one intelligent soldier

Said Sir Michael Rose, speaking at the SAS passing-out parade in 1979: One intelligent soldier can achieve more than a fleet of B-52s. There's some debate as to whether that statement could be applied to Rose himself, but I doubt many would disagree with it.

David Davis apparently agrees. His resignation from Parliament should be understood as an exercise in the struggle for strategic influence, specifically directed at the growing decent/neocon faction in the Conservative Party. I have been a little surprised, and pleased, by how well the Tories have held up on the Counter-Terrorism Bill, ID cards, and related issues; I would have thought the Murdoch influence would be telling by now. And, indeed, there are signs of change within - Boris Johnston's win seems to have hugely strengthened the Policy Exchange/Michael Gove current, while Cameron's annoying press chief Steve Hilton has run off to California. His BlackBerry is unlikely to be enough to compensate for the distance, which must strengthen Andy Coulson's role as Rupert Murdoch's ambassador to the Tories.

But now: cazart! Davies' replacement, Dominic Grieve is even talking about repealing the 28 day provisions. Stick that up your punter - I think not. There's not going to be any cave-in now. It's part of the Westminster traditional language that, to be considered principled, an act must also be ineffective or poorly executed, which is one of the reasons so many people have been at pains to accuse Davis of Machiavellianism or frivolity. People who want something that isn't evil or dishonourable don't get to pull off brilliantly outrageous triple-crosses, do they? Yes, of course it's Machiavellian scheming - this is politics after all, and that's how things get done, and the people who complain are usually the ones who were outschemed.

If you needed evidence that the Davis coup is significant, you need look no further than the emergence of an actual Murdoch candidate running against him. Yes, Kelvin McFuck is back, looking to add another name to his litany of post-Sun failures. He is one of very few men to actually fail to make money by underestimating the public's taste - it's not like News Bunny ever made a penny... But, this time, he is clutching a promise of actual financial support from News International, plus close air support from the paper itself. Inevitably, the media establishment is busy writing him off as a joke candidate, which makes as much sense as writing Davis off and is being done for precisely the same reasons.

Whether McFuck realises it or not, in a very serious sense Davis was running against the Sun Party from the word go. What does the Sun actually stand for, politically? Well, now we know - we can read it off McFuck's public statements.

He also told the BBC he would be campaigning on three issues - hostility to the "sense that our country is somehow in the grip of some kind of security vice", demanding that there be "the referendum for Europe", and on more populist issues - like seeking changes to government spending on "things I don't think we care about".

In a BBC Radio 5 interview, he was slightly more specific about point three, saying that he wanted to ban BT from using "automatic voice responders and call centres". You have to wonder whether a man who had just come from a late-night dinner with antisocial binge drinker Rebekah Wade was entirely sober, but there is a clear pattern here - he, and it, stand for authoritarianism, the Special Relationship in the worst sense, and fake populist gut-chafing (this latter, of course, is essentially content-free).

Putting it another way, McFuck's candidacy is an exercise in the promotion of power-worship. It's Schmittian conservatism; the permanent crisis requires an Ausnahmezustand, which demands a strong leader who may incidentally beat up the odd call centre to demonstrate their compassion for the weak, who are very much intended to stay that way. Note that McFuck's not interested in the people who work in the call centre. Only a numskull like Geoff Hoon could think the Government ought to field a candidate - it should be clear enough to everyone else that the Government, in many ways, already is.

In this light, it's clear why Davis is standing and why he deserves your support - it's only contradictory that he believes in both the death penalty and habeus corpus in terms of generalised progressivism or liberalism, which he doesn't believe in (or he wouldn't be a Tory). In terms of classical conservatism, it makes perfect sense to think that the State should have the power to cut your head off, and that its power must be constrained by law as much as humanly possible. (After all, if the State *wants* to kill someone, it's likely to find a way unless someone stops it.)


And, going by the polling data, this is likely to be your chance to help pour the proverbial vast bucket of shit back over McFuck's head. Imagine the scene at the Murdoch summer party - McFuck, red-faced, holding forth, James Murdoch explaining to Rupert, ticking quietly on his death-support system, that there's this thing called the Internet and it's like TV that you read, Wade drooling slightly over Wendi Deng's shoulder but still reasonably coherent, the plates of roast baby stewed in the juice of freshly squeezed minority shareholders well dug into but not quite down to the toying level yet. All seems well with the world...and then, the disruption. Forced to show their hand.

