft in Aruba. The beast in question is a BAC111, serial no. 88, registration P4-CBH. Interestingly, the Jetline BAC111 I mentioned earlier as supposedly operating for Richard Chichakli's San Air General Trading (serial no. 61) was previously registered in Aruba as P4-CBI to a private operator believed to be Jetline, before being re-registered in Equatorial Guinea as 3C-QRF. (This is the one formerly belonging to Hustler magazine.) In all, Jetline has some four aircraft in the P4 (Aruban) registry.

Dunno what it all means yet...

Evidently not under fire, then...

Link

Thurlow said he had lost his medal citation for that incident over two decades ago and stood by his account that there was no enemy fire at the time.

His account was further called into question by a battle damage assessment report on another Swift boat, PCF-51, involved in the March 13 action. The report listed three .30-caliber bullet holes in the superstructure of the 50-foot patrol boat.

The Swift boat veterans also have cast doubt on Kerry's account that a second mine explosion damaged his boat, PCF-94, and blew an Army Special Forces officer, Jim Rassmann, overboard. Kerry's Bronze Star was awarded for his rescue of Rassmann, who credited Kerry with saving his life.

Among the records was a battle damage report filed the following day, March 14, which stated that PCF-94 had three windows blown out, radios and radar inoperable, the boat's auxiliary generator inoperable, screws curled and chipped, aft helm steerage control not working."

Curious search request

The Ranter is no.2 on Altavista for "x-ray photo public domain".

Best Blog Awards

It's the time of year for the Washington Post Blog Awards. Click the button in my sidebar to nominate me. Please.

MoD's mad Doc in committee brain fart

The Torygraph reports on what must have been a memorable day at the independent inquiry into Gulf War syndrome after the former medical adviser to the MoD's own "health assessment programme" turned up in a US Army uniform and accused British servicemen of alcoholism and malingering.

"He was scathing of the British soldiers he examined, many of whom he claimed smoked, had criminal records and were alcoholic or obese. "All the eight Sandhurst Gulf war veterans that I examined were alcoholics and six were obese."

He even accused Lord Guthrie, the last Chief of Defence Staff, a former SAS officer and the regiment's current colonel-in-chief, of being "obese". He made a number of personal attacks on other veterans. "The Gulf war veterans who have complained to the press, thereby breaching their own confidentiality, are liars," he said."

Where do we start with this lot? Dr. Quack seems to have a variety of curious views. Having claimed that British soldiers were unfit he prescribed that the MoD ought to ban contact sports. Curious. He also seems to suffer from a common complaint in the Ministry, an exaggerated respect for American power. Apparently he still has his boots from Vietnam and wore the uniform "to show how much better it was". He further claimed that the US Army must be better because it won in the US War of Independence and declared an admiration for George S. Patton, before declaring that "most if not all" Gulf veterans he examined were "malingerers". It should come as no surprise that he got the bum's rush in short order for "loss of trust", neither would it surprise anyone that the MoD went on paying him £1,000 a day for some time after his sacking.

There is a slightly more serious edge to this though. The good doctor appears to hold a form of ideological belief that post-conflict medical problems do not exist physically, and should not exist mentally. He is quoted as saying that "all war syndromes since the US Civil War" have no "physical cause", and gives the strong impression that any mental symptoms cannot be real. Patton, of course, would hav agreed strongly. This was after all the man who punched one of his soldiers in a field hospital, calling him "a coward", after being told that the man was suffering from shell shock. It would be typical of the MoD's attitude if they had sought out Hall with a view to discrediting the Gulf veterans.

Allawi a Shi'ite?

"Muqtada said that calling Iyad Allawi (he didn't mention him by name) a "Shiite" was like calling Saddam Hussein a "Muslim."

From Juan Cole. I have to say, right back to last year, Cole has consistently pointed out that Allawi was nothing but trouble. His actions in the current crisis have only borne that out. I didn't think much of him, either.

Bout vs Farah

Doug Farah has an interesting new post on Viktor Bout and Jetline International. Apparently an aircraft registered 9L-LEC was leased by Jetline to something called Skylink and used in Iraq. Mr. Farah requests info on Jetline. He shall have it. Skylink may be a a Russian company, Skylink Express, listed as operating between 1994 and 2001. Its fleet consisted of two Il76 and an An12BP, which also saw service with more than one Boutco. 9L-LEC is listed by AeroTransport.org as being an An12, not as given by Farah an Ilyushin, manufacturer's serial number 4341803, active with a "private operator in Sierra Leone" but with a note to the effect that Skylink are the owners. It was formerly owned by another privateer in Kazakhstan, and interestingly by a company called Trans Air Congo. (Farah's source states the aircraft is currently in the DRC.) Before this period, little information is available.

This leaves problems. 4341803 is with a "private operator", but perhaps Skylink? Is this the right Skylink? Careful examination reveals that Skylink's "official" An12, MSN 1347909, has passed through a variety of highly dodgy operators including known Boutcos like Space Cargo and GST Aero Aircompany. It is currently leased to "Afrique Cargo Services" of Senegal. Was Skylink keeping 4341803 off the books, or was it operating under a false identity?

Trading car park tickets; economics and community

I'm about to do the stereotype blogger "A funny thing happened at the supermarket" thing, so please bear with me. It's the only one so far.

Round our way, there's a council-owned car park behind the Tesco, and the tickets are sold for fixed periods (1 hour, 2 hours, whatever). A custom has grown up of people who have completed their shopping within that time offering their used tickets to people coming in. It struck me that this was an interesting economic phenomenon. Now, the first part of the analysis is pretty simple. If the council can set the unit in which they sell parking time, then they can effectively sell the time several times, given that at least some of the parkers will leave before their time is up. This is an economic rent to the council and a deadweight loss to society, as it's an incentive to use parking less efficiently. It's no surprise that a) the tickets are marked "non-transferable" or b) that a secondary market has arisen.

If the parkers who have surplus time give their tickets to others, the free parkers are in effect getting the equivalent of the council's economic rent back. Also, society's resources are slightly more efficiently allocated (fewer people are paying for nothing). The problem is that the tickets are not traded but given away. Where is the incentive for the person who actually bought a ticket to give it away? I have two explanations. One is that you give the ticket away in expectation of a deferred benefit; as the whole thing depends on tickets being given away, doing so today increases the likelihood that you may get a free one tomorrow. The alternative, more of a Richard Layard answer, is that you gain utility from the satisfaction of helping others (and indeed of outwitting authority) and taking part in society. Likely, both are in operation.

I can't believe this

Torture quite OK really, says High Court

The High Court has ruled that evidence gained through torture is admissible so long as the torture was not "connived at" by agents of the Crown. This is insane. What happened to the "poisoned tree"? (the legal principle that any evidence gained by illegal means, even evidence gained as a consequence of other evidence gained by illegal means, is tainted) What is wrong with us? But, of course, ordinary real people don't care about this. What they care about is Anti-Social Behaviour. So you can now be arrested for dropping litter.

I know Keeping Britain Tidy is important, but isn't torture a tad worse?

Power! (sorry, the electrical kind)

Some interesting developments on the energy politics front. For a start, a giant contract has just been signed by Centrica (which owns the British Gas name) and a Malaysian oil firm to import huge quantities of liquified natural gas into the UK. This has been one of the running long term stories of the last few years, as the North Sea gas production runs down and the quantity of electricity produced from gas goes up. One answer is to import Russian gas through the interconnector pipeline from Holland, squirting it back into the old gas fields for storage. It's a neat idea, but there are some well publicised problems, not least that a crisis anywhere upstream of the UK along the pipe to Russia could cut us off. So, the idea of diversifying the supply of gas is welcome. As is finding a use for those old Milford Haven oil terminals, one of which is going to be reactivated and converted as a huge LNG port.

There are a couple of interesting security/defence implications. Gas is transported in gigantic tankers and stored in tanks so cold that they create permafrost around them. And it explodes. I recall being told that maritime terrorism was limited in effect because a laden oil tanker won't actually explode, for example the French VLCC Limburg which was attacked by an al-Qa'ida suicide boat off Yemen in 2002. Although a big hole was blown in the ship, she survived. An LNG tanker is a more dramatic proposition, as the gas must be kept at very low temperatures to be liquid - if the tanks are breached, it would expand rapidly. Not to mention being explosive. Most of the planned gas imports will come from Egypt or Algeria.

So nowhere dangerous or unstable, then.

It's no wonder that the First Sea Lord, Sir Alan West, was recently quoted as saying that al-Qa'ida was a threat to merchant shipping. It's also very little wonder that the Government was so keen on celebrating the 300th anniversary of British rule in Gibraltar.

Another interesting sidelight on energy appeared in the Guardian today, in the form of a report on how some environmentalists are now reconsidering their opposition to nuclear power in the light of climate change and energy security problems. The story is here. Wouldn't that be a turn up for the book?

How not to own a pub (warning - Yorks identity post)

Whitelocks Luncheon Bar in Leeds is possibly the best pub in the world. Hidden in one of the oldest surviving parts of Leeds (Turk's Head Yard), on the site of a Knights Templar cross, it is an astonishing Victorian fantasy of black wood panelling, mirrors, plush and porcelain, divided by a curtain between a long copper bar and an even more plush restaurant like something that escaped from the Orient Express in 1901. It is famous for - among other things - being the first public place in Leeds with electricity, serving fantastic home-made pies, real ale and bloody wine. The current building and the interior date from the 1890s, when it advertised with two Hollywood premiere style searchlights sweeping the sky over the doors, which were guarded by an Irish giant to keep anyone from bothering the dwarves.

Yes, I did say dwarves. At the time they employed dwarf waiters. I don't think you'd get away with that now.

It's been favoured by a variety of people: writers and hacks, old ladies, Leeds City Council bigwigs, escapees from the Leeds Festival. Me. Peter O'Toole. Whatever. Now, though, it has become part of a thing called the "Spirit Group" that bought it off Scottish & Newcastle Breweries. They have classified it as a "City Day Pub" and assigned it model customers called "Mick and Ruth". The fury really should have been predictable - on the 2nd of August, the Yorkshire Post devoted most of page 2 to a ferocious slagging. The branding document concerning Mick and Ruth and their taste for pinot grigio was run hard, backed up with a vitriolic review by their restaurant critic, who accused the new owners of microwaving the potatoes (for shame!). Today, the story broke nationally in the Guardian, with a report on a campaign by "old farts of all ages" to resist the evil onslaught. Good luck to 'em.

You may recall that...

A while ago, on the 1st of July the story broke via the Financial Times that the US was to intensify counter-terrorist efforts in West Africa after revelations concerning Liberian dictator Charles Taylor's connections both with the CIA and Al-Qa'ida. This was covered both here and also at Laura Rozen's War and Piece. The Financial Times story included a sensational paragraph quoting Alex Yearsley of Global Witness as saying that "the CIA and FBI long had tried to publicly minimize links between conflict diamonds and Islamic militant groups, including al-Qaida. The U.S. security agents feared exposure of their own longtime links with Charles Taylor..". However, this bombshell vanished from later editions and the FT website after everything beyond an anodyne call for a full investigation was spiked.

The recent Boston Globe story on the cancelled US raid into Liberia to seek an AQ financial expert seems to bear out the original version of the FT story.

Admin notice: RSS feeds

Due to the failure of Blogstreet's RSS panel service, there has been no Ranter Coverage section for a while. There is now a temporary version in operation courtesy of BlogFuel. This may have to become permanent, as Blogstreet has now been dead to the world for a week, all login and contacts pages pointing to 404 errors and its forum filled with Chinese spam. No signs of recovery are apparent.

Unfortunately, I'm not at all sure I have the full list of RSS feeds we were showing, so if I've offended you, please inform me. As for the Ranter RSS at http://feeds.blogstreet.com/24822.rss, I assume this is also toast...whoops, it is still working, so where there's life there's hope tha knawst.

When Punctuation Attacks!

Anthony Wells has an amusing post about compulsive parliamentary candidate Lieutenant-Commander Bill Boakes, who stood for election at every opportunity from 1951 to 1981 on a platform that varied from being a democratic monarchist campaigning for equal pay for women to being the "Air, Road, Public Safety White Resident" candidate (rather less fun). All very interesting, but the English language intervenes when Wells describes some of Boakes' other eccentricities.

"Fast moving traffic held no fears for Boaks, his other passtimes included sitting in the middle of the fast lane of the M40 on a deckchair, reading the Daily Telegraph, and deliberately pouncing onto Zebra crossings into the path of oncoming traffic, pushing a pram full of house bricks."

Very amusing, but I wasn't aware that reading the Daily Telegraph was quite as dangerous as hurling yourself in front of moving cars. Possibly it's even less enjoyable, but that isn't what that comma after "deckchair" suggests, even if the alternative gives the impression of a deckchair fascinated by conservative newspapers.

Or maybe he meant it.

Keeping up the mood of paranoia and intrigue...

Back last summer I blogged on the destruction of a US Army tank in Iraq by insurgents using an unusual weapon. Wild speculation ranged at the time from a 1940 Soviet antitank rifle, perhaps souped up with new ammunition, to the first-ever use in anger of an electro-magnetic railgun. In the fullness of time consensus gathered that it was an RPG with a new and rare warhead.

A little strange, then, to find railguns in the list of "golden nuggets" sent by John Scarlett to the Iraq Survey Group as suggestions for their next book...whoops, their final report. (The Scotsman)

"The message, Mr Mangold said, suggested ten "nuggets" of information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs that could be included in ISG reports.

Among the "nuggets" were claims that Saddam had a secret smallpox programme, that Iraq had developed mobile chemical weapons laboratories and that the country possessed or was building a "rail gun" as part of a nuclear project.

None of those suggestions have been supported by the evidence found by the ISG.."

So - does Scarlett get his information from casual web rumours?

Progress on the Bout story? The Liberian angle

Multiple blogs report that the US Defence Department planned a raid into Liberia to capture the al-Qa'ida agent Khalfan Ghailani in November, 2001, but then cancelled it. Ghailani was eventually captured in Pakistan last week. Ghailani is said to have been sent to Liberia in 1999 to head AQ's diamond trading activities, (link), where he lived in the base of Charles Taylor's so-called Anti-Terrorist Unit. UN investigations suggested that he and several other senior jihadis met Taylor, and a US "intelligence source" informed the Boston Globe that Taylor personally received some US$ 1 million from them, apparently to buy his protection. Despite this, the 9/11 Commission controversially stated that al-Qa'ida did not fund itself by trading in diamonds. (See Doug Farah, here.) Further, the FBI stated in June, 2003 that there was no - no - al-Qa'ida presence in West Africa. Farah claims that the 2001 mission was scrapped at least in part due to the lack of anyone who spoke the local language. But who were they after if there was "no presence"? Why bother? Polytropos makes the obvious suggestion that the FBI had a good reason to keep the matter quiet in the spring of 2003 - after all, no-one wanted folk to think the terrorists weren't in Iraq after all.

Another important point about all this is the possibility of a Bout connection. Successive investigations have concluded that, throughout the late 1990s and early 00s, Taylor's regime and Viktor Bout's West African business were functionally integrated to the point where you could argue they were one and the same. Taylor's main industries - diamonds, timber and flags of convenience - fed into the airline system. (the rocks being exported by air and sold, partly paying the bill, and the open registry providing both a home for the planes and another source of money.) Bout's aircraft brought in the sinews of war that maintained Taylor in power - or, in a word, in control of diamond mining and shipping registration. In late medieval Europe, the cannon to knock down the barons' walls brought with them their tax revenues and hence the ability to pay for the cannon. An analogous military-economic-political system drives the wars of modern Africa. If, as many suspect, Taylor was protected for his past services to the CIA, the whole history of our time may have been blowback on a biblical scale. If...if..if. Whilst Bout was operating in Liberia, Ghailani and his comrades were too. That was the period when the Liberian shipping registry was sending large sums of money to Boutco San Air General Trading. It was also the period when Flying Dolphin was flying, not dolphins, but weapons to Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan.

Yorkshire Assembly referendum - are they serious?

Just back from a trip to god's own county. Sighted in Bradford - billboards for the approaching referendum on a devolved government for Yorkshire. Now, I'm in favour of this, and I was a little surprised to see the lack of much campaigning activity. I would have thought that nothing would be an easier sell than pandering to Yorks local chauvinism, but the ads have done it. "Would an Elected Regional Aszzzzzzz" Sorry. Let's try that again. "Would an Elected Regional Assemly helpzzzzzzz" It keeps happening. "Would an Elected Regional Assembly help put decent homes where they're needed?"

Well, there's taut, punchy, sales directed ad copy if ever I saw it. Dull, dull, dull. And the capitals give it a beautiful air of Public Information Broadcasts. The vote has recently been put off, supposedly due to trouble with the postal ballots, and I wonder if the government are really trying to win? After all, a major election in Yorkshire at the moment would very likely be a double whipping for the government - probably BNP trouble in the mill towns, UKIP trouble in the fox hunting Vale of York and Lib Dems coming out of the woodwork everywhere else. Not to mention possible far left ructions in the Labour fortress constituencies (isn't proportional representation great?).

So - one way out would be to let the whole policy die of natural causes.

Security Crisis! Well, four years ago

Well, the latest Orange Alert didn't need much debunking - apparently the information involved originates from 2000.

"Federal authorities said on Monday that they had uncovered no evidence that any of the surveillance activities described in the documents was currently under way."

This was, of course, widely predicted after the New Republic story that an important al-Qa'ida member would be found in Pakistan shortly after the Democratic Convention. Personally, I think the last thing to fear is another skyscraper bombing - they don't repeat themselves, and there are plenty of really serious industrial targets where nothing much has been done about security.

The US alerts remind me increasingly of the way investment analysts in the boom began issuing all kinds of new ratings instead of plain old buy or sell - "accumulate", "strong buy", "market perform". Strangely, they were all on the upside. There wasn't a "strong sell" or "dump this dog right now and stockpile canned food" rating. More recently, several of the investment banks have set up rules stipulating that the number of sells must equal the number of buys. The terrorism alert levels have this problem. It only goes up. A sensible version would be balanced around normality (VERY LOW, LOW, NORMAL, ELEVATED, HIGH) - but that would make it far less sexy.