Myths of the Falklands: Number 1, Command

25 years ago, there was a war on, too. Everyone knows the story - fascist dictator invades forgotten colony in middle of nowhere, stalwart soldiery and jolly Jack Tar kick him out, patriotic rejoicing, vague guilt, and kajillions of words of editorialising ever since. The Falklands War remains an event that badly needs good history, but so far is surrounded by myth, either numskull patriotic or self-loathing. Note that this applies to both parties to the conflict.

Myth number one: Command.

The British public discourse is pretty clear - even though the government and the military missed a string of signals on the way in (we'll deal with them in the next thrilling instalment - Myth 2 - Thatcher's War?), once it happened, no-one doubted the aim. A razor focus led straight to the beaches of San Carlos Water, with the paladins Woodward, Thompson, and Moore in the lead and the utmost support of the chiefs of staff.

It's a myth, of course.

The Chiefs of Staff Committee

We're keeping the intelligence/political level for the next post, but this body performed patchily. Its Navy chief, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, and the Army's Chief of the General Staff, Lord Bramall, were notably uncertain about the aim of the operation. The RAF's Michael Beetham was keen to get involved, and kick-started the activities that led to the long-range Vulcan raids, but couldn't avoid being a secondary force. Bramall seems to have doubted whether the job could be done, or even should be done, and to have felt that it would be no bad thing if the Navy buggered it up.

From the 29th of March, when RN Fleet Headquarters was alerted that it might need to form a carrier group, through the 2nd of April when the head of amphibious warfare, Commodore Michael Clapp, and the landing force commander, Brigadier Julian Thompson, were warned-off, through the 7th, when Clapp's ships began to sail from the UK, there was no official statement of the expedition's aim. This could only come from the Chiefs, answering a political request from Whitehall. Up to the 12th of May, nine days before hitting the beach, the aim remained as follows:

Plan to land on the Falklands with a view to repossession.

Obviously, nobody aims to plan. But more seriously, what did it mean? London sent a string of interpretations, suggesting variously that it might be enough to "poise" offshore, land somewhere remote and wait, or biff the fuckers. Each option had very different requirements, reflecting on the choice of landing site, the order of landing, and the logistic requirements.

Worse, the lack of an actual strategy meant that the procedure laid down for an amphibious operation was put in reverse. Rather than the land force defining its plan and passing requirements to the Navy, which then fit the loading of ships to them, London ordered simply that ships sail from Portsmouth and Devonport as quickly as they could load. Combat-loading was put off until the halt at Ascension Island, but even there, fiddling intervened. At one point, MOD signalled that the whole force must sail south six days before it actually did, which would have meant sailing directly for the beaches with the loading tables even worse than before, without the infantry having time to zero their weapons, without practising landing even once, without receiving huge amounts of stores flown out from the UK. Fortunately, the proposal was kiboshed - very fortunately, as at that point the medical plan did not exist.

Time and again, unclarity about aims and Rumsfeldesque fiddling caused trouble. Clapp and Thompson in Fearless were ordered to race ahead to Ascension to make a Top Conference, with the result that Fearless missed her rendezvous with the fleet tanker RFA Olmeda. That meant Fearless was too high in the water to launch her landing craft until the next tanker came in, and no heavy kit could be moved. Logistics is difficult.

The worst example came with the role of the 5th Infantry Brigade. Intelligence reports of the Argentine airlift of troops to the islands suggested that reinforcements were needed, but the COSs waggled for days about it. It was repeatedly suggested that the second brigade, when it came, would be used as a rear-area garrison or reliefs for the 3 Commando Brigade and its Para reinforcements. This thinking permeated - if it was a secondary role, it would be OK to use the 5th Airborne Brigade HQ and what was left after two of their Para battalions had been grabbed, plus two Guards units, rather than a complete light infantry brigade. Also, 5 Bde were promised the Chinook helicopters, so these stayed on M/V Atlantic Conveyor until she was sunk..

The key problem, really, was that the top command was hoping to get away without a real war. Or at least, without a real war for their service.

One hope for this rested on Admiral Sandy Woodward.

Woodward joins the story just because he was the admiral furthest south at the time, leading an exercise with some escorts in the western Mediterranean. The assault ships, logistics, and carriers, plus a lot more escorts, sailed from Britain under Michael Clapp, although technically they belonged to Rear-Admiral Derek Reffell.

He received directives from the chiefs of staff that required him to achieve sea and air control around the Falklands and cut communication between the mainland and the islands. These he interpreted in his own fashion. What "sea control" meant can be seen in two different ways - a Nelsonian and a Mahanian view. Nelson's original contribution to sea warfare was extremism. He didn't just win, he aimed to annihilate the enemy. Rather like his contemporary, Karl von Clausewitz, he believed that "real war" should be as much like "true war" as possible - that is to say, as chaotic and violent and terrifying as possible.

Admiral Mahan, the Edwardian strategist of the U.S. Naval Academy, looked at what the point was, and answered that the point of sea warfare was "the freedom to use the sea and the freedom to deny that use to the enemy". It didn't matter if there was no battle - indeed, it was preferable - if the overriding aim of being able to use the sea was achieved.

In the South Atlantic in 1982, the first would mean seeking a battle with the Argentine Navy and Air Force, and trying to crush them, and the second would mean trying to keep them from interfering with a landing on the Falklands. Woodward initially seems to have chosen the Nelson option, as evidenced by a variety of bad ideas he presented to Clapp and others. For example, he wanted to send a decoy group towards the mainland, including Fearless, RFA Fort Austin, RFA Resource, Invincible, and some escorts, while Clapp and Thompson and their staffs went even closer in aboard a destroyer. The idea being to force the enemy out of harbour.

He also suggested, as an alternative to landing and (if necessary) marching on the enemy, a landing on a remote island somewhere in West Falkland, or the construction of an airbase for F-4 Phantom aircraft in Clovelly Bay, West Falkland.

The last is quick to deal with - it just wasn't possible without engineering equipment and manpower they didn't have. And the second last was quite simply reckless - at this point, Intrepid still wasn't with the force, and losing Fearless and Fort Austin would have been a disaster. Equally, five out of the eight destroyers sent were hit by something or other, two being sunk. But what would have happened had Woodward beaten the Argentine Navy, the landing force being either elsewhere or on a remote island? He thought that a blockade would force them to give up, but then, he was never able to stop them sending a C-130 supply run every night of the war. And this required time - but the best estimates for how long the carriers could sustain all-out operations were around 60 days, as the weather turned nastier and men and machines wore out.

Further, though, the whole argument assumed that the Argentine Air Force would turn up. With no threat to overturn their strategic success, there would have been no reason for them to hurl themselves at Woodward's ships - they would have controlled the operational tempo. And eventually, anything could happen - they might get lucky and hit a carrier, they might start sinking tankers, or the UK might fall out with either the US or Europe.

Was Woodward suffering from Trafalgar syndrome, the belief that a decisive fleet action would win the war? Possibly. His behaviour towards the amphibious force suggests so, but even if he was, it might not have been so deluded. Between the 30th of April and the 2nd May, the two navies came very close to a fleet action, with three Argentine groups manoeuvring about the Task Force's perimeter. The last contact the British had with the Argentine carrier group was on the morning of the 30th when a Sea Harrier picked up their radar transmissions, but after this moment there was no more information for some time. But the other side located Woodward's carriers on the 31st after a (risky) reconnaissance flight by a Grumman Tracker. They were now in a position to launch an air strike, and presumably send in the northern surface-attack group with its Exocet ships behind the jets.

However, the Argentine command didn't launch that evening, and the wind changed on the next day. They therefore called off the attack and ordered the fleet to rendezvous with its tankers west of the Falklands before seeking another opportunity. But on the way, the General Belgrano was sunk, which caused everyone to scratch the tanker RV and return to home waters at best speed. It's hard to see exactly what would have happened had the fleets engaged - the British had two small carriers to one bigger Argentine one and 10 escorts to 9, but only 5 of the British ships (T-21, T-22, or Leander class frigates, and County class DLGs) had surface-to-surface missiles compared to 8 Argentine SSM ships. The wildcard would have been the British submarines, providing that HMS Spartan could catch up in time (she had not found the enemy carrier group as intended).

It would have been a bloody business, and might have ended up as a Nelsonian thrashing, but it seems unlikely that even a devastating British victory would have come without seriously weakening the carrier group - perhaps losing a carrier. Which would have posed the question - what now? Blockade was, as discussed, imperfect and could anyway not be sustained long enough to win. Could a weakened carrier group have provided enough air cover for the amphibious group? It seems impossible, given the close-run thing it was with two carriers.

Once COMAW and company arrived, Woodward's role changed dramatically. At last, he had a clear aim, which was (however much he disliked it) to support the amphibians by providing combat air patrols and strikes and looking after the transport holding area out at sea. He discharged this well, taking the (mildly controversial) decision to keep the carriers well to the east. Again, the lack of clear strategic analysis had nearly led him to take an appalling risk, but the return of clarity led him back to a sensible and conservative policy.

Logistic Blindness

This afflicted a string of important people, kicking off with Lewin in MOD Main Building and moving south. Woodward doesn't seem ever to have grasped the problem, complaining that the amphibious group had offloaded nearly one ton of stores per man and that must surely be enough. In fact, 3 Commando Brigade had 4,500 tons of stuff in their War Maintenance Reserve, roughly a ton per man, but this doesn't include their first- and second-line loadout, weapons, or vehicles. The order from London on the 26th to "move out" was based on the assumption that everyone was being terribly slow, but the NATO Northern Flank plans had assumed eight days for a smaller force to land through an operational port with host-nation air cover.