This is also to say that Dan Hardie was right. He's been a Davis fan for some time; I was doubtful, especially after he reacted to the police crime figures going down by suddenly deciding the BCS was right all along. But when the time came...

There's a PledgeBank here; and what's this? Bob Marshall-Andrews and Colonel Tim Collins? And Kings of War. And Peter McGrath. It's like going back to the 2005 general election, maaannnn.

I’m a worse bastard than the fucking shite that I am, and that’s saying something

Finally, we have the best possible argument against the dire Counter-Terrorism Bill. Unfortunately, it's one that by definition we couldn't have had before last week's pornographic nightmare of a vote. It's a sort of recursive critique. Think about it - by far the worst feature of the damn thing is the awful "concession" that Parliament gets to vote up or down on the detention of individuals. It was bad enough when this was meant to be a sop, only becoming active after the poor devil had already been in the clink for weeks, but the text the Commons passed foresees that the vote would have to be taken in a timely fashion. It would actually have practical consequences.

This is a constitutional obscenity - the legislature pretending to be the executive (deciding how much of a terrorist threat exists) and the judiciary (deciding on a case of habeus corpus). It's also almost self-refuting; the whole Government line on this has been that we need to pass some draconian and hopelessly ill-thought out legislation motivated by panic now, so we don't do it after a major terrorist incident. Originally, they argued that the bill was as it was because, in the event of its use, it might not be practical to convene Parliament quickly. Which makes a degree of sense, after all, if somebody just blew it up. But now, the bill intended to deal with the case that Parliament could not act requires Parliament to act.

Then there's the question of evidence - the whole point is that the police would supposedly not have enough time to gather the prima facie evidence required to charge the suspect, but the Bill requires the government to put evidence it won't actually have, all other things being equal, before the House. Which could also have bad consequences for the chances of any trial that resulted. And what if the evidence was the special secret sauce of SIAC?

And the horror of putting someone's essential liberty in the hands of politicians concerned with re-election, on what would probably turn out to be a party-line vote, shouldn't need explaining. But all this is a bit theoretical.

Since last week, however, we can say - how could anyone trust the people responsible for passing the Counter-Terrorism Bill to decide on whether some poor fool is locked up or not? Robert Spink MP? The Reverend William McCrea? Nigel Dodds, who appeared on the radio before the vote to state that he considered it a matter of principle, but he hadn't made his mind up yet? Shaun Woodward, who continues to deny he offered the Paisleyites a deal, although Mark Durkan says Woodward offered his SDLP colleagues one? Whoever it was who offered Diane Abbott the Governor-Generalship of Bermuda, and Keith "Are you still here?" Vaz a knighthood? Geoff Hoon? I tell you, it's the perfect argument.

I wonder, in the event of the bill being activated and some bewildered Dewsburyite's fate riding on the vote, what
precisely the Government whip would be willing to pay for a vote for continued detention? An ambassadorship? Access to the Government Art Collection? Straight to the Lords? An audience with Jacqui Smith? No, that would surely be reserved for the waverers. If not the suspect themselves. (Note: I'm indebted to Viz's Eight Ace for the title.)

still crazy after all these years

Remember we wanted to know more about Asia Airways? This entity has solidified somewhat, and it now has a place of registry (Tajikistan, EY-) and some aeroplanes. There are four Il-76, registered EY-601 to 604, and three Antonov 12s, registered EY-401 to 403. Interestingly, all the aircraft we have any information on have been transferred from Click Airways (CGK), the now EU-banned operator that has been running quite a lot of Il-76s from the UAE to various war zones. There are still a few CGK and CKW codes coming up in the movements, but they are certainly dropping off by comparison with ASW, Transliz and BGIA; it looks like the fleet is being reshuffled.

Interestingly, on this day of 2004 retroblogging, they include An-12 serial number 8345607, which stopped a surface-to-air missile over Baghdad back then as EK-12555. So did 8346006, working for Phoenix Aviation as EK-12333. Built strong - Antonov strong. And the Il-76 EY-603 has been seen with Rus Aviation as well - yes, these guys.

selling the dummy

Here's an interesting question about the finally-released Senate Intelligence Committee Phase II report about the use of intelligence on Iraq. The "Shorter" for Phase II A is quite simply that "yes, it was all bollocks", and specifically that it was all bollocks in the same way it was in the UK - caveats were removed, possibilities upped to certainties, dissent suppressed - with certain well-known exceptions that were complete nonsense. Phase II B deals with the infamous meeting in Rome between top-of-the-barrel rightwing nutcase Michael Ledeen, convicted spy Larry Franklin, all-purpose crook and bullshitter Manuchar Ghorbanifar, plus two Iranians, one of whom Ledeen claimed to be a disaffected Iranian spook on the run, but who may just have had a similar name (another man involved turned out not to exist, and another described as "an information peddler", and an unknown number of spies from "a foreign government". What a bunch.

The report should by rights be the final blow for Ledeen's credibility and reputation, in so far as such things exist - it makes clear that he misrepresented the people present so that the Department of Defense would handle the meeting rather than the CIA (this was important because the CIA considered Ghorbanifar a liar and probably an Iranian spy), and that he also didn't say that yer man was coming. Nor did he mention the others, because any involvement with Italian officials would have required the permission of the State Department, which presumably considered them all to be a bunch of nutters. Despite much black ink, it is clear from context that the "foreign government" was Italy.

Further, it reveals that US Army counter-intelligence agents suspected he was being used by Iranian intelligence, but that the investigation was killed off on instructions from Stephen Cambone after one month. That's all impressive enough, and much as we all thought. But what I want to know is precisely where the British government comes in?

You may recall that the famous document that was meant to show Iraq buying uranium from Niger originated with the Italian secret service, and then appeared in yer dossier, just in time for the Americans to start using it in public speeches. It has long been suspected that the meeting in Rome was somehow involved in this exercise in policy-laundering, or rather bullshit-laundering. So how did the thing get from Italy to the UK? Well, there was Harold Rhode, also at the meeting, who made it to the December 2002 Iraqi opposition conference in London. That may give us some idea. Now that's what I call the exigencies of the service - you've got to meet gems like Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, Chalabi, and Nick bleeding Cohen, plus every other Decent out of hospital at the time. It's hell in the diplomatic, as Harry Flashman so wisely said.

It would be interesting to know if/when any of the other members of the Rome Secret Dining Club visited Britain between then and September 2002. As Mick Smith points out, the Defence Intelligence Staff just got post-Huttonised.

more unwritten books

This is fascinating - a drug that up-regulates the rate of neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, in your brain, which may be a treatment for depression. Obviously the risks are around what happens to the new neurons. I can't help thinking there's a science fiction outcome in this somewhere.

The Switzerland of the Middle East (for some periods of Swiss history)

There is a fascinating post at Pat Lang's about a study trip to Lebanon which involved meeting some interesting and alarming people (Samir Geagea, described here as "a bit Lyndon LaRouche" - well, whatever hard things have been said, quite understandably, about the latter, he never commanded a militia that cut huge crosses in the bodies of its enemies). Bashir Assad's wife is apparently an Obama Girl, Walid Jumblatt is losing his wits, Saad Hariri is an arrogant twit, Rafiq Hariri's sister is considerably smarter than Saad, Siniora is a Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and all the Hezbollah representatives they met were very impressive indeed, once they laid off the war porn propaganda pix.

Apart from this Lebanese version of the Spectator at its best, I was interested by this:

Amin Gemayel was not particularly forthcoming, and seemed badly out of touch. When pressed for details on a number of points he was completely at a loss. He seemed to resort to stock politician phrases even in personal conversation. My impression was of a man losing vitality. I tried to push him on the question of what a real 'national defense strategy' would be, seeking some common ground between him and Hezbollah. He replied that he envisaged a 'Swiss model' of every citizen owning a gun. Incredulous, I asked him if that would really deter Israeli or Syrian aggression. He responded evasively, citing the importance of various UN resolutions. When I cornered him privately after the session, he said that in the 1970s they had tried to acquire Crotale air defense systems but were thwarted by Israeli pressure, indicating that similar factors were at play today.

Not that he means much these days, but I can't see what the objection to a "Swiss model" would be. In fact, Hezbollah's total strategy down south appears to have been exactly that in 2006. And given that Lebanon will always be surrounded by bigger powers with dubious intentions, and it is unlikely to be allowed to create a manoeuvre-warfare capability even if it can afford to (see above), it's hard to see what other policy is available.

Further, the availability of cheap ATGWs and electronics is a big boost to the strength of such a force, and there is no shortage of people to use them. In some ways it's a lot like the development of another well-known army in the Levant, which was founded on the guerrilla wing of an integrated political party/economic development organisation/rebel army. Can anyone guess which it was? Of course, the Israelis concentrated on buying tanks - but then, they weren't in the mountains. The other good thing about such a policy is that it would be a handy way of dealing with the existence of militias - wrapping them into some sort of national command structure.

And, of course, Lebanon used to call itself the Switzerland of the Middle East. The similarities are actually more than you think - cantons of differing linguistic/religious identities, mountain frontiers, a profitably discreet and profitably dubious banking sector. You can even ski. But, you know, Switzerland as an island of perfect peace is quite a new idea, created by its neutrality in the world wars - before then, well...there's a reason why the pope has Swiss guards, which is that back in the day, Swiss mercenaries scared the hell out of Europe so much that some international treaties specifically bound the parties not to recruit them for use against Christians. (Savages, well, that was OK.)

The overall impression is that the system is gradually working its way back into equilibrium, not least as a result of Bush no longer having an active policy. "Have you figured them out?" asked Zaphod. "No, I've just stopped fiddling with them.."

Using up SCIRI

I've repeatedly suggested that there is an emerging alignment between the Sadrists and political factions close to the NOIA insurgents and ex-insurgents. Here's some news - a new coalition including Sadr, various mix'n'match factions including the Dialogue (close to NOIA), a chunk of Dawa that has split from SCIRI, and the Allawi fanclub (yes - he's still going!). The Iraqi Accordance Front - the main NOIA political wing - isn't there, but it's falling apart between its commitment to working with the Shia-Kurdish alliance and its base's desire to get paid for changing sides. This suggests to me, at least, that the political position is crumbling - the link between the Awakenings and the government is going, and at the same time chunks of the (much hyped) secular middle are falling off and moving closer to the Sadrists.

Now that's what I call scienciness

So, the US Army's research centre employs a climate-change denier as a scientist, and then sets up a blogger conference call with him. I'm less interested in the fact he's a weirdo on the specific issue than the simpler point that he's talking out of his arse.

Instead, Dr. Bruce West, with the Army Research Office, argues that "changes in the earth’s average surface temperature are directly linked to ... the short-term statistical fluctuations in the Sun’s irradiance and the longer-term solar cycles."

In an advisory to bloggers entitled "Global Warming: Fact of Fiction [sic]," an Army public affairs official promoted a conference call with West about "the causes of global warming, and how it may not be caused by the common indicates [sic] some scientists and the media are indicating."

So it's yer sunspot cycle, already. Christ. That was literally the very first denier document I ever read, way back in the 1980s - someone quoting an Australian radio DJ who reckon it was all about teh solar variance. And they're still pushing.

But it's quite simply wrong. Here's a paper from the Proceedings of the Royal Society (pdf). The key bit is the following set of charts, which show several measurements of solar activity - sunspots, cosmic ray intensity, the abundance of certain radioisotopes, and total solar irradiance - and finally, the GISS and Hadley Centre temperature series. The multiple lines on the solar charts show results using a variety of different methodologies to smooth the 11-year solar cycle and noise, leaving the centennial trend.



Clear enough? Here's the conclusion:

"There are many interesting palaeoclimate studies that suggest that solar variability had an influence on pre-industrial climate. There are also some detection–attribution studies using global climate models that suggest there was a detectable influence of solar variability in the first half of the twentieth century and that the solar radiative forcing variations were amplified by some mechanism that is, as yet, unknown. However, these findings are not relevant to any debates about modern climate change. Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanisms is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified."

Well, what can you say? It looks a lot like someone here is another King's bad bargain like George "The Memory Haunts My Resume" Deutsch.

Political Pathetic Python Again

Here's a visualisation of today's output from the Viktor Bout script, version 2.5, with the help of IBM ManyEyes's network graph function.



Unfortunately the flight number data in there has somehow been filtered, and there should be arrowheads. Why can't I have arrowheads?

Rest assured the definitive version is coming...

Indecent behaviour at a police station, TPCA 1847

This essay by Ian McEwan in the Guardian Review shows precisely why the Decent influence on British intellectual life is so damn depressing. You may think, and I would say the AaroWatch crew are guilty of this, that they are just a bunch of wankers left behind with their blogs after history moved on. But their unpopularity is not all that important - the whole Decent project is intended to be an elite/intellectual one, based on influence rather than numbers.

On those terms it's succeeding, what with the ramifications it's developed in the Conservative Party...and its effect on the literary establishment is pretty grim, too. McEwan will never be a core-group Decent, even though he wrote a whole book about how terribly civilised, self-controlled surgeons compared to those irresponsible scum protesting in the streets. He's too good for that, and style has a role to play as well - Martin Amis's epic self-dramatising fits in perfectly with a movement as queeny as Decency, but McEwan's literary protestantism doesn't quite fit. But they are having an effect on him.

Consider this essay. It's a good, solid piece of work; a well-researched reflection on the continuity of apocalyptic thought in human societies, and the way it projects the real horror of mortality - that the world goes on without us - onto precisely the society that will always outlive us. But then, but then; you read this:

It was inevitably a transition, the passing of an old age into the new - and who is to say now that Osama bin Laden did not disappoint, whether we mourned at the dawn of the new millennium with the bereaved among the ruins of lower Manhattan, or danced for joy, as some did, in the Gaza Strip.

They didn't, though, did they? The TV image in question turned out to be stock footage shot months before, and no-one remembers the BBC lead of that night from Palestine, Yasser Arafat giving blood for New York. There is something wrong here - after all, why would you want to involve Palestinians at this point? They didn't bloody do it, man. Why not say - in Afghanistan, where the orders for the attack were given? In Saudi Arabia, where the attackers came from and where, in all probability, the money came from? In Hamburg, where the terrorist cell actually prepared the attack? Why give a location at all - someone, after all, will have danced for joy somewhere?

And here we go. McEwan now devotes several hundred words to the revolutionary notion that Wahhabism, Nazism, and Stalinism are undesirable and would be best avoided, something no Guardian Review reader is likely to have thought before him. He cites Christopher Hitchens, raging about John F. Kennedy, but oddly doesn't seem aware that Richard Nixon nearly started a nuclear war in 1973 or Ronald Reagan in 1984 with the ABLE ARCHER crisis, one which was particularly perilous because it happened without any of the diplomatic crisis management Kennedy's cabinet wrapped the Cuban crisis in. There is a message here, no? And it's not about apocalyptic thinking, at least not that kind.

But McEwan, as I said, will never be a real Decent. American Christian Identity types come in for a lot of flak, as does the Israeli settler movement. The fox is struggling to hedgehog up. On the other hand, though, it's there - the creationists get given an explicit pass on the suggestion they don't really believe it, and we've dealt with Palestine further back. This is undoubtedly a Decent document, which is a great pity, because its indecent curves are stunning when shown.

Meanwhile, I was driving away from Windsor Great Park on the day of the Queen's Cup polo match when I saw, over a hedge, the top of a Routemaster! Given the bizarre significance of the things to the PolEx/Godson/Standpoint/CCO/Martin Bright club, I'm tempted to imagine it as the transport for the Decent assassination squad.

Does anyone need Qtek 8100 user manuals?

Because although I don’t have one any more, I just stumbled on the user manual and the Windows install CD.

People say to me just be yourself, it makes no sense to follow fashion. How could I be anybody else?

Ackerman reckons we should be impressed that he suggested a Turkish-Kurdish rapprochement two years ago. The evidence for the rapprochement is pretty good - there are meetings going on between the KRG and the Turks, under the chairmanship of (Kurdish) Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, about issues connected with all the business Turkish companies are doing in Kurdistan. But who cares about that, when there's blogger one-upmanship at stake?

It's the 24th of July, 2005, and this is on the front of TYR: The Turks Are Coming! Maybe

If I was a Turkish spook, I wouldn't be planning to attack the Kurds. I'd arm them, trade with them, finance them, and sleep soundly knowing I had one of the most bitter bunches of mountain killers in the world between me and the chaos in Iraq. And I'd still have the menace of invading them available. Just one thing: do not declare a sovereign state - yes, be one, but don't say it. I wouldn't want to be shot by my own side.

Hey, that's two whole days after Jean Charles de Menezes was offed by Ian "Therapy Cat is Concerned" Blair. Well, the Turks eventually blew their stack and invaded, achieving nothing and wasting their deterrent credibility. Now they are getting serious. You read about it here first. And remember, one day Kurdistan will apply to join the EU.

Speaking of predictions - look at this. Via Brian Ulrich, Turkey is playing a key role in negotiations between Syria and Israel, by offering the Israelis a side-payment....in water. Yes, just like this old school January 2004 post on TYR. There's a huge opportunity for an EU-like technocratic settlement there, y'know.

Where did I get the title?

I View the Checksum: It was Exum

Turns out Abu Muq was Andrew Exum all along. Which is interesting; I'd read and been impressed by Exum's work on Hezbollah and Iraq, but I'd never have thought it was him, chiefly because the man behind the stylish blogger template was obviously both smart and struggling to overcome a deeply ingrained wingnut streak. There was the whinging about the Independent, and the occasional lapses into cheapo frogbashing, and the pathological Alex/Patrick Cockburn confusion thing - my challenge, by the way, is still open. It reveals a certain amount of cogdis when you're simultaneously mocking racist buffoon Mark Steyn and still, in the year of Our Lord 2008, approvingly referring to the article in which he coined "fisking".

I didn't want to take part when I first heard of them - too many good military-related blogs did the same dull trajectory into domination by the scarlet-faced majors at the Base, and once AM started getting linked by fifteen-carat/carrot wankers like Mudville and Blackfive, it looked ominous. But the blog went on beyond that, despite a minor insurgency of trolls; its real commitment to understanding the politics of guerrilla warfare has so far kept them under control, and a truly interesting community has developed. Where else do you run into Ackerman, DeLong, Gian Gentile, Bob Bateman, David Kilcullen, Norwegians, and me in the same comments thread? Fantastic, a hybrid of Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Frank Kitson; precisely what the times require.

Chance

Where else but Northern Ireland would the government form a Consultative Group on the Past?

In other news, the Kevin Myers review has achieved the rare distinction of links from ahem, reactionary ballbag hack Tim Worstall and Ken MacLeod, who reckons Al Gore would so have staffed-up from AEI and Patrick Henry College in order to fight for the Unitary Executive, going by his last book. (Worstall, meanwhile, having spent years arguing that climate change isn't happening cos of the 1940s pause, is now arguing that its nonexistence means climate change doesn't exist either. I am not joking.)

I'm not sure if this is universal acclaim or just a case of the fundamental unity of extremism. In other housekeeping, someone on a Verizon FIOS link in Syracuse, New York wants to know what hhappens when kerosene is spilt on a kitten.

Update: Shorter Worstall - I'm a lady! libertarian...

Review: Watching the Door

Says Bryan O'Sullivan in his bookmarks:

Kevin Myers, the ne plus ultra of ballbag Anglo-Irish reactionary hacks, surprises us all by writing what might be an essential close-up of the Troubles. Maybe his lunatic, protean nature was a perfect fit for the time.

This was the upshot of this post. I promised, I think, to review Myers' book once I got it, and here goes. Well, for a start, O'Sullivan isn't wrong - the young Kevin Myers this book portrays is no reactionary, but he is certainly a ballbag, a hack, and occasionally a near-lunatic. It's good to read a journalist memoir which isn't wildly self-glorifying, and a major theme of Watching the Door which runs in parallel, in politics and in life, is shame. Myers admits that his younger self, the RTE journo in Belfast, was at worst little better than a war tourist getting off on the bang-bang, the gangster glam of the paramilitary underworld, and the sexual opportunities the war provided. Not just that - but he admits that he happily let actual journalism slide, in favour of attending to his own self-obsession.

On the other hand, though, what are the accepted moral standards in a society like early-70s Belfast? The city Myers describes is one where several of the forces that keep civilisation going have failed - shame is one, and another is scepticism. People are willing to do appalling things, and also to believe anything, so long as it's about themmuns. Killers shoot a teenage boy and then give his younger brother, abducted with him, tenpence for the bus fare. This kind of perverted kindness recurs throughout, as the original structures of morality and authority collapse. Similarly, the traumatised seek comfort in other forms of religious bullshit, like the cultist charlatan Oliver Cromwell Whiteside - the sections of the book involving whom are desperately painful.

Not even primarily the official ones of law, the state, the church; one of the most telling moments in the book is Myers' encounter with a legendary dockside brawler, once a feared enforcer throughout the North, who never hit a man again after a fifteen-year old boy pulled a gun on him. His version of order was hardly desirable, but what came after was infinitely worse. It's a vision of the classic northern working-class town gone rotten, its social networks re-organised around the new class of mini-warlords and the new war economy based first on extortion and fraud, and later on heroin imports, rather as the process of scarring re-organises the skin's cellular structure. Peace was impossible so long as the British and Irish governments were still talking to the shells of the old society, rather than the people who controlled the war system.

It's also a book about youth; when you're young, shame, scepticism and responsibility are not particularly big concerns. They weren't for Myers, for his many girlfriends (like the one who let the IRA know his car registration after an unsatisfactory threesome), or for the new men of the paramilitary world. One thing that stands out is how many of these people were enjoying themselves - the transition from ordinary routine, Catholic morality or Protestant propriety, to intrigue, violence, and nervous hedonism was clearly a liberation for a lot of people. In many ways, it was yet another version of the 1968 generation; just conditioned by history to be a peculiarly horrible one. Here, under the combined influence of sectarianism, a particularly dense conservative power-structure, and an existing thug culture, the liberation turned out to be the liberation from freedom that militarism has always offered directionless young men.

In a sense, the great divide wasn't even so much between the loyalists and republicans, but between a kind of unified paramilitary subculture and everyone else. Other divides were the class divide, between the players, the fans, and the targets on one side, and the garden centre unionists and castle Catholics on the other out in the suburbs, and between the old and the young, those who were quite content with a frozen conflict and those who either wanted to win or end it.

However, I find another strand of the book less compelling. Myers insists on his own complicity in a number of violent incidents I really don't think he bears real responsibility for. I MUST RECOGNISE MY GUILT!! can be a form of self-dramatising, self-important bollocks too. And insisting on some sort of duty of journalists to cooperate with the authorities...well, that's reactionary, hackish, and rather Decent.

the tape recorder, for special music

Rita Mitsuko - Marcia baila
Uploaded by emmaus

This needs reviving, surely?

Curiosity is not a crime. Killing cats is.

OK, this is outrageous stupid shit of the sort we expect from our gallant allies. Simply, a graduate student at Nottingham University is writing a thesis on terrorists, and as part of this he gets a copy of an Al-Qa'ida training manual from a US government website. Being a postgrad and therefore by definition permanently broke, he got a friend who worked in the university administration to print off the 1,500 pages rather than paying the shared printer fees.

Now this seems silly - 1,500 pages? Seriously? Wouldn't it have been better to search that lot rather than read it through? Don't they have grep at Nottingham? But that's not the point. The point is that "someone" noticed the document on the administrator's computer and grassed them to the police, who predictably freaked, arrested everyone under the Terrorism Act, kept them locked up for eight days, arrested his family, seized all computers they could lay hands on, etc.

The key detail is that both people have names that might give rise to suspicion of being insufficiently willing to condemn, etc, etc. Now, yer man has been released, however, the administrator is Algerian, and is going to be deported on "unrelated" immigration matters. Yeah, right.

Further, the university:

A spokesman for Nottingham University said it had a duty to inform police of "material of this nature". The spokesman said it was "not legitimate research material", but later amended that view, saying: "If you're an academic or a registered student then you have very good cause to access whatever material your scholarship requires. But there is an expectation that you will act sensibly within current UK law and wouldn't send it on to any Tom, Dick or Harry."

Right, sunshine. There is no such thing as "legitimate" research material, just as there is no such thing as "legitimate" thought. We all have the right to read what we damn well like, and as a fucking university you have a duty to stand up for this. As soon as you accept that reading X, Y, or Z, even though not illegal, is the sort of thing They don't like, you've already lost. Ecrasez l'infame.

The University of Nottingham's vice chancellor is Sir Colin Campbell, who can be reached on +44 (0) 115 951 3001, and by fax on +44 (0) 115 951 3005. More people to shout at are here.

Hat tips: Kings of War, IRG.

I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall

Well, I asked for details of that Hezbollah converged telecoms network, and some appeared via the comments at Abu Muqawama. First of all, there's a map. My first reaction on seeing this was that it looked a lot like a rather underdeveloped, dated official backbone network - there's not much redundancy anywhere, and there's only one path between Beirut and the Beka'a, or between either place and the South, which goes far too close to the southern border for comfort. The long lines follow precisely two routes, each of them along the highway right-of-way; there's more redundancy down south, but it doesn't look like you'd need more than three cuts to thoroughly partition the whole thing. However, breaking up useful comms within the southern area itself would be considerably more difficult; and this does seem to fit with their tactics.

And here's an interesting point - there appear to be some very critical nodes in the upper Litani valley, not far at all from the main Israeli incursion in 2006, and for that matter from where the UNTSO post was destroyed. It's also clear that they have put in several loops right along this sector, close to the border, which should come as no surprise. But the backbone goes that way, too.

Of course, it's far from obvious that the map is honest, accurate, or comprehensive, or that there aren't radio links that thicken it up but aren't shown on the map. "Salem" provides the answer, which is that this network at least is the old official one before Oger took over running it, and Hezbollah took it over. This doesn't mean, however, its capabilities are necessarily the same or even remotely similar.

The single biggest cost in a telco deployment is always the rights-of-way, cell sites, and digging the holes. Essentially, it's Baumol's cost disease, seen from the opposite end - rather than some labour-intensive goods becoming relatively more expensive than capital-intensive ones because they are excluded from technological progress, it's more that the inputs with the greatest manufactured content - switches, routers, Node-Bs - get cheaper due to Moore's law and economies of scale, while the civil engineering doesn't display any such trend. Further, the electronic kit goes obsolete quickly, the bearer - fibre or copper - not for 20 years at least. And the holes in the ground don't - ever.

Pat Lang posted an article of his from the 1970s at the time of the 2006 war entitled "The Best Defense is..." As I recall, there was quite an emphasis on wired comms in that, too. This sort of investment implies a strategy based on the control of land, and an intention to command the informational terrain as well as they do the physical and human sort.

TYR Technical Partner - www.bogons.net

Just to explain my absence, first of all I've been changing ISPs - you may recall I promised to give Virgin Media the push. Bogons Ltd - Internet for the Clueful were tapped after the normal exhaustive procurement process, and I spent last Sunday afternoon setting up an ADDON ARM8200 modem/router to work with my existing WRT54G WLAN box. I was hoping to use ZIPB, but eventually settled for renumbering the WRT54 (although, as the modem seems to be a Viking one, this might show the way).

Anyway, that was fun...of a sort, and the upshot is that Phorm can still bugger off and I now have considerably higher IP bandwidth. And then I vanished down a wormhole in the work-life continuum for the rest of last week, so no blogging for you, which is just as well because I was mostly thinking about SIM-based authentication systems and related OSS-BSS issues. And you wouldn't want that.

Kly! Kly! Boing! Boing!

You thought Keighley were having a good year? We're having a fucking good year. Yes.

1 Keighley 7 6 0 1 215 118 19
2 Doncaster 6 6 0 0 216 74 18
3 Gateshead 6 5 0 1 204 129 16
4 Barrow 5 5 0 0 199 50 15
5 Oldham 6 5 0 1 196 136 15
6 York 7 2 0 5 188 175 10
7 Swinton 7 3 0 4 186 217 10
8 Rochdale 6 2 0 4 193 173 9
9 Workington 7 1 0 6 134 224 7
10 Blackpool 6 1 0 5 128 240 5
11 Hunslet 7 1 0 6 123 241 5
12 London Skolars 6 1 0 5 75 280 4

Keighley 36 Rochdale 35; cracking.



Hallelujah indeed.

It’s good to talk

OK, so I was wanting to know about that Hezbollah WiMAX net. The original source of the story appears to be this Time report:

Although Hizballah is known for its massive Iran-funded social welfare system that provides everything from soup to education, construction materials and matchmaking services for Lebanon's Shi'ite underclass, cell-phone service is not part of the package — except for those who join its guerrilla army.

Hell, there's a cracking affinity-marketed MVNO opportunity in there.

One of the world's most technically advanced and resourceful guerrilla organizations, Hizballah had some time ago installed its own, in-house dedicated fiber-optic telephone network, connecting its headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut to its offices, military posts and cadres as far south as the Israeli border. During the summer 2006 war, Israel had jammed cellphone signals throughout south Lebanon and monitored the Lebanese telephone system, but Hizballah's internal communications channels had survived thanks to its private fiber-optic system. Since the war, however, Hizballah has expanded the network to cover its new military frontline north of the United Nations–patrolled southern border district, and into the Bekaa Valley to the east. Part of the system incorporates a WiMAX network allowing long-distance wireless access for the Internet and cell phones.

More recently, Hizballah has dug trenches for fiber-optic cables in the mainly Christian and Druze Mount Lebanon district and in north Lebanon, according to Marwan Hamade, the Lebanese minister of telecommunications. "It was confined to one or two small areas before and we overlooked it as part of their internal communications. But now it's spread all over Lebanon," Hamade told TIME.

We'll have to get used to this stuff; with the falling price of fancy technology, the days when sophisticated networking was confined to the rich are gone. After all, Hezbollah isