Simon Jenkins: Double Standards

Here's Simon Jenkins' latest piece of work.

For the Tories it is sex, for Labour it is money. Financial scandal sticks to the latter like political napalm. From formula one to ministerial mortgages, privatisation contracts and cash-for-honours, the sign of a £50 note waving in the wind sends Labour politicians weak at the knees. Their only moral is don't get caught, yet they get caught all the time.

Subtext: Tories are honest, really; all that stuff in the 90s was made up. No-one really cares how many women Alan Clark had, now, do they? Let me tell you how the world works, son..

Unfortunately, there's a two billion quid a year probby in there; and for some strange reason, Simon Jenkins has forgotten all about it.

Labour's third biggest donor of the year has turned out to be a David Abrahams, known to Durham planning officers as David Martin. He was selected to fight William Hague in the Yorkshire seat of Richmond but was deselected when his curriculum vitae, including a reference to a non-existent wife and son, proved less than authentic. Yet he was close enough to Blair to attend his farewell in Sedgefield earlier this year....

Guy Hands, late-90s head of Nomura Securities' principal finance unit and the man who brought today's fancydan finance (securitisation? CDOs? nifty mezzanine subprime strangelet entities? Yes.) to London, was close enough to none other than William Hague - having been a friend at Oxford and a colleague at McKinsey - to advise him to "forget about the leadership and spend the next five years fucking your brains out with Ffyon".

...In Brown's Britain there is no longer a public service ethos, only a business ethos applied to public services. No longer do Presbyterians render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. Everything goes to Caesar under a private finance initiative.

Them, eh? Let's see a take.

"Forty per cent of the £5bn set aside to improve military housing will be spent on renting the buildings from a private landlord, the BBC has learned. The Ministry of Defence has said the money would be spent on upgrading accommodation over the next 10 years.

But figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show £2bn will be spent renting back premises sold off by the state in 1996....In July, Defence Secretary Des Browne said the MoD planned to spend the £5bn on "upgrading and maintaining" accommodation. But the BBC freedom of information (FOI) request has revealed that property developer Annington Homes will receive almost £2bn of that sum.

The Conservative government sold most of the defence housing stock to Annington in 1996 for £1.6bn...In January, BBC News published photographs sent in by soldiers of their accommodation, depicting blocked urinals, uncollected rubbish and peeling floors. Recently a committee of MPs reported that although there had been some improvements, much accommodation was still unacceptable and this was having an effect on morale.

In April 2006, the MoD also signed an £8bn Private Finance Initiative deal to upgrade accommodation for single soldiers.

Annington Homes, eh? Back in '96 - those strange days when the Labour Party was an alternative and William Hague was actually in charge of something - that was, well, another word for Nomura Principal Finance. Let's join the dots, shall we? Treasury (Kenneth "Cancer Stick" Clarke) went to MOD looking for a tax cut for the election giveaway. MOD - Michael "Magic Lips" Portillo - somehow came up with the idea of flogging the MOD housing and renting it back. MOD went to Cabinet, a Cabinet including William "Save the Pound" Hague, and got approval to flog it to William Hague's best friend.

William saved so many pounds through this deal that the Government received no less than £1.6 billion of them for an estate that they have been renting for £2 billion this year, and very probably more in all the 10 intervening years. Why so probably? Well, the original contract specified a number of things. First, the MOD Defence Housing Executive would pay rent for all the buildings in use. Second, DHE would pay for their upkeep - something of a departure from the normal law of landlord and tenant. Third, Annington - William Hague's best mate - would have the right to sell a chunk of the property every year. Fourth, DHE would pay for improvements to them before sale.

You read all right - the total supply is guaranteed to always go down, Annington's costs are guaranteed to be zero, the spectacular capital gain in property was reserved to William Hague's best mate alone, and the Government subsidises the sale process while still having an obligation to house soldiers on the open market. Soldiers have returned from Iraq to queue for their own homes. One might think such a PFI would be somewhat noticeable; but it's radio silence from the Conservatives, and from the hairy truthscreamer Jenkins. You'll just have to read blogs.

What might explain this astonishing result?

I can't begin to imagine why LibDem polls are up; especially as at the same time more of the population now oppose than support ID cards.

Pair of Pakistan Politics Posts!

Whilst we're on the Pakistan blogging, immense respect is due to the Pakistan Policy Blog. It looks like Nawaz Sharif is coming home - like football, remember that? - apparently because the Saudis insisted that he be released from exile in Jeddah. The PPB makes the very good point that Musharraf has been gradually mutating into Nawaz over the last few years; now, one of the reasons why the general doesn't want him back is that there is a niche for him, or the general, but not both.

To govern in Pakistan he needs the unqualified backing of one of the two big power blocs, Sindh or the Punjab, and the acceptance of the army, which is mainly Punjabi. This was the plan, after all; Benazir would return and give the government some actual popular support and her powerbase in Sindh, and Musharraf would stay on in a suit to reassure the Punjabis and the army. Now it looks like she's coming, like it or not, and so is Nawaz Sharif; in which case, if she can bring herself to treat with him, nobody needs Musharraf any more.

As far as I can make out, he's got himself into this position entirely of his own making; calling a state of emergency has just pissed off everyone, including his only non-military support, the Punjabi bourgeoisie - who of course have a ready-made replacement limbering up in Saudi. And there is nothing Pakistan needs less than either a) a US-armed tribal ex-Taliban movement or b) a powerful Saudi influence. But the defining factor of Musharraf's career is his Napoleon complex.

Pakistan, NOIA, and a rebel data centre

This NYT story is an example, I think, of the way one's mental models control one's perception. The report deals with a proposed U.S. policy of providing the Frontier Corps, the paramilitary police of the North-West Frontier Province, with aid directly rather than via the Pakistani military. This is one thing. It is not an obviously stupid policy, nor is it unproblematic; but this isn't the point.

I come away from the article unsure whether the constant references to "tribes" and activities in Iraq mean that the writer is analogising the Corps to the tribal militias the US Army has been recruiting in Iraq, or whether there is a further policy of recruiting such forces in Pakistan. If the first, it's a silly analogy - the Frontier Corps is a part of the Pakistani federal government, not a group of ex-insurgents in a tactical alliance with an occupying army. And he's clearly bought into the superduper surge narrative. If the second, it's extremely worrying.

Trying to create local countergangs in Pakistan would have a serious downside; what or who would they be fighting for? Better be clear it's Pakistan, and a version of it that is tolerable both to the wider world and (more importantly) to the majority of Pakistanis outside the NWFP. And who can say, at the moment, what Pakistan is? At least the Corps will fight for whoever runs the Pakistani government, but who knows what US-empowered ex-Taliban (the closest analogy to the various ex-insurgent groups in Iraq) would do with their new weapons?

Similarly, the tactical peace with the NOIA (New-Old Iraqi Army) has been one way to reduce violence in Iraq, at the price of creating new forces that don't answer to the Iraqi government or for that matter anyone else. And the NOIA are precisely who these "Concerned Citizens" are; all accounts of 'em seem to mention the Islamic Army and the 1920 Revolution Brigade, always my favourite NOIA outfit. My own analysis, by the way, is that having stepped their operational tempo right up in the spring in response to the abandonment of the Baker-Hamilton commission's proposals (which they were probably consulted on via Tariq al-Hashemi), they've now made an operational choice to crank it down and cooperate in order to buy US concessions - specifically acceptance of their control on the ground and arms, in return for dead Saudi jihadis.

(Anyone else notice that the insurgency has better data management than HMRC? Five terabytes - or should that be TERRORBYTES? - of detailed records on all their foreign recruits. That must surely be a unit error, but 0.5GB would still be plenty. However, it does look like their encryption wasn't strong enough - but then nothing ever is if the enemy has physical access and infinite leisure.)

Slower and slower

Dan Hardie keeps getting desperate e-mail from stranded Iraqi employees of the British Army. I haven't yet, but I do regularly get people on NewSkies satellite-Internet links searching for information on how to apply for asylum.

Expect dramatic news from him tomorrow; you'll need to write to them. Apparently David Miliband doesn't think the matter is urgent.

Python and CSV; know your limits

Right, I've got this honking great MySQL dump file, and I'd like to use the data in it without needing a MySQL db server; so I thought I'd turn it into a SQLite db, as python has native sqlite3 support. Various suggestions are on offer around the web; SQLiteBrowser, for example, claims to import and export from various SQL flavours and CSV files. Nice; but it chokes on the file.

So I saved a copy of the thing as a plain text file with the mysql tags trimmed off and tried a few options; a posting on the UK Python list reminded me that the csv module in Python can take arbitrary characters as delimiters, not just commas, which sounded useful. After all, I couldn't just split it at the commas because the contents are basically a lot of tuples, like this: (data, data, data),(data, data, data) And I need them in groups.

I thought I was being clever when I did a global find/replace, taking out the ),( because the csv module doesn't support multiple characters as delimiters, and replacing it with \t; then I wrote this script:

#! usr/bin/env python

import sqlite3
import csv

f = open('/home/yorksranter/Documents/Geekery/airports.txt')
csv.field_size_limit(100000) #see below!
input = csv.reader(f, delimiter='\t')
conn = sqlite3.connect('/home/yorksranter/Desktop/airport.sql')
curse = conn.cursor()

curse.execute('''CREATE TABLE airports ('id', 'country', 'latitude', 'longitude', 'name', 'timezone', 'shortname')''')

for item in input:
........curse.execute('INSERT INTO airports VALUES (%s)' % item)
curse.commit()

Each item should be a tuple of seven values, and they should be in the same order they were in the original db, so this ought to recreate the data in an SQLite 3 file.

Then my problems began; I got the following error message:

_csv.error field larger than field limit

. Google found me this and this; it seems as far as I understand that the DB is too big for the csv module; there does seem to be a way of altering the limit, going by the module source code.

Thoughts? Update: There is; csv.field_size_limit(), and I altered it until the thing ran properly; but there's still no data in the db!

That's not what software-as-a-service is meant to mean!

The Biggest Data Fart In The World Ever (BDFITWE) just keeps on getting better/worse. Check this out:

Sir John Bourn, the outgoing comptroller and auditor general, told a secret session of the public accounts committee that a senior business manager at Revenue & Customs had authorised the information to be released in its full form. His email approving the sharing of the data was copied to an assistant director....It asked for all child benefit numbers, national insurance numbers and names but did not want bank accounts and addresses and dates of birth. According to Bourn, Revenue & Customs told the NAO that removing the extra information would be too costly.

You what? Too costly? How? Oh, right, it's the old standby - "there's a contract". We can't find you the plates for your flak jacket/diagnose your cancer within less than three months/type SELECT (names, addresses) FROM families WHERE child=Yes rather than SELECT * FROM families because there's a contract.

So how does it work? Do they have a little taxi meter on their desks that increments every time they issue a database query? How much is Crapita or Siemens or whoever charging them per SQL statement? But yes:

The e-mail states that the data would not be "desensitised" in the way that had been requested as it would require an extra payment to data services provider.

I think I just ate my hat. Mmm, felt.

Shawn Williams, a partner in a law firm specialising in fraud cases, said he regularly received confidential data from Revenue & Customs in CDs with either no password or the password written on the disc itself.

Realistically it's only going to be "password", isn't it? Or maybe something more secure like "passw0rd". Of course it's meaningless, because a CD can't actually check passwords; if you were to access it with a program that didn't perform the password check (like, say, a slightly altered...) this would not help in the slightest.

Further, on a general point, can anyone point to any evidence that The New Public Management - contracting out, next steps agencies, numerical targets and all that jazz - has ever achieved anything useful anywhere?

15-7

So now we know; looks like the Glock 17 caucus got a clean sweep of the "independent" MPA members.

BBC:

The MPA chairman, Len Duvall, said the watchdog body risked bringing itself into disrepute by the public and vitriolic attacks on Sir Ian.

I think I'm going to vomit. Excuse me, will you?

Anyway, the result was 15 votes against, 7 for, one abstention; I think the abstention was probably Whittaker, as her e-mail account autoreplies that she is away until tomorrow. Does anyone have a rollcall?

Here are some of the replies I received from members of the MPA:

Am sorry alexander. I do not know who you are and contray to your message I have received many messages of support for ian. Perhaps you could give me examples of what performance issues of concern you have of the Metropolitan Police's command and control systems.

With crime at its lowest level in 5 years in london and reassurance levels up I would be interested to read your views

Thanks you for taking the time to e mail me.

John Roberts

I replied in-line:

On Nov 20, 2007 3:01 PM, John Roberts wrote:
> Am sorry alexander. I do not know who you are

Merely a citizen, a Tube user, a target.

> and contray to your message I have received many messages of support for ian.

Well, this is not one.

>Perhaps >you could give me examples of what performance issues of
concern you have of the >Metropolitan Police's command and control
systems.
>

According to the IPCC Report, no-one ever positively identified de
Menezes as a suspect, but after this had filtered through the system,
the senior commanders were given the impression he *had* been
identified as such. Further, the CO19 group were receiving filtered
information from headquarters after these errors had got into it, but
not direct information from the surveillance team; the commander on
the scene didn't control all the units involved and wasn't deployed
forward with the surveillance team, so didn't actually know what was
happening.

Have you read the IPCC Report?

And he replied:

Thank you for a quick reply your comments have been noted.

Take care

John roberts

Here is a reply from Green MLA Jenny Jones:

Alexander Harrowell wrote:
>This is an edited version of the response I prepared to the IPCC Report:

....(ed: snip a version of this post without the swearing)...

>Who are you?

>---------------------------------------------------------------
>Cllr Jenny Jones AM
>Green Member of the London Assembly
>City Hall
>The Queen's Walk
>London SE1 2AA
>Tel: 0207 983 4391
>Fax: 0207 983 4398

And this is an oversight body. I could laugh; I suppose I'd better. A colleague remarked that the whole thing had been an example of "democracy theatre" by analogy to "security theatre".

ID Cards will make us safe from identity theft

It's usually the Home Office that leads the way in the British government's eternal Olympics of stupidity; but now and again, someone is inspired to go that bit further, to be a tiger, to raise the bar.

Having built a monster centralised database of every last child in the UK, the Revenue burned it to a pair of disks and sent them off with a courier...and never saw 'em again. With no less than 25 million records compromised including names, addresses, National Insurance numbers, and bank accounts, this must be the world champion securifart.

"Dear Sir, The Department for Work and Pensions requires you to update your bank details now or face losing out on child benefit for your" (son/daughter) ($name)...

We told them it would happen, and they went ahead and did it.

Cat

Concise

The Register has been having fun with a script that removes all mention of the word "iPhone" from webpages; a necessary function these days. Better, they developed it to work on an iPhone; but just check out the code.


// JavaScript here

//This one thinks it's an object
var myRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();

//This is the text we're going to change the word "iPhone" to
var changeTo = "";

//This is our home page, and the site that leaving will unload the app
var home = 'http://www.theregister.co.uk';

function startUp() {
changeTo = readCookie("newName")
if (changeTo == null) {
changeTo = window.prompt("So what would better suit the iPhone?");
createCookie("newName", changeTo, 1);
}
loadRegister(home);
}

function loadRegister(targetURL) {

//targetDomain is set to a string containing the site (but not directories or file) that the user clicked on
var targetDomain = targetURL.substring(targetURL.indexOf(".", 8)+1, targetURL.indexOf("/", 8));

//We compare that to our home page
if (home.indexOf(targetDomain) == -1) {
alert("Moving Off Site: " + targetDomain);
//This line unloads this application, as the targetURL replaces this document
parent.parent.location=targetURL;
}

//Then we load the page
myRequest.open("GET", targetURL);
myRequest.onload = targetLoaded;
myRequest.send();
}

function targetLoaded() {
var loadedSite = myRequest.responseText;

loadedSite = loadedSite.replace(/iPhone /g, changeTo + " ");
loadedSite = loadedSite.replace(/ iPhone/g, " " + changeTo);

var counter;

var loadedDocument = parent.frames[0].document;

loadedDocument.open();
loadedDocument.write(loadedSite);
loadedDocument.close();
//This is our horrible bodge which waits 10 seconds for the page to load
setTimeout('pageLoaded()', 10000);
}

function pageLoaded() {
//This loops through every link on the page (241 on the El Reg home page when we were testing this) and adds an "onclick" even listener
for (i=0; i < parent.frames[0].document.links.length; i++) {
parent.frames[0].document.links[i].onclick = linkClicked;
}
}

function linkClicked() {
loadRegister(this.href);
//We return "false" so the browser dosen't attempt to load the link clicked on.
return false;
}

function returnHome() {
loadRegister(home);
}

function changeName() {
eraseCookie("newName");
changeTo = window.prompt("So what would better suit the iPhone?");
createCookie("newName", changeTo, 1);
}

function createCookie(name,value,days) {
if (days) {
var date = new Date();
date.setTime(date.getTime()+(days*24*60*60*1000));
var expires = "; expires="+date.toGMTString();
}
else var expires = "";
document.cookie = name+"="+value+expires+"; path=/";
}
function readCookie(name) {
var nameEQ = name + "=";
var ca = document.cookie.split(';');
for(var i=0;i < ca.length;i++) {
var c = ca[i];
while (c.charAt(0)==' ') c = c.substring(1,c.length);
if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length,c.length);
}
return null;
}
function eraseCookie(name) {
createCookie(name,"",-1);
}
//--

Nurgs! My brane! Now this is why I like Python...

#! usr/bin/env/ python

import string
import urllib
import webbrowser

print ('Enter a URL for de-iPhoning')

input = raw_input()
url = urllib.urlopen(input)
data = url.read()
snip = input.replace('http://www.', '')
fname =('/home/yorksranter/.mozilla/firefox/ydirmggn.default/Cache/'+snip)
f = open(fname, 'w')
d = data.replace('iPhone', '')
f.write(d)

webbrowser.open_new_tab(fname)


Obviously you'll want to replace the file path with your own browser cache, unless you like this blog so much you named your user account after it. Windows users should do the same and remove the first line.

No wonder the Reg guy ended up saying this:

We also decided that we're not going to develop anything else for the iPhone until there's a proper development kit, allowing the use of a proper programming language, and some decent documentation too.

All TYR Labs code in this post has passed the rigorous Atwood Certification Test.

Muhahhahaaaa!

Sun Microsystems is building a data centre in an abandoned Japanese coal mine using 30 of their data-centre-in-a-shipping-container boxes. Of course, the ostensible reason is that it's always 15 degrees down there, so they expect to save 50 per cent of the electricity requirement, and further it's as secure as you like.

But seriously, this has to be the secret base for a sci-fi villain, no? No mention of a white cat, but you bet there's one in there.

Belated Bad Logistics Blogging

Everyone was all over this NYT story about those vanishing cargoes of guns in Iraq. It's nothing new if you've been reading this blog; we've been concerned about this ever since 2005. And, unlike Spencer Ackerman, we've got the whole supply chain; those guns didn't come on no C-17, Spence, but on JLI and Aerocom Il-76s ex-Tuzla, some of which may not even have gone to Baghdad at all but instead filed new flight plans enroute and continued to Dubai, Djibouti, the Yemen, and many other locations.

However, the report does sharpen up our knowledge of what happened when guns did arrive in Iraq; I suspected that any vaguely official looking party might have been able to make off with them, especially the fake policemen so common in Iraq, and it looks like that's precisely what happened. Apparently, US and Iraqi officers would rush to the airport when they heard a shipment had arrived in order to grab it before anyone else did, and no documentation was checked or indeed presented.

Further, weapons were being misappropriated and sold both by Iraqi contractors and US officers; it's also certain that the insurgents were acquiring arms from the shipments, as the guns kept turning up in captured caches and stocks turned in under a buy-back program. However, much of the materiel was impossible to trace as the shippers didn't have to provide lists of serial numbers; it seems the US recipients didn't bother to catalogue them either.

We also know that the Bosnian authorities were systematically deceived about the contents of shipments leaving Tuzla; as were the British authorities in the Sloman Traveller case. It is literally impossible to say how many weapons were loaded in the Balkans, how many were unloaded in Baghdad, or what happened to any balance. (Although we do have a reasonable idea where to start looking for some of them at least.)

It may also be significant that the corruption the NYT describes began just as the involvement with Viktor Bout did.

'Ello, Ello, Let's Be Having You!

Right: it's time for a final desperate push before the MPA meets on Thursday.

So far, we can update our lists as follows:

5 declared Labour members.
1 Green, Jenny Jones, still hanging on for the decentralised, human-scale virtues of ecologically plugging random electricians on the tube. But we're getting in touch...
7 Tories and Liberals.
Cindy Butts, Faith Boardman, and Richard Sumray, who are all for various reasons parti pris for the Government.
Damien Hockney is voting no confidence in Sir Ian Blair.
Karim Murji, I'm informed, is voting the Government ticket.

That's 10 members of the Glock 17 caucus to 8 in the Axis of Reason. Who's left?

Now see this: looks like MPA e-mail addresses are firstname.lastname@mpa.gov.uk.

Aneeta Prem, media@aneeta.com, webform; "has the top electrical consultants to build your home's intelligent lighting system," apparently.
Reshard Auladin: Has "a keen interest in British Muslim affairs" according to the MPA. reshard.auladin@mpa.gov.uk
Rachel Whittaker; rachel.whittaker@mpa.gov.uk, 020 7202 0223. Not this one.
Kirsten Hearn "Wishes to describe herself as a stroppy, blind dyke, and proud of it", apparently, not to mention a professional troublemaker. Surely, surely, surely this woman cannot be planning to vote in favour of the cops randomly shooting people?
E-mail kirsten@flotowers.freeserve.co.uk.
John Roberts. Has "14 years of experience of working with London's hard to reach communities", apparently. john.roberts@mpa.gov.uk

And Peter Herbert of the Society of Black Lawyers, we think, is sound.

If you have any spare time this week at all, and especially if you live in London; can you please take the time to contact one of these people? And if you've got a blog, can you please reproduce this? Remember that in a two-horse race like this, every swinger counts double; not just a vote for our side, but one less for them. We're now 10-9, with 5 votes in play; play up, play up, and play the game.

Stupid Filter

They switched it on... and the Internet vanished!

Target for Tonight

The Metropolitan Police Authority meets on the 22nd November to discuss Sir Ian Blair's case; they cannot be left uninformed.

This body consists of members from the London Assembly, magistrates, and "independent members". Their details are here. The balance is as follows - 7 Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who can be expected to vote no confidence in Blair out of partisanship. There are 5 Labour members, including Deputy Mayor Nicky Gavron and MPA Chair Len Duvall, all of whom can be expected to back him. There is Green Jenny Jones, who has gone public supporting Blair. Anti-hierarchical ecofeminism, right?

Then there are 9 independent and magistrates; out of these, Cindy Butts is an ex-researcher to the Economic Sec of the Treasury and therefore must be considered a Government vote, and Richard Sumray is an Olympic bid official and therefore is also captured. Considering the certainties, the vote breaks 50-50.

Then there is Faith Boardman, who is an independent member, ex-Lambeth Council CEO; i.e. probably Labour, and anyway as the former head of the CSA she cannot be expected to oppose public incompetence. 9-7 to Killer of the Yard.

Now we have Aneeta Prem (media AT aneeta.com), Rachel Whittaker, Peter Herbert, Karim Murji (k.murji AT open.ac.uk), John Roberts, Kirsten Hearn, Reshard Auladi, and that titan of statesmanship Damian Hockney(Damian.Hockney AT london.gov.uk, 020 7983 4919) the "One London" man and ex-UKIPper. (Update: See comments, he may yet be saved!)

We need to get 2 more votes than t'othersiders out of this group. Hockney opposed the HSE prosecution, but is apparently against Blair staying in office. Assuming he votes with the Government, they have a 3 vote lead; we need to get 6 of the remaining indies on board to fire the fucker. I want a full-dress blogswarm on this; think of the Iraqi employees' campaign and square it. In fact, think of Josh Marshall's US social security drive.

Who can find our four missing MMPAs?

Update: NO MORE EMAIL TO KARIM MURJI PLEASE! We don't want to alienate them with spam; and we have contacted him by other means. You might prefer to call Peter Herbert's chambers on 0207 841 6100 or e-mail clerks AT tooks.co.uk giving his name.

Stockwell Report: A Response

The IPCC report is, first of all, a cracking job of work, despite that the Met did its level best to dodge the investigators. They have established a lot of facts, and carried out a mass of interviews, and come up with sensible conclusions; I'd like to recommend again that you read it, as it is likely to be the Rosetta stone of the anti-terrorism state in the late Blair period.

For example, we learn the details of Operation KRATOS and its twin, Operation C. KRATOS and C were plans drawn up to deal with the possibility of a suicide bomber being spotted in London, and that it might be necessary to shoot them. C, hitherto unknown to the public at large, was intended to deal with a bomber spotted at a major public event, when the police response would be largely pre-planned and under central command and control. C foresaw that if some conditions were fulfilled, a designated senior officer (DSO) at Scotland Yard would be able to order a sniper to shoot them.

KRATOS, meanwhile, was intended to deal with the (much more likely) situation in which the suspect was at large in the streets, and therefore that no prior planning would be possible. Quite wisely, the KRATOS procedures put a much greater emphasis on local control. The role of the DSO still existed, as did a set of rules demanding that all intelligence sources must be reviewed, that the police should try to confront the suspect in the open, or at a moment that would keep them away from the public, so that negotiation or a nonlethal weapon could be tried. But the silver commander, the field commander, rather than Scotland Yard was in charge.

Operation THESEUS 2, the operation launched after the discovery of Hussain Osman's gym card, didn't fit either of these very well. The plan Thomas MacDowell prepared fit them even less - it foresaw that the occupants of the flats would be allowed to leave, watched, and approached by police out of sight from the building, which meant it was neither a set piece nor a mobile operation. It was also half a surveillance operation and half an arrest. Cressida Dick, who was bugled out of bed to run a possible KRATOS operation at 0100 that morning, designed a command structure that was half KRATOS, half C.

Had it been a KRATOS, there would have been an operations room at Scotland Yard monitoring the whole operation, with a gold commander in overall charge and a DSO who would be responsible for the decision to authorise lethal force or not, and a firearms specialist as tactical adviser to these. There would have been a silver commander in command on the scene, with his or her own tactical adviser, with direct communications to all the teams involved in the operation and to Scotland Yard, which would also be receiving information from the surveillance team and the arrest team. The silver commander would have been in full charge, with the exception that the DSO only could authorise the use of a gun outside direct self defence.

Had it been a C, the key command would have been at Scotland Yard or perhaps at a forward command post, and the DSO would have been in direct control of the possible shooter. One roughly matches the army's idea of Mission Command - Auftragstaktik for Germans, who invented it - and the other Befehlstaktik, "orders tactics". Mission command implies that orders to subordinate units specify objectives, and that their commanders are given total discretion to achieve them, excepting only any restrictions specified with their objectives. The German army traditionally thought it was appropriate for offensive operations or other manoeuvres when it would be important to be able to respond to opportunities quickly. Befehlstaktik was the opposite - everyone does precisely what they are told and nothing else. This was traditionally thought appropriate for defence up to the moment when a counterattack was launched.

So what did Dick and MacDowell come up with? A weird hybrid of the two. Dick took over as gold commander, but McDowell remained so in form throughout; why? Similarly, the silver commander, DCI "C" and his tactical adviser, TROJAN 80, were co-located with the firearms squad and were in command on the scene; that's what a silver commander means. But the surveillance squad were under the direct control of Scotland Yard, and "C" was never with them. The practical implementation of this was no better - there was direct radio communication from Dick to "C" and from TROJAN 84 in Scotland Yard to TROJAN 80 in "C"'s car, and from "C" to the CO19 men. There was direct radio communication from the surveillance group to Scotland Yard, but not to Cressida Dick, who was meant to be in direct command of them; she got reports from DCI Jon Boutcher, monitoring the radios. "C" was sometimes able to hear the crosstalk on the surveillance group's radio network, but not always, and he had no command authority over them. The Met's planning meant that neither the commander at headquarters, nor the commander in the field, would have full information. Nobody would.

Neither was the commander on the scene ever on the scene; his command element was with the famously late firearms squad, and then behind them. He was reliant on what was heard over the surveillance net, and what came down from headquarters, much of which was information from the surveillance team that had come via the surveillance team leader, Boucher, and Dick. And he had been told to "trust the intelligence"; which he also told the CO19 men. One of the reasons for the choice of the operations room at Scotland Yard was the presence of "other agencies" - that is, the secret services.

Here we hit the damning detail; nobody ever identified Jean Charles de Menezes as the bomber, but this information never reached anyone in a position to act on it. Yes, several of the surveillance officers were at different times of the opinion that he might perhaps be; but no-one who thought so had seen his face. The only member of the surveillance team who did thought he wasn't.

But as the information went up the creaky structure, uncertainty mutated into certainty. Boucher never seems to have told Dick that nobody had identified de Menezes; Dick asked for a judgment in terms of a percentage from the surveillance team, but they thought such a judgment would be meaningless. Even that appears to have been taken as evidence that he might be the man. Let us remember that the surveillance team was meant to watch everyone leaving the block so further cops could stop them all and ask questions; it was because he left the building and the surveillance team didn't identify him as a suspect that he was shot.

The command structure appears to have become a machine generating confirmation bias. Imagine the position in the police car barging towards Stockwell that morning with "C", the CO19 leader and TROJAN 80; as the car lunges over the traffic islands, occasional voices on the surveillance radio are saying "No; I didn't see him..yes, he looks quite like him", and a clear strong voice on the main set is saying "Suspect is getting off a bus; he must not get on the tube". The second voice is the chief commander, and is a sight more certain (she isn't fully informed) and clearer (she has the better bandwidth), and anyway she isn't driving over dogs in south London and therefore sounds a sight calmer and hence more authoritative. TROJAN 80 is talking to TROJAN 84 on his mobile phone and is probably getting the paranoia in the rest of the ops room direct. The Commander is not only senior-ranking, but is also meant to be clued in on all kinds of other secret spook stuff. And you can't ask the surveillance group yourself, or actually see what is going on.

This is what is known as the cross-cockpit gradient; it's not healthy to depend on information that comes from someone who is too authoritative to question, and the same thing applies to information that comes from sources too secret to question. In the end, several of the CO19 men seem to have believed that the KRATOS codeword had been given; they differed on whether it came from "C" or from the DSO and relayed by "C". "C", it turns out, was the mystery "senior colleague", which is interesting because he was a junior colleague.

Sir Ian Blair must go.

Update: Interesting read here.

The IPCC Report

The IPCC seems to be clueless about running a website, so here's a direct link to the Stockwell I report (PDF, 1.35MB): link.

Much more later.

Public Service Announcement (Without Guitars)

Readers are strongly requested to read this, as well as explanations here, and then vote for Sadly No here.

That is all.

Some data points

OK, so by chance we have some real data to put into the sums in this post. The head of MI5 has just announced that we should all be very scared, because he reckons there may be 2,000 people in Britain who pose a threat to national security because of their support for terrorism.

So let's run the Terroriser. 59 million people; 2,000 terrorists. So there's a 0.0034% chance of any given citizen being a terrorist. Remember that the Terroriser will catch 99 per cent of the real terrorists - so that's all but 20 terrorists. Now, the Terrorist will also miss 98 per cent of the non-terrorists - but that means we'll get some 1,180,000 false positives. 1,980 terrorists plus 1,180,000 false positives = 1,181,980 suspects. (1,980/1,181,980)x100=0.1675155. There is a 0.167 per cent chance that any one of the suspects is a terrorist.

And there are still 20 terrorists out there; easily enough for a major terrorist attack. Now consider this hilarious report; apparently the FBI mined supermarket sales figures in the hope that sales of falafels would indicate the presence of Iranian terrorists! As well as, ah, Israelis, presumably. Note the involvement of half-arsed fearmonger Steven Emerson, and also old TYR butt Yossef Bodansky.