In fact, the landing craft and choppers managed to unload ammunition from the P&O Ferrymasters truck ferry M/V Elk at a rate of 80 tons an hour, which would be good going for breakbulk dry cargo handling in a real port. Similarly, Brigadier Tony Wilson of 5 Brigade and Major-General Jeremy Moore of division HQ spent their trip south on the QE2 planning in splendid isolation from either Sandy Woodward or Michael Clapp, whose ships and aircraft they were, or Julian Thompson, whose logistics regiment it was (among many other things, 5 didn't have its own logistics support and consumed 3 Bde resources). Wilson believed Moore had promised him all available helicopters to get his brigade forward, although Moore had no helicopters to promise and there was no way such a thing could happen in the light of the offload, artillery, and medical requirements.

With his logistics outsourced to the Navy, Wilson was unfortunately free to start his own war by pushing men forward from the Goose Green area to Bluff Cove in his liaison helicopter, thus creating an advance along the south coast that the Navy and Marine planners had ruled out as logistically difficult to support, needless, and risky. The confusion about strategic aims that had started at the top led to the tactical and operational mistakes that led to the disaster at Bluff Cove.

In the next post in this series, coming soon, we'll deal with the top itself, or rather, herself. Stand by for Myth Two: Thatcher's War..

The National Inquirer, now fortified with Patrick Cockburn

So last week's mobile-phones-kill-bees screamer front page was bad enough. They ignored all the countervailing evidence and picked out a tiny uncontrolled study carried out in someone's spare time that neither mentioned the condition they were interested in, nor even attempted to measure how much RF energy they were using.

This Sunday, they were at it again, with another electrosensitivity pseudoscience screamer. This time it was WLAN that was going to kill everyone (never mind that, even if you believe that "pulsing" has a mystical influence more important than the amount of energy involved, WLAN works very differently from any cellular technology), based on following evidence.

1) A classics master at Stowe School, who complained of headaches before entering his classroom. This he attributed to the recent deployment of a wireless LAN, which was removed. No follow-up has been carried out to my knowledge to determine if he feels any better.

2) Some random bloke who had bees in his loft, which exterminators failed to remove, but which left after he installed a WLAN router.

The problem here is that if you do something, and something changes, your head is wired up by evolution to assume that it was because of your action. Cognitive psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error, and there's a lovely story about one of its discoverers, Daniel Kahnemann. Kahnemann was asked by the Israeli Air Force to lecture to their flying instructors on what his research showed about learning processes. Kahnemann prepared a lecture based on some results that seemed to show that positive reinforcement - being nice - was a more effective teaching technique than negative reinforcement - chewing-out anyone who gets it wrong.

When he gave the talk, though, one of the grizzled instructor pilots instantly responded to say that he knew without a doubt that no-one learns anything unless you SHOUT at them. So far, so stereotyped, but then, up pops another. No, he says, Professor Kahnemann is damn right. And so on. The problem was that statistically, if one of their students had a bad day yesterday, he was likely to have a better one today - regression to the mean. So, if the instructor had yelled at him, he was likely to perceive an improvement. And he was just as likely to perceive that, had he been supportive instead, because that's how human beings work.

This is why you need things like big statistical samples, null hypotheses, tests, follow-up and the rest. On the same page, the Indy mentioned a school where - wow! - after a campaign by parents, O2 and Orange had agreed to move a shared cell-site. This was given as evidence that mobile phones *are* dangerous - it might of course be that people like a quiet life when this costs little - but worse followed. The paper issued a string of figures "from the campaign" that seemed to show that a lot of people there had headaches, skin inflammations, or red eyes.

What was missing? Well, how many people among the population report headaches? Close to 100 per cent sounds about right. Nor is there any postevent data to find out if it had any effect. You must be joking.

But there was worse. The Indy's environment editor, Geoffrey Lean, again repeated the deeply stupid and dishonest claim that a recent Finnish study showed that one was "40 per cent more likely" to have a brain tumour on the side of the head you used your phone. But it didn't. In fact, the study - available here - showed that there was no greater risk of a brain tumour whatsoever. People who *did* have a brain tumour were 40 per cent more likely to say they used their phone on that side of their head.

Now, if this was a real result due to the phone, something really weird must have been happening. Mobile phone use must have been transferring brain tumours from one side to the other! This is obviously silly. More likely, those monkey brain logic bugs struck again. Confirmation bias means we seek out information that fits with our worldview. Could you really give an accurate estimate from memory of which side of your head you used a mobile phone over a period of ten years?

Also, Lean again ignored a string of copper-bottomed, peer-reviewed, randomised-controlled trials he didn't like. There's the Danish study of 420,000 people over 25 years I mentioned in the first link above. There's also this one in the British Medical Journal that shows that people who claim to come out in hives when they meet a phone have the same symptoms whether they are exposed to GSM signals, or whether they are just told they are. The Indy? Nix. They also managed to quote Sweden's Misleader of the Year 2004.

And finally, just to pile on the psuedo-scientific bullshit: Lean and the Indy even boast about the web traffic the last lot of cheap-ass crapola brought in, quoting three bloggers - but not one who disagrees.

Finally, someone will probably point out that I work for Mobile Communications International magazine. Well, it's true. Aren't I just seeking out information that suits me? Perhaps. But the good thing about science is that it's a machine designed to correct for bias, and I've got the data.

The Next Big Miscarriage of Justice

What would you think if I told you the police had accused 5,000 British citizens of a really unpleasant, despicable crime, the sort of thing where just being questioned is the kind of news that could destroy your family, career, and psyche, that some 39 of them had committed suicide as a result, but quite possibly every man-jack of them was innocent?

It would be like the Guildford Four case on steroids, right? All over the papers, public inquiries, years of litigation, every blowhard from Vanessa Redgrave to Tim Worstall joining the Free the 5,000 support group.

Well, they did it, and it's not. In June, 2006, this blog mentioned an article in the Times by Duncan Campbell - that's the Duncan Campbell of no-ricin not-plot fame, whose articles on this topic were retconned out of the Grauniad archive - which detailed the incredibly flaky evidence used by police in the Operation Ore child-porn case.

Amongst other things, the testimony of a US Postal Service inspector and a cop, both of whom swore that visitors to the website in question had to click a button marked "Click Here for Child Porn", was exploded as nonsense ('twas actually a banner ad).

Now Campbell is back, with even worse news. Recap: the Texas-based website Landslide.com provided hosting and payments services to a large number of porno sites, under a revenue-sharing agreement. In 1999, police seized the box on which the SSL-encrypted credit card numbers were handled. Operation ORE consisted in going through the list of cards.

Unfortunately, the original file includes some 54,348 credit cards known to have been stolen or otherwise compromised.

The site's operators had a curious relationship with credit card fraudsters. In its heyday, it was one of the easiest ways to get credit card merchant facilities, and hence an obvious opportunity if you had a list of other people's cards. As 65 per cent of revenue from its customers went to the owners, they had a strong incentive to look the other way. At least, until the suckers began to spot unusual transactions - then, they raised chargebacks through the Visa dispute procedure. As Landslide was the merchant under VisaNet definitions, it had to pay up, and it was this that eventually bankrupted the site. Naturally, this was an advantage to the crook, as the cost of chargebacks fell on someone else.

The killer fact? Many of the credit cards presented for payment don't correspond to the server log - to put it more brutally, a mysteriously large number of people were paying up in advance but not taking delivery of their smut. In fact, quite a lot of the websites that used Landslide contained no porn, nor anything else, existing purely for fraudulent purposes. The M.O. was to get hold of a list of cards - a black market exists - set up an account, and then run a script that would charge small amounts (say £25) to each, hoping that the payments would go unnoticed.

It should be quite clear from this that the police investigation in both the US and UK was spectacularly incompetent, overkeen to prove that they could keep up with Teh Interweb Menace, and probably conducted with one eye on future data-retention legislation. All prosecutions must stop, and there must be a full-dress public inquiry. The sheer scale of the case demands it.

This is, of course, an instance of everything we fear about the National Identity Register. Justice-by-database has the potential to generate injustice faster and more efficiently than any previous system. It's time to stop the machine - anyone whose credit card was compromised before August, 1999 is a potential target.

Don't miss the longer version of Campbell's report from PC Pro (pdf link). I'd actually forgotten the little ha-gotcha that if they didn't find anything on your computer, they'd charge you with "incitement".

Did I mention the Home Office must be abolished?

All the atrocities, and how to take advantage

Last Friday, the Guardian reported that servicemen on leave from Iraq were spending their time camping in a queue at RAF Coltishall in the hope of buying the houses their families lived in before they were sold to the public. It's another fine achievement of Michael Portillo's 1996 deal to flog the entire MOD housing stock to a company run by William Hague's best friend.

The problems were clear right from the start - rather like Right to Buy, it meant that the stock could only ever decrease, but unlike it, the tenants didn't really get the choice of buying their house, but rather the choice of moving out or taking a chance of buying.

That Grauniad story is one of very few occasions the (cough) mainstream media have covered this in any detail. But as always, you can expect the Grauniad's hyper-Blairite sister to do something really horrible. And they did, with this useful primer on how to take advantage yourself. Delightful.

The Rays from Outer Space Strike Canary Wharf

The Sindy has been getting a lot of blogosphere points for this article, which alleges that a mysterious ailment of bees is caused by "radiation" from mobile phone networks. Nowhere is it mentioned that an identical, and unexplained, condition has been documented as early as 1896, before the invention of radio and a hell of a long time before mobile phones were common.

It gets worse, though.

But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.

No, it didn't. The study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were no more likely to get a brain tumour than anyone else. But, in the event they did, they were 40 per cent more likely to report that it was on the side they held the phone - or at least to think that they held the phone 10 years ago on the side of their head the tumour was on, as this was self-reported and clearly subject to confirmation bias.

There is no mention of the Royal Danish Cancer Institute report, the biggest (n=420,000) and longest (25 years) epidemiological study ever undertaken into the subject and the only one to use network operators' billing data, rather than self-reporting, to find out how much the patients used their phones over a period of 20 years. So what did they find?

We found no evidence for an association between tumor risk and cellular telephone use among either short-term or long-term users. Moreover, the narrow confidence intervals provide evidence that any large association of risk of cancer and cellular telephone use can be excluded.

You can read the paper in the Journal of the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

All in all, an exercise in bad newspaper science worthy of the Daily Hell - even the headline sounds Mailesque. Why? According to media sources, the Indy recently hired two chief sub-editors from the Mail. Do Associated Newspapers Staff Wreck Your Journalistic Standards? - not a bad headline, eh?

Update: I've managed to find the German study they referred to (pdf). It consisted of plonking a DECT cordless phone base station inside the bees' hive, either with or without homemade shielding, then catching some bees, marking them, and counting how many returned within a given time period. It's not clear from the paper whether they put anything in the control group's hive, which raises the question of whether the results are an artefact of the experiment.

In two rounds of tests, they got one marginally significant result and one nonsignificant. Apparently, 54 per cent of the bees with the DECT station on returned on time, compared to 63 per cent without, in six tests. Reading some of the other papers, the initial hypothesis appears to be that "GSM TDMA time slots change over at about a frequency of 217Hz, and that's nearish one cycle in the bees' dance, so it must be connected". They do mention that the pulse cycle in DECT is 100Hz, but do not discuss the fact that this isn't the same.

Neither do they mention that timeslotting doesn't mean there is no signal from the BTS, just that it communicates with a different user. Ho hum.

I Don't Care

I do not care whether or not the sailors from Cornwall profit by selling their stories. Michael Portillo thinks that it is the worst misfortune to befall the Navy since the Falklands. I disagree strongly. Which ships have sunk? Who is dead? Let's not be snarky and mention Portillo's term as Defence Secretary, one that is improved from a low base by the example of Geoff Hoon.

I do care, though, that Able-Seaman Batchelor now apparently thinks he disappointed the whole Navy, having received enough money for "a few driving lessons" in his own words - so, £200 perhaps. I do care, though, that no-one seems to have thought through the risks involved. I also care that a lot of people seem to think that the problem was a lack of desire for an unplanned war of choice with Iran.

Sadly, applying Will to hydrography is even less likely to succeed than applying it to the weather. The usual wankers are out - as well as the keyboard kamikazes, Lewis Page has of course discovered that the incident proves the Navy needs only carriers and no other ships...strange, this bullseye I just drew happens to surround the holes in the wall very neatly!

Anyway, a dangerous frontier incident has been resolved without anyone getting hurt or any obvious loss to our side. Cheers.

Update: A robot has been captured by Iraqi insurgents. If it sells its story, can it keep the cash?

Diplomacy by visualisation

This tale of Google Earth being used to monitor violence in Darfur, as well as this, raises an interesting point. In his memoirs, Richard Holbrooke tells of how the Bosnian War parties were hugely impressed by the mapping software running on computers the US State Department brought to the conference - they could pull up any view of each and every border proposal!

Later, the Israelis brought a staff of cartographers to each of the meetings after Wye River to study the exact details. This is something that will never happen again - now the best two mapping visualisation applications, Google Erf and NASA World Wind, are free to anyone with a laptop. And both are capable of displaying almost any form of information over the globe.

It's like the surrealist mission, to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.

Iran Non-War Watch

So what did happen with the Ronald Reagan after all? Well, she just called in Pearl Harbour on her way back to the Coast. War Iran a with be will not there. New readers arriving from Making Light/Electrolite are advised to use the "Iran" tag and this AFOE post with real war plans an stuff!

More updates from the crime beat

Someone decides to rake through the Elf-Aquitaine embers, with the result that 42 persons are sent for by the judge. Including a whole slew of politicians - carrier-grade rightwing thug Charles Pasqua, crooked prefect for the Var Jean-Charles Marchiani, professional president's son Jean-Christophe "Papa M'a Dit" Mitterand, and slightly surprisingly, Mitterand's right hand man and pet intellectual Jacques Attali. Better known in the anglosphere as the first head of the EBRD whose specifications for its headquarters in Liverpool Street, London verged on the pharaonic, Attali remains a man respected by the Left in France, if nothing else for his books.

The warrants for Pierre Falcone and Arkadi Gaydamak (yes, that's the one whose son owns Portsmouth FC) have been reiterated, if that's the right word. Presumably the move is motivated by the fact that, in the middle of an election, no-one is likely to risk interfering with the case.

Weirdly, though, the French press isn't covering this at all. AFP and Reuters both carried the story, but Le Monde granted it only a nib, while Libé didn't so much as touch it.

Note: I'll be unavailable for the next two days, but I will try to check the comments.

Maglev is Dead

OK. Remember a few months ago, the Sundays were briefed about one of Tony's eye-catching initiatives - to launch a magnetic levitation high-speed rail link from London up to Scotland?

Well, if it ever had any substance, it's now a dead parrot. And so are all maglev projects, which should bring a hearty cheer from everyone who cares about good technology. Wanna know why? Get your looking gear round this Eurotrib thread. Not only did the new TGV rip through its own record by cranking up to 356 mph, it got within 6 mph of the record for a maglev vehicle. That's seriously fast for something running across the lumps and bumps. That's as fast as an early-model Spitfire.

And it kills off the only real argument for maglev - speed. So why do I hate maglev?

It's a classic case of bad technology, for the same reasons the NHS NPfIT is, and for the same reasons Tony Blair fell for it. John Waclawsky said that there are two kinds of technology, the kind that provides a direct benefit to the end user, and the kind that's designed by people who think they can see the future. These, he said, are also known as success and failure.

The only way you can start doing maglev is to take a Big Tough Decision to spend kajillions and tear up the whole rail infrastructure. Anything short of that is still going to cost a fortune, but won't make a profit or give any realistic feedback on whether or not to go ahead. Further, you can't get any benefit from doing some of it - it has to be all or nothing, because it doesn't integrate at all with the existing system.

For example, if you put in an upgraded, LGV-standard line from London to Doncaster, even without building it any further, you've already hugely increased the speed of the service, and freed up the old main line for freight. And if that worked, you can just keep building. But if you start a maglev project - you've got to go all the way before you get any benefit whatsoever, you can't run services on from the end of the line over conventional tracks or the other way round, and you can only upgrade by pouring another zillion tonnes of concrete.

Given that it involves a completely new alignment, you will probably also need to terminate it out of town (airports were suggested for the ECI mentioned above), which means you've got to deal with hordes of passengers getting from where they live or work to the terminal. Do something sensible, and you can run the trains right into London.

But the good news is that it's New, it's Expensive, and it's Centralised. Like second-generation nuclear power and monster government databases. And there is something about this stuff that managerialists can't resist - it takes a lot of managing, after all.

Thinking about it, I'm struck by an analogy with the creationist quackery of "irreducible complexity". You can't have a little nuclear industry, or a modular national identity register, or a progressive roll-out of maglev. They have to spring into being, complete in themselves, fresh from the Designer's drawing board.

But it doesn't happen like that. If it can't evolve, it's probably useless. Think process.

Update on Falcone, Chichakli

In a wonderfully-titled article, ("Former Miss Bolivia on Drugs Charges, Second Beauty Queen in Trouble"), the Associated Press reports that Sonia Falcone, cosmetics enterpreneur, Bush-Cheney'00 donor, and wife of Elf-Aquitaine/Arms to Africa fugitive Pierre Falcone, copped a plea to charges of illegally employing some immigrants (they were legal immigrants, but not allowed to work, so in British terminology it was a case of facilitation and working-in-breach).

She is going to have to leave the US as a result. It'll be fascinating to see where she and Pierre head for, although his Angolan diplomatic passport means he will have little trouble travelling.

Meanwhile, Richard Chichakli gave an interview I hadn't spotted. It's the usual stuff - a string of notable non-denials. Interestingly, his lawyer claims that the evidence against him is "secret", although (as so often with Chichakli defenders) he admits he hasn't read the brief. The evidence of Chichakli's association with Liberia and Sergei Bout, for his information, rests on the bank transfers from the Liberian shipping register to San Air General Trading's account at Standard Chartered Bank that Alex Vines of Global Witness produced at the House Armed Services Committee.

Here Comes the Equestrian Statue

It's quite well-known that I don't think very much of Niall Ferguson's intellectual credibility. But this is special, in the sense of "I'm not different...I'm special."

I'm not going to take issue with his bizarre contention that saying sorry for the slave trade is why the Iranians grabbed the boarding party from Cornwall. I am, however, going to take issue with essentially all his practical statements.

This is indeed what comes of being too nice. A month before expressing his "deep sorrow and regret for our nation's role in the slave trade," the prime minister had announced his intention to reduce British troop levels in Iraq by 1,600 within a matter of months. "The next chapter in Basra's history," he declared, "can be written by Iraqis." Unfortunately, it looks more likely to be written by Iranians. And somehow I don't think they'll be saying sorry afterward.

Well, why would they? A crushingly large majority of Basraites voted for parties that are either openly Iranian-influenced, or we say they are Iranian-influenced. More importantly, though, how would the 1,600 soldiers - not one of whom has actually been withdrawn - have dissuaded them from doing this? Concretely, practically, they could do precisely nothing to prevent an incident at sea. And how could they retaliate - by invading, all by themselves?

Apparently that is the Ferguson prescription.

In those days there was little hope of rescue. Britain's armed forces were far too thinly stretched over its rapidly expanding empire for Rambo-style missions to liberate scattered slaves and POWs. The most the Barbary slaves could hope for was to be ransomed, to which end collections were regularly made in British churches.

It is in this light that we need to understand James Thomson's immortal lines: "Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves: Britons never shall be slaves." When first set to music in 1740, this was a forward-looking injunction to Britain's rulers to go ahead and rule the waves, precisely so that Britons would no longer run the risk of being enslaved.

And now, thank God, who can say our armed forces are thinly stretched? Let's plug in some facts. Through the imperial glory of the 19th century, we never had a huge army. Historically speaking, it's usually been about the size it is now. What we did have was a big navy, but navies don't work well in the Dasht e-Kavir desert.

Also, even small European armies of the mid-19th century had serious firepower and tactical advantages. These were already on the way out by the 1860s-70s, as Pathans and Maoris and Boers started to get hold of modern rifles. This no longer exists. To keep his shtick on the road, Fergie has to ignore about 150 years of military history.

However, when required, this can always be done by the third-rate mind without injury to the integrity of past statements.

Yet today we live in a different world.

Really? It's not 1840 any more? How do your answers above change?

Britain could not refight the Falklands War if Argentina invaded the islands tomorrow. Nor could a British strike force be sent to punish the Iranian government today. If military action is going to be taken against Iran this year, it will be initiated by the United States, not the United Kingdom. And, to judge by Faye Turney's conspicuous absence from the front pages of U.S. papers, a British hostage crisis won't be the casus belli.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Britain certainly could refight the Falklands if Argentina invaded tomorrow. We spent a good deal of money building an airbase on them, so that the Army's spearhead battalion group and an RAF strike squadron can get there in a day. There is a company group and a fighter flight, as well as artillery and helicopters, down there right now. We've also built quite a few amphibious warfare ships since last time, 'tho the loss of the FA2 Harriers is a probby. Wrong on facts.

Anyway, and why the UK armed forces are in a state, it's the damn-fool adventure in Iraq that Niall Ferguson was so keen on.

Further, "punish" the Iranian government? The United States wasn't able to "punish" its hostages out of Iran in 1979. Has he not looked at a map? It's a big place full of people! Keeping hostages is easy, which is why hostage-takers do it. You don't need infrastructure to do it. You don't need anything but knives. If he has an infallible knife-denial plan, let's see it.

Niall Ferguson has no intellectual credibility whatsoever, but this does not seem to harm his career in the States. Ah, the States..what is it with some people? Another of my regular butts, Martin Kettle of the Guardian, this weekend announced that

"the building of the 21st century Americas - and above all the building of the modern United States itself, a society that after much struggle was eventually a pioneer of law, democracy, and freedom, has proved to be the single greatest collective human achievement of the past four centuries."

Jesus wept. Sewerage, anyone?

If that's true - and if it is not, I would really and truly like to know what collective human achievement is greater - then in some refracted way it is also a distinctively European, and in a significant way, English achievement too.

Right. America is so fantastic and...in a significant way...I can be patriotic about it too! I have a little theory about these people. If you're a professional Mucho Pomposo in Britain at the moment, you probably grew up in the peachy postwar, give or take a few years - between the end of rationing and the Pistols' first LP, to bastardise a cliché.

Patriotism was Dad, the Army, and Churchill. New meant American. Europe (or anywhere else) was a row involving Dad and Ted Heath, and a mixture of fox-tormenting knights and Paki-bashing 'ead kickers. Hence the Kettles and Fergusons, one subtype projecting John F. Kennedy on to the US, the other, Churchill in Congress.

As far as I can tell, the generations after this are less fascinated. Repeat after me: they're not the Messiah, there just are a lot of them.

Update: The Sea Harrier was withdrawn after a decision in 2002, as Dan points out, so it's the epic incompetence of Geoff Hoon to blame for that one, rather than Iraq.

Bonus Pathetic Python Sunday

OK, so we solved the last problem. But now I've got another. We've just created a window with a Tkinter frame within, and announced that a listbox will be there. Then, we have the following statement:

self.selector = Listbox(frame)
..Listbox.pack(side=TOP)
...for item in ["lots","of","data","in","here","that","takes","up","four","lines"]:
....Listbox.insert(Tk.END,item)

Dots inserted to get the indenting right. Tk.END causes the interpreter to fart a syntax error and then another for every subsequent line. Every imaginable variation (with and without Tk or TK or tk, End, END, end, you get the picture) does this, or else shunts the problem into the data.

Do I have do something weird to make the snake treat the list, which makes up four lines, as a list?

Yes, there is STILL not going to be a war with Iran

How many times do I have to tell you? A US aircraft carrier will leave port for the Gulf every six months, about six months after the last one. BTW, the assorted speculation on some of the US blogs about the RN's carriers is risible. The current RN presence in the Gulf consists of two minesweepers, a destroyer, a frigate, and a couple of auxiliaries. I'm not sure Illustrious and Ark Royal are even operational.

Now, what scares me is the French, whose Charles de Gaulle recently arrived in the Arabian Sea. You just don't know what these imperialists will do next!

Admin Notice: Withdrawal of Enetation comments

OK, the Enetation comments are getting too bad to use. There's no spam protection, and no central moderation page, so it's not practical to remove comments spam from each of 1,473 threads one by one. By clicking on the permalink at the bottom of each post, you can use the Blogger comments thread, which is subject to moderation.

In preparation for a possible move, I'm going to archive the Enetation comments, clean up the file, and look at either dumping them into Blogger or keeping them until a new TYR is developed.

The lost opportunity

Remember this post, again? This Reuters DeathWatch story confirms every last bit of it. Zalmay Khalilzad did indeed talk to insurgent spokesmen during 2006. And the Baker-Hamilton commission? Who knows.

Pathetic Python Sunday

What on earth is causing this class definition to throw a syntax error? The error occurs at the colon (yup, the one that has to be there according to docs.python.org) in the second line.

class gui:
def_init_(self, mainwindow):
self.frame1 = Frame.mainwindow
self.frame1.pack()


Update: Thanks. Yes, the code is correctly indented elsewhere. Now, I'm getting a TypeError "This constructor takes no arguments". Eh?

Update again: OK, typeerror gone. But now getting a syntax error at every reference to the constructor's (self) method. Eh?

The cost of UAVs

Some time ago, I got involved in a debate about the cost of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs. I argued that the idea that they would supplant piloted aircraft was overambitious, and that, crucially, the high accident rate they experienced would make them rather more expensive than anyone thought. After all, if their biggest advantage was that being unmanned they were expendable, they would be expended - else, what is the point? And expending them means replacing them, and specifically keeping a large stockpile.

According to Wired, 40 per cent of the USAF Predator fleet has been lost since 2003. That is, 53 aircraft out of 139, at $4.5 million each, or $238 million worth.

Political GOTO considered harmful

Well, the decisions are in on the plan to break up the Home Office into the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry for Counter-Terrorism, National Security, Border Control, and Unauthorised Ball Games. And the snark in that link remains applicable.

The only interesting news is that it's even worse than I thought. Not only does the permanent secretary in charge of security, intelligence, and resilience, Sir Richard Mottram, stay at the Cabinet Office, although 150 of his staff will move over, the Foreign Office has successfully defended its rights over GCHQ and MI6. So, an "Office of Counter-Terrorism and Security" will sprout within the Home Office, which will have the "UK strategic lead" for these issues - but it will still answer to the JIC and the Cabinet Office, who will still have control of the interface with GCHQ and MI6.

Clearly, Sir Humphrey. Meanwhile, the Home Office has also asserted powers over efforts to "win the battle of ideas" against Islamic extremism, but this doesn't appear to mean that the Department of Communities and Local Government has explicitly lost them. And, worst of all worlds, the Ministry of Justice will get prisons, probation, the courts, sentencing, the constitution, and relations with devolved administrations, taking over the Department for Constitutional Affairs, but the Home Secretary will still have a "core public protection role" in sentencing.

To put it another way, John Reid can still interfere with the judiciary to send more people to jail for longer every time Rebekah Wade sez so, but now, he doesn't even have to budget for it. The Home Office gets to keep the anti-social behaviour industry, but has an undemarcated frontier with Communities and Local Government and also with Justice running through it. On the other hand, it gets to "lead" on terrorism and national security, except when it doesn't.

Mmm, spaghetti! There is simply no way this is ever going to work, is there? I foresee that the whole thing will be re-organised again within three years.

But I'm merry. If that happens, it'll be a great opportunity to sink the chisel into the bugger and chip off some more. And the triggering event is likely to be the eventual tits-up of the NIR. Even Dave from PR apparently wants to have elected police commissioners, a silly Texan idea, but one that could quite easily be hacked into a restoration of elected police authority control over the force areas.

Bloggin' Rugby League: Warrington for the Cup?

I've been a little surprised Warrington haven't been better this year - they were good last year, and they signed very well in the close season. Adrian Morley hasn't so far paid off, getting injured twice in a row, but Vinnie Anderson and Stuart Reardon are two cracking signings. I'm astonished Bradford let Reardon get away, frankly.

This all showed up nicely yesterday - Hull KR have been a bit of a cup surprise package lately, getting to the semi-finals last year (mind you, they did get a lucky, lucky draw) and performing well in the league. But Warrington won in style in the end, though it was a genuinely tough game and they were lacking Morley and Lee Briers. Reardon and Anderson both played out of their skins.

There's something about Wires, though - no matter who's in the team, they're always a bit vicious (anyone remember when Bruce McGuire played for them?), and this match was remorselessly smash-mouth stuff. They are probably the best prospect for an alternative to the big four - as recently as 1994, they missed out on the championship on points difference, having drawn with Wigan - but this year they haven't yet been consistent. That's the good thing about the Cup, though - consistent isn't required, hence the number of clubs who have an entirely unjustified reputation as giants of the game because they have a few (step forwards, Widnes and Leeds).

More silly metrics

Bacon Butty piles on to one of the notions I criticised here. Food miles are, if anything, less useful than embodied energy as a policy target - after all, a whacking 22 per cent of CO2 attributed to UK food transport originates from sea and air transport. Obviously, the first place to start, especially as something like 33 per cent is attributed to trucks within the UK and zero to rail transport.

It's also worth remembering that one of the reasons for the supermarket airfreight phenomenon is that the airlines found they had spare capacity on aircraft coming back from various places in Africa. As any trucker could tell you, a backload is pure profit, as the costs are covered on the outward journey. To put it another way, it's no net increase in CO2 emission unless the route would otherwise be uneconomic and - this being the airline business - politically closeable.

Final thought? Forget all the intermediate interventions, and use the tax that gets to the cause of your problem. But it's becoming a major political line of discourse that environment/energy issues are a question of consumerism, or rather, inverted consumerism. (Consider Martin Wight's typology of international relations theories - Revolutionism, Rationalism, Realism, and Inverted Revolutionism. The last was pacifism.) Stop buying stuff! Better - buy expensive stuff that shows your moral character!

But looking at the data, this is ridiculously ineffective. What works is rockwool. That, and lithium-ion batteries, wind turbines, and incremental improvements on a range of other technologies. Not flying, or not buying airfreighted (or perceivedly airfreighted) goods, will do us no good at all. So why is Diddy Dave Cameron so keen?

My chippy reckoning is that it's class. Anything involving changes to infrastructure or buildings will piss in a lot of Tory pools, from Grecian dukes discovering new laws of atmospheric chemistry to oppose wind power to nifty resellers flipping buy-to-lets in the M4 corridor, and make a lot of sparks very happy, and these things do not please Dave from PR. It's the technocracy, stupid.

It's a pity that Gordon Brown insists on taxing the poor into moral enlightenment.

Thogged

I've been thogged by the Ministry. Thogged? Well, it's a meme going around..name five bloggers who make you think, hence thinking bloggers, hence (thanks to Chris Dillow) thoggers.

I don't usually do these things, partly because obviousness is hard to avoid. But on this occasion, I'm a-thogging the following bethoggen. die Stiftung Leo Strauss, for their unique take on politics, Kevin Carson, who's crazy but in a reasonably creative fashion, the RepRap Crew who may just be changing the world, Chris Lightfoot who still makes me think, and Dan Hardie who will be a cracking thogger now he's got his blog started..

I'd also like to suggest an enhancement to thoggin'. What about the blogger who makes you want to throw up? We could call it vogging.

Just to make a living and help out the Congolese

No beheadings in this story, though. Congolese radio station aims to give a microphone to those whose voices have never been heard before. I liked this line:

The show's technicians – after getting caught in Army-militia crossfire twice – finally managed to put up antennas in the region's more remote rain forest areas. So now the signal is strong across Ituri...

There's something inescapably magical about radio - a few years earlier and it would have been indistinguishable from steampunk, or even clockpunk. The German secret agent Wilhelm Wassmuss, operating in southern Iran during the First World War, lost part of his radio gear in an ambush, but kept going, impressing the locals with the sparking transmitter and claiming to be talking directly to the Kaiser. Now, in some parts of Africa, people build towers so they can climb up and get GSM service although they are out of range at ground level, and SW Radio Africa gets round Zimbabwean government jamming of its HF signal by bulk-SMSing its listeners.

Speaking of which, what about this tale? The Zimbabwean government claimed it had obtained 3,000 Angolan paramilitary police to help it cling to power. The Angolan interior minister was quoted as agreeing. Now they deny it. I can see a few possibilities - the Zimbabweans are lying in order to frighten their people with foreign killers, it's real and they need to import thugs...or is this more like the 3,000 Spanish marines on standby for the Wonga Coup in Equatorial Guinea? Perhaps they are coming, but their mission won't be what Mugabe wants.

In the meantime, they do keep shooting down those IL-76s in Mogadishu, don't they? The lost aircraft are EW-78826/serial 1003499991 and EW-78849/serial 1013405192 of Trans Avia Export Cargo Airlines, Belarus. Which, in fact, doesn't seem to be a Viktor Bout company at all.

Bleggin'

OK, so I'm trying to create a dropdown menu with around 40 options using the Python lib Tkinter. I've just learned that you can't just define a command - call it get - and pass in the option as a variable (i.e. def get(variable) and then, for option X, command=get(X)), which brings me the horrible prospect of defining 40 or so functions that would only be different in that they have a different string variable.

This is obviously a stupid way to do it, and one that involves a lot of mindless copying. I'm thinking either: create a list and assign a number to each option, then callback the numbers, or else: do a for..while loop that would create the 40 or so functions when the class is instantiated. I'm not sure how to catch the callback in the first, or whether you're allowed to autogenerate functions.

Thoughts? (The wanker is me, btw.)

Gordon Brown: no better

All you need to know about Gordon Brown is contained in this story in the Financial Times. Specifically, this response to criticism of his decision to fund the 2% tax cut for basic rate income tax payers by extending the basic rate downwards:

The Conservatives argue, of course, that the complex set of income tax changes will penalise single people on lower incomes. But Mr Brown’s allies recognise this – indeed they have no problem with it. In their view, this group can bear a little more of the tax burden.

As one ally puts it: “Nobody aspires to be a single person on £12,000. Everyone in this group wants to get married, have kids, get into a higher paid job. And they know from this budget if they make it, the highest brackets are not hit.”

I think I'm going to vomit. Did the guy really just suggest taxing the poor to motivate them to get less poor?

The article is also well worth reading for the view of another "ally" that the point of this is to "convince middle England". Apart from being a surefire bullshit tag, this means if anything well-off, white, south-eastern conservatives. To put it another way, the poor are being made to fork out purely to dish the oppo. A Labour government - a Labour government...

I tell 'em sorry, I haven't got the money any more

I keep saying it. There will be no war with Iran. The Americans do not have the military resources to start one. Over at AFOE, I calculated they would need a third carrier group plus 100 land-based strike aircraft and extensive tanker, AWACS, Rivet Joint, and other supports, just for the air strikes.

Two carrier groups are on station. The Ronald Reagan group is off Hong Kong. The only other one anywhere near duty is Nimitz, which still needs to complete a three-week COMPTUEX.

What about the land forces? The US Army keeps stocks of kit in various places around the world, so that in a crisis the troops to man it can be flown in. According to the WaPo and General Pace, the stockpile in Kuwait has been sent to Iraq, and so have the stocks held aboard ships in Diego Garcia and Guam. Only the stockpile in South Korea is intact, and that ain't going nowhere. The units aren't well, either.

There will be no war with Iran.

Slow Blogging

Note that blogging is currently slow, due to a little project of mine that is taking up spare mindshare. The Guardian Column Generator should be operational by next week or thereabouts. Gah, it's hard to start programming again, but it's the satisfaction of craft.

Cyclone Blogging: Eyewitness

So, Cyclone George tore through the old haunts, killing three people on a mining railway construction camp. Could have been worse, though - it got up to 275 Km/h.. This bloke stuck it out in South Hedland, and has photos.

Somebody's been criticising my web design

OK, then, someone's been complaining about this blog's general appearance, specifically the javascript clock that Internet Explorer sufferers can see around their cursors. It's Web 2.0. Honest.

Fools. Just imagine if I had decided to ignore the user testing feedback and unleash this TYR Beta from December, 2004 on the world.

I really can't imagine how I managed to build that eye-buggering horrorshow. It really has a smell of Geocities in 1998+tinfoil hat insanity, no? Still, time to move on. This blog, frankly, is ugly.

I am the god of hellfire and I bring you squid

Sneaking through the barrio, I came on a bleakly lighted doorway, that bore the mark of the cult...



The place called itself a "Poulperia", which I took to mean it specialised in squid.

24 hour Tory party people

You can't beat them, so why don't you join in...

OK, so every blogger and their cat knows about "Guido Fawkes"'s personal history these days. Hull University in the mid-80s, Federation of Conservative Students, working for David Hart and friends - this is the bit he softpedals - and then the bit he turns up to 11, his period "organising raves around the M25".

Tim Ireland points to a history of the scene which describes his involvement. It wasn't raves he organised, but rather a political campaigning group which opposed the then Tory government's crackdown, or at least claimed to. I say "claimed to" because it strikes me as unlikely that someone on David Hart's staff would have flipped across the spectrum quite that far and so quickly.

In terms of policing history, there's no time at all between the Miners' Strike and the rave/road protest crackdown. Some would say they overlapped, if you date from the Beanfield. And he does seem to have known his way around Queen Anne's Gate rather well:

I remember being at something at the Home Office, I ended up in this blazing row [with a Home Office official]. He said 'look, I know who you are, we know all about you', became I had a Special Branch record from being in politics, working in extreme groups.

One wonders what he was doing at the Home Office. One also wonders what he was doing not long before than in Johannesburg. Nice friends you've got there, as they say.

Unique

Charlie Stross is apparently thinking of using the huge GEC Marconi/BAE cost overruns as a plot device for one of his books - the idea being that some sort of really cool (and evil) skunkworks project was being funded off the books through the vast sums of money wasted on NimWACS, Astute, Eurofighter, Nimrod MRA4, Bowman and the rest.

As a fan of British tech nostalgia, I think it's a cracking idea. I mean, who wouldn't want to imagine that at least some of all that money was actually used for something. After all, the Alan Clark diaries show that he was musing about how to get a satellite-launch capability back, and he got to be Minister for Defence Procurement. No wonder it was a disaster area.

Actually, the Clark diaries show he wasn't all that thick - at one point in the mid-80s, he quotes himself suggesting that the criteria for procuring a new weapon should be "how good it is at defending the Bahrain causeway, and how quickly it can get there". Now, diaries are notoriously better than Hansard at cleaning up one's own thought processes, but that's genuinely nonstupid. Not quite as good as the Rupert Smith criteria ("all equipment should be in one of the three standard sizes - a standard door frame whilst on a soldier's back, the back of a Land Rover, and a 40ft container in a C-130"), but close.

Now, the late 80s was the period when BAe and Rolls were pushing the HOTOL project, which as everyone knows, was scuppered when Thatcher killed the funding. (Enter alternate history here.) Remember, too, that the Challenger accident kiboshed a plan to use the shuttle, with several RAF personnel aboard, to loft a couple of MOD Skynet comsats. (Enter conspiracy theory here.)

Speaking of Skynet, Hawker-Siddeley BAe Space EADS -Astrium Stevenage's finest is waiting on the pad today at Kourou for the French rocket scientists to sort out their Ariane 5-ECA, which is having one of its bad days...

Too funny that the MOD's supersecure satellite network is a PFI job.

OK, then, Charlie - just substitute in the rest between the tags provided, with something like this. Why is it I find code easier to read if it's described in German, anyway?

Old haunts flattened? (Cyclone George)

Looks like Port Hedland, Western Australia, is about to get hit head-on by a major cyclone, and Marble Bar just afterwards..this blogger has the last dispatch.

Media: Transmitters serving the area between Dampier and Sandfire Roadhouse are
requested to sound the Standard Emergency Warning Signal before broadcasting the
following warning.

TOP PRIORITY

TROPICAL CYCLONE ADVICE NUMBER 43
Issued at 9:05 pm WDT on Thursday, 8 March 2007
BY THE BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY
TROPICAL CYCLONE WARNING CENTRE PERTH

A CYCLONE WARNING for a SEVERE CATEGORY 4 cyclone is now current for coastal
areas from Dampier to Sandfire Roadhouse and inland to Tom Price, Newman,
Paraburdoo, Marble Bar and Nullagine.

At 9:00 pm WDT Severe Tropical Cyclone George was estimated to be
70 kilometres northeast of Port Hedland and
55 kilometres west northwest of Pardoo
and moving south at 20 kilometres per hour.

Severe Tropical Cyclone George is approaching the coast near Port Hedland. On the current movement the cyclone is likely to cross the coast between Port Hedland and Pardoo within the next few hours. Recent observations at Bedout Island indicate gusts to 275 kilometres per hour are occurring near the centre of the cyclone.

VERY DESTRUCTIVE winds with gusts to 275 kilometres per hour [170 mph] will be experienced close to the cyclone centre as the system crosses the coast.

DESTRUCTIVE winds with gusts to 170 kilometres per hour [105 mph] have developed on the central Pilbara coast between Port Hedland and Pardoo, and will extend inland with the cyclone centre.

GALES with wind gusts to 120 kilometres per hour are expected through the remaining parts of the warning area overnight and tomorrow.

WIDESPREAD HEAVY RAIN and FLOODING are likely across the Pilbara, with falls in
excess of 200 millimetres possible close to the cyclone track.

DANGEROUSLY HIGH TIDES could cause EXTENSIVE FLOODING at the coast between
Sandfire Roadhouse and Whim Creek.

Residents on the coast between Sandfire Roadhouse and Whim Creek including Port Hedland, are specifically warned of the potential of a VERY DANGEROUS STORM TIDE as the cyclone crosses the coast. On the current track Port Hedland is specifically under threat. Tides are likely to rise significantly above the normal high tide mark with very dangerous flooding and damaging waves.


Details of Severe Tropical Cyclone George at 9:05 pm WDT.

Location of centre : within 35 kilometres of
latitude 19.9 south longitude 119.1 east
Recent movement : south at 20 kilometres per hour
Central Pressure : 910 hectopascals
Maximum wind gusts : 275 kilometres per hour near the centre.
Severity category : 4

FESA-State Emergency Service advises of the following alerts.
RED ALERT: People in or near coastal communities of Port Hedland, Whim Creek, Pardoo, Marble Bar and Nullagine should move to shelter.
YELLOW ALERT: People in or near coastal communities between Sandfire Roadhouse and Dampier including Roebourne, Wickham, Karratha, Point Samson, Dampier and in or near the inland communities of Tom Price, Pannawonica and Paraburdoo should be taking action in readiness for the cyclone's impact.

Hell fire. I worked near the Bar, Corunna Downs station, in the autumn of 1998 - now doesn't that feel like a long time ago? - and I remember a few cyclone alerts that didn't materialise.

But this one is going all the way to Baghdad. C-Downs is about 40 km East of the central track, the Bar a bit closer, but certainly close enough. Port Hedland is going to get hit like a hammer, though: here's the view from the weather radar there. TCWC Perth tracker is here.

God, there's a place with some evil pubs, right on the dockside where the 300,000 ton ore carriers growl by. Tonight, that's *not* the place to be. After all, seas within 20 miles of the eyes are officially phenomenal. Ah, that's the spirit all right.

Blogs: here, and here, and there's always 'Rati. I hope everyone's all right.

Update: It's ashore, 25 kms east of Hedland, Cat-4. Latest bulletin says it's going to pass "close" to the Bar at Cat-3 or Cat-4. Scienceblogs's Chris Mooney blogs.

Chris Lightfoot

Our regular reader, MySociety prime mover, pythonmeister, sysadmin, hammer of government mainframe psychosis, Chris "Chris" Lightfoot has died, at a terribly young age.

I never met him, but I saw and used enough of his projects, and shared enough blog, to respect his good sense, campaigning venom, and technical chops greatly. In fact, Chris was a prime example for the development of this blog for the last two years, and an example that led me to start regaining lost skills.

The last communication I had with him was on the subject of a campaign against John Reid. I'm not sure whether I should be concerned that this morning I had a moment of dread at the thought of removing the blog from my RSS reader - as if, perhaps, there might be some good news if I left it there. Grief, like all other emotions, will infect all new communications media - I don't think William Gibson thought of that, or if he did he didn't write it. It's not as commercial as saying that sex will infect all new media like a virus.

Chris Lightfoot. Presente!

You didn't stand by me - no, not at all

There's been a lot of fisking on this blog lately. More than I am happy about - I try to get back to something more positive and discursive, but then, someone comes along and pisses in my pool. Usually a government minister. This trend keeps up.

Paul Farrelly MP, Labour member for Newcastle-under-Lyme, recently brought in a private member's bill to extend employment rights to people working for employment/recruitment agencies. Now, this is where I have my say.

These organisations have a strong case to be the worst legal employers in Britain today. I worked agency jobs for years, and as a rule, they were atrociously poorly paid, manipulative, unsafe, and humiliating. Agency staff are always desperate to demonstrate power. The second best advice you can have about agencies is always take the first job, because otherwise they won't call you again. They will always assign you the worst first, to see if you'll do it. The best advice, by the way, is to have no business with them whatsoever.

I recall the furniture factory in a half-abandoned mill in Airedale, where the agency staff were easily identifiable. We were the ones without the dust masks. I remember the Royal Mail distribution centre in Guildford where, somehow, the agency staff's breaks never coincided with the canteen opening times, so no food for you! Perhaps the fact most of us were black had something to do with it. The people who were actual Royal Mail employees, all good CWU men, no doubt, were paid much more, worked shorter hours and less anti-social hours, and had subsidised hot meals. Us, well, not so much. The minibus that took us there was driven by a man who, on Friday nights, regularly talked to himself zooming up the M25. I'm pretty sure a lot of my colleagues were illegal immigrants, and I know for a fact that the agency regularly "got their wages wrong" - always in their own favour, of course - because the few of us who were native English speakers had to do their arguing for them.

Working for that particular firm can't have been any more fun, though better paid - several of its own executives used to buy drugs from the Somalis, to keep up with their commission targets. I remember being sacked from a call-centre job for hanging my jacket on the back of my chair, at instant notice. ("We're intitled to an hour's notice!") What sticks in my mind isn't so much the pay as the total absence of dignity.

So, I think Employment Relations Minister Jim Fitzpatrick ought to be...severely criticised, and voted out or deselected by his CLP as soon as possible. I'm occasionally tempted to advocate violence, but this kind of thing rarely does you any good. And compared to Yahya Jammeh, he's a pussycat.

But let's be clear. What the fuck is a Labour minister doing talking out a bill intended to offer greater job security to the poorest workers in the country? Did they vote on it, and lose? Did they refuse to schedule it? No. Fitzpatrick stood up and drivelled away until the available time for debate ran out. He wasn't even willing to debate it.

Damn, I remember David Ames reading out the Basildon telephone directory in order to kill the Disability Rights bill. Jim Fitzpatrick is an anti-democratic, anti-socialist thug. In fact, he makes old Yellow Pages Ames (after all, he was yellow, going on the chicken run after his tenure of Basildon looked iffy) look like a granite slab of integrity.

Bad British History

Another in our occasional series of comments that ought to be posts: Rob Farley discusses a Max Boot article in which Boot accuses Britain and Canada of "unilaterally disarming" on the grounds that Canada had the world's third largest navy in 1945. Farley, of course, gives Boot short shrift, but does point out that armies have got smaller throughout the world.

Only one problem, though, and that's that the example is bad. The British Army of 1930 was barely bigger than it is today. In fact, the British Army has almost always been the size it is now, excluding the world wars and the national service period. In 1930, for example, there were only two divisional headquarters. There are only two deployable division HQs now, and two more reserve formations.

In 1930, the forces deployed around the world by the British Empire were not large at all. Certainly, there were more than the current deployment, but not that many more. It was frequently observed, throughout the long 19th century, that the British empire got by with fewer soldiers than, say, Serbia.

For one thing, the empire depended quite heavily on locally recruited units, many of which were funded from local taxation. The Indian Army, for example, wasn't subsidised from London until its mechanisation in the mid-1930s. In a sense, British India was almost an independent state - at least, it often had its own foreign policy. Although one-third of the Indian Army's manpower was British, those officers and men were paid from the Indian budget.

The "white dominions" - Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa - all had their own armed forces, although British politicians regularly moaned that they didn't spend enough on defence, over-relied on the Royal Navy, which was purely UK-funded, and were essentially free-riders. There are TYR points for anyone who notices the parallel with the US/European NATO arguments during the cold war.

Now, the Indian Army was a major security exporter, as it offered a pool of troops that were free, at least from London's point of view (the view from New Delhi was of course different). Hence, Indian troops were occasionally deployed anywhere in a space defined by Malta, Cape Town, Tientsin, and New Zealand.

Another important factor was that the British Army's infantry battalions stationed in the empire were effectively on barracks duty. Each of the regiments would have one of its battalions stationed in the UK and one overseas at any given moment, and they swapped every fourteen (!) years. The cost of maintaining a battalion abroad was significantly less than in the UK simply because of the price differential.

Now, everything in this picture transforms when you get to the big wars, when the Army erupts in size and concentrates in theatres of war. British units are combed out of the Indian army, as in 1914, or else Indian formations are deployed next to British ones, as in 1915 or 1941. And the dominions mobilise hugely, like the Cannucks building the world's third biggest navy.

There are currently about 10,000 British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the respective cost of supporting them is much higher, even if you discount technological change, because both of these deployments are expeditionary ones far from any of the army's infrastructure.

In 1914, as the British army mobilised, a complex succession of shipping movements began around the world combing out the regular battalions on their 14-year deployments and rotating newly-mobilised territorials in to backfill them, not to mention Indian units out of India, and to pick up the first convoys of Australian, South African, and Canadian volunteers, as well as (later) the 1st Indian corps. But the killer detail here is that the regulars brought home made up first the 7th Division in time to get slaughtered at First Ypres, and then the 29th Division, the last of the regulars, in time for Gallipoli. That was it - two divisions, 14,000 men. Which isn't far off the current deployed total.

The argument from the Royal Canadian Navy is also rather poor. The Canadians achieved something incredible in going from essentially no navy to the third largest, but what Boot doesn't tell you is that this was a navy razor-specialised on one task, North Atlantic convoy escort. Just counting ships doesn't tell you that these were almost all corvettes and other ASW types, that and small escort carriers.

bunker mentality

Whilst we're on the subject of spooks, by the way, this tale on Slugger O'Toole is completely ridiculous, for reasons fully explained in a comment I left there.

Simply, the Government has plenty of places to go underground right huurr in the South-East, without needing to go to Northern Ireland (seriously! the only part of the British Isles where you can be certain there really are terrorists!). The RAF and various other agencies still use large chunks of the Corsham bunker under Box Hill, and there are also the various bunkers along the A40 - PJHQ/CINCFLEET at Northwood, and RAF Strike Command at High Wycombe.

I really have to stop this Dsquared-esque habit of posting comments that really ought to be posts on either TYR or AFOE.

Deep rumblings in the deep state

The plan to break up the Home Office and let John Reid keep the macho bits is permitting us a rare glimpse of the core executive in action. Consider this story in teh Grauniad. First of all, note the close symbiosis of the Cabinet Office and the intelligence services - historically, the Cabinet Secretariat evolved at much the same time as the Committee of Imperial Defence and MI5, under the hand of Sir Maurice Hankey, so this is no surprise. But it's nice to have examples.

For example, Reid, or rather the Home Office top bureaucracy, claims to have won a power-struggle to get control of the Cabinet Office's emergency planning/crisis management machinery. This is interesting in itself, as traditionally, war planning and civil defence grew out of the MOD and the Cabinet Office intelligence-administrative complex, not the police-judicial Home Office. Note, though, that the organisation responsible for the revived civil defence effort is the Intelligence and Resilience Unit - the two are joined at the hip.

Even though this outfit and its head, Sir Richard "We're fucked - you're fucked, I'm fucked, the whole department's fucked" Mottram, are moving into the Home Office, this link is going to be maintained. Mottram will remain as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, very much rooted in the CabSec/intel world, and as the Cabinet Office Intelligence and Security Coordinator. That's not so much double-hatted as triple-hatted.

It's also a significant power grab by the Home Office, as they would now own part of the central intelligence analysis and policy machinery as well as MI5 and NCIS, and a share of Mottram's responsibility for funding the intelligence services. Traditionally, the Cabinet Office control of the analysis-policy centre, with the division of responsibility for intelligence between the Home and Foreign Offices, has provided a balance of power between them and a useful division between intelligence collection and policy advice.

Hence the reaction of the Foreign Office to suggestions that SIS and GCHQ might come under Reid's aegis as a single lead for intelligence. There is no way they will let that happen without a vicious struggle.

On the other hand, the CabSec probably thinks they've defanged the Home Office by wiring their man into it, and it's also a classic civil service move to square the circle by having the Foreign Office spooks still report to the JIC and IS Coordinator, rather than to a new Home Office-run intelligence centre...but making the JIC Chair/IS Coordinator's staff join the Home Office. Of course, the Foreign Office is probably thinking that, like any personal union, it can only last while Mottram's in charge.

This amused me, though:

The shakeup will leave the new "core" Home Office responsible for policing, serious and organised crime, counter-terrorism strategy, MI5, immigration and nationality, passports, drugs and antisocial behaviour.

The Ministry for Counter-Terrorism, Internal Espionage, Organised Crime, Border Control, and Unauthorised Football in Public Parks, then.

Feel the steel balls

OK, so we the first to highlight the fact the military is none too certain about the EFPs-from-Iran meme. Then we were the first to draw attention to how trivially easy they are to make, and how widely available the materials and information required are.

Since then, the US Army has actually shown off what it claims to be evidence - you can read the NYT story which also mentions the fact a lot of the stuff on show originated in, ahem, Dubai. I wonder how it got there? In the back of a big aeroplane, whether with malice aforethought, or just because all the stuff required is available in commerce - it's not as if ball bearings, plastic pipes, or sheet copper are materials of war subject to strict control, and even the explosive isn't that hard to source - and that's assuming you didn't just get it from an old depot like the one at Al-Qaaqaa.

Anyway, since then, they have discovered machine shops in Iraq churning out the copper stampings - a considerably more sophisticated method than the one I suggested. After all, I was thinking of cutting out the copper with snips and beating it to shape against the bottom of a gas canister, using a rubber mallet. No wonder British manufacturing industry is in the shape it's in - one day I'll tell you about the job I had bending metal rods for supermarket displays into shape against a working drawing by hand.

Now, the fallback argument is that the triggering devices are, as they say, the smoking gun. So where do they come from, then? According to an article by James Glanz of the NYT, in which a degree of scepticism is displayed that might have come in handy back in 2003, the US Army says they are from Radio Shack - yup, the American chain of hobbyist electronics stores known in the UK as Tandy, and two other well-known brands.

And this, apparently, is evidence that they really come from Iran! The logic here is impressively weird. According to Major Marty Weber, described as a senior EOD officer, all the IEDs in Iraq he's examined that use passive IR triggers contain IR components from Radio Shack or two other firms. He claims that none of the southern Lebanese ones use Radio Shack components. Therefore, the Sadrists (since when do they use IEDs?) can't be getting them from Hezbollah, and therefore they must come from Iran! Now, the Americans officially believe that Hezbollah is an arm of the Iranian secret service. So this is quite literally insane reasoning. We are being asked to believe that because the electronics in the Iraqi IEDs comes from a different source than supposedly Iranian-supplied ones in Lebanon, therefore, the Iraqi ones must be supplied by Iran.

Weber also claims that the only places in the world where EFP, passive-IR triggered IEDs are used are south Lebanon and Iraq. This is simply wrong, and if he read this blog, he'd know that he could add Northern Ireland and Germany to that list.

You can see the photos here. I particularly like the packet of ball bearings marked "Feel the Performance! Feel the Power! Feel the Steel Balls!"

In fact, the title should be "Feel the Indian steel balls!". I've just taken the time to have a peer at the photo in Adobe Photoshop from a couple of angles and enlargements, and I'm pretty sure they come from Jindal Fine Industries, an Indian bicycle parts manufacturer.

Dominic Lawson: Intellectually Dishonest

One good thing about blogs is that it is difficult to get away with the standard techniques of dishonest debate. Resort to straw-man arguments, and you almost always collect a bucket of shit in short order. In national newspapers' opinion pages, not so much.

Dominic Lawson, Sunday Torygraph editor, wants the world to know he's seen a film called "The Great Global Warming Swindle" by one of the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)/Living Marxism guys. So he puts it in his column in Friday's Indy. Amusingly, he commits a serious breach of etiquette by actually mentioning that the director is an ex-RCP man - they usually don't like to mention it.

He then proceeds to lie:

The same sort of argument, in fact, which caused countless millions of Africa children to die of malaria unnecessarily because the Green lobby successfully blocked the use of DDT.

This is simply factually incorrect. There is no ban on DDT for disease prevention. There is a specific clause in the Stockholm Convention that exempts DDT for malaria control from the international control. Mosquitoes began to be resistant to DDT in 1969, so its utility is limited to say the least. But if you do think it will work, you can buy the stuff at this link, like the governments of Madagascar, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Africa, Namibia, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Algeria, Thailand, and Myanmar.

Anyway, he describes the film as follows:

We are taken to those vast tracts of Africa where there is no electricity, and see families huddled round a fire in their mud hut. Then we are told that "five million children under five die every year as a result of respiratory diseases from indoor smoke". Remember that, the next time you read about the ecological purity of heating derived from "biomass".

Hark! Wood pellets in a CHP scheme will fill your house with poisonous black smoke! And dead babies! Dead black babies! This is argumentation of a standard that shouldn't get out of primary school. A thought experiment - let me light a wood fire under a chimney, and Lawson light a gas or oil one without, and which one of us will die of carbon-monoxide poisoning first?

It's the chimney, stupid - it could be a new political slogan, no? In fact, there are NGOs running around Africa building chimneys and installing stoves, not to mention biogas digesters, specifically to address what passes for a point here. No word on them from Lawson, of course.

Next, we are taken to some godforsaken health center in the Kenyan hinterland, struggling to get by with electricity from a dilapidated but undeniably politically correct solar panel. It just about manages to keep alive the fridge with the medicine inside. Despite such scenes, Durkin's latest effort is not a manipulative tear-jerker..

Clearly. I can just imagine the place - next to one of the mighty 400KV transmission lines of Kenya's hyper-efficient national supergrid backbone, but denied electricity. Well, not really. There's a fridge there working, but it's not proper, macho electricity - it's politically correct, solar electricity. Gay electricity, to coin a phrase. And why? All because of evil green lobbyists, intimidating those poor naked babes such as BP, Shell, the Daily Telegraph, the Conservative Party...

The problem with this line of argument is blindingly obvious. We are in those vast tracts of Africa where there is no electricity, are we not? There isn't any electricity, Dom. It's not Surrey. Yes, you could use a diesel generator, but then, your godforsaken health centre has to buy diesel, and not have it stolen by men with AK47s and a Landcruiser with no diesel. And even if there was a transmission line out there, Kenya would have to find the foreign exchange to import the coal, gas, or oil - or uranium - to drive it.

So far, we've got a strawman and two direct lies in three paragraphs.

People whose business actually is the development of Africa don't have these problems. At companies like Safaricom, MTN-Investcom, and Celtel, they are very, very keen on driving their mobile phone base stations with wind and solar power, for the reasons in the last paragraph. And they are profitable, so according to Lawson's professed beliefs, he ought to revise his views.

Perhaps the fact he gets his views from people who either a) underwent an unprecedented mass conversion in 1991 to extreme right-libertarianism but still find it necessary to defend Radovan Karazdic, b) discovered in 1991 that advocating ideas powerful people like is good for business, or c) still believe in the revolution and think that making everything worse will heighten the contradictions and force everyone to listen to them, ought to have a similar effect, too.

Finally, he leaps for a straw. There is a scientist, name of Svensmark, in Denmark, who believes that fluctuations in cosmic rays cause changes in cloud formation. He has some experimental evidence for this. He theorises that this may explain part of observed global warming. He is, of course, now the toast of the bitter-end deniers (whether he wants this honour is doubtful). Lawson, of course, buys in.

There is a problem, though, or rather several. For a start, nobody knows whether more clouds at high altitude reflect heat outwards or hold it in, on balance. So it could actually make things worse.

And for a second, it's not really very helpful. If you pay money into a bank account, at a rate that fluctuates randomly around a central value, and take a constant amount out a month, the balance will fluctuate trendlessly with the income. If you, or someone else, decides to start adding a sum of money every month, it will still fluctuate with the random variations, but the balance will start to show a steady rising trend. Now, if it pays a high rate of interest, the system will exhibit positive feedback, and the balance will rise by an accelerating rate.

Whatever random inputs into the climate system are discovered, so long as the laws of physics and chemistry do not change, the same principles will apply. In the short run, if Svensmark is right, we are adding heat to a system which is trending warmer anyway. That does not sound like reassurance to me. Even if he was right and the effect is the reverse in the short run, what happens when it flips, as a randomly cycling effect will by definition do?

But what does reassure me is that the class base of conservatism has changed its mind. GE, Volvo Trucks, Siemens, Rolls-Royce, Alstom..even the Chinese are building 5MW wind turbines. As Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote about the end of the Mengistu regime, after the army went home, only the academics were left, and they were rounded up without difficulty. The merchants have made up their minds, and only the bullshitters are left.

Update: Looks like the Svensmark/Calder theory has already met the tattoed fist of empirical refutation.

Another update: An anti-wind power lobby group has picked up on this post! I'm honoured, dammit! Socme.org links this post next to the suggestion that "greens" are behind the dodgy fuel reported at supermarkets in the south-east. Aaaah, they're so prone, aren't they? According to the actual chemical analyses, it's silicone lube in the fuel that's the problem..and no-one thinks that's a biofuel.

Yet another update: From conservaworld, one "J.F. Beck" checks in. No doubt this comment will be memory-holed in short order, so it's preserved here: So Lawson is right to argue that any use of biofuels is going to make your kids die from indoor smoke?

Smoke is indoor because of a lack of chimneys. Lawson would die if he lit a fossil-fuelled heater without adequate ventilation, as happens to poor people in the UK quite frequently.

It's a dishonest, strawman argument and a rather sick one at that.

Further, do you dispute the terms of the Stockholm convention? Do you know better than the authoritative text of the convention? Can you kindly provide your version?

TYR Exclusive: Interview with Paddy McKay

Long-time readers of our series on Viktor Bout may remember the Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor's report which implicated various people in Sierra Leone in terrorist financing. We've been interested for a long time in West Africa, and the links between Charles Taylor's regime and Al-Qa'ida, not to mention the missing 727 case. One of the men the Jamestown report named, Paddy McKay, was involved with airline businesses in Sierra Leone and across the Middle East.

Mr. McKay recently got in touch. He denies the allegations, and asserts that they were motivated by corruption. The full text follows:

1. What, in your view, motivated the original Freetown Peep story?
An
approach was made to the DCA in Freetown to register an aircraft that
was not (in our carefully considered opinion)airworthy. Understandablythe request forregistration was denied. The disgruntled individual
invented a story connecting these officials and my organisation to
terrorist groups and released it to the press and to the police in
Freetown which resulted in a number of Sierra Leone officials being arrested and triggered an avalanche of completely misleading information to be published on sites like yours.

2. Do you think illegal activity is going on within the Sierra Leone 9L- registry?

Certainly the SL DCA would not tolerate misuse of their
civil aircraft register. However, many registers are misused without
the knowledge of the those tasked with the administration of such
registers.

3. There has been extensive reporting of links between Middle Eastern terrorist groups and some West African diamond-producing states. Specifically, the Al-Qa'ida representative Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is known to have met Charles Taylor several times during 1999. In the past, similar suggestions have been made about other groups, including Shia Amal in Lebanon. In your opinion, is this credible?

Charles Taylor is known to have formed a number of questionable alliances.
Other than that, I am not qualified to comment.

4. What is your relationship with Tim Spicer, Anthony Buckingham, and their various enterprises?

There is currently no connection between me
and Tim Spicer or between me and Tony Buckingham.

5. Did it continue beyond the Sierra Leonean operations of the 1990s? NO



6. Does it still exist?

NO

7. How, in your opinion, did Air Leone lose its Sierra Leone AOC?

Air Leone Ltd was sold to a Saudi businessman whose intention it was, to
form a Haaj Airline. For reasons unknown he did not pursue his
original plan and simply allowed the AOC to lapse. (Supporting
documentation on file)

8. Does HA Air, Star Air, or Fast Aerospace have business in Iraq?

The company HA Airlines was formed but as far as I am aware no AOC was
issued due to a dispute between partners/shareholders. Following the
dispute one of the partners/shareholders formed his own airline, Star
Air and this continued until their AOC was suspended by SL DCA. Fast
Aerospace Ltd is the parent company of IAS which is appointed by
cabinet to assist SL DCA with the provision of technical expertise
when such expertise cannot be found from within Sierra Leone. IAS was
instrumental in the suspension of Star Air's AOC. (supporting
documentation on file)



9. Do any of those companies provide service to private military entities there?

NO



10. How did HA lose its Jordanian AOC?

HA Air did not at any time hold a Jordanian AOC



11. Star Air bought an L1011 from "CBJ Cargo". Does this company have a relationship with Chris Barrett-Jolly?

This is inaccurate! Star Air did not (during their time on the SL register) purchase a cargo L1011. They did however lease in a cargo L1011 from a respectable L1011 leasing company. There is no connection between this company and Christopher Barrett Jolly. The other aircraft on the Star Air fleet were ex BWIA. (supporting documentation on file)



12. Are you aware of one Imad Saba, proprietor of multiple air operations in the UAE?

I have heard of him, I have never met him nor have I done business with him.



13. Who owned the BAC-111 3C-QRF, serial no. 061? It has been identified as belonging to San Air General Trading, a company on the UN asset blacklist.

I don't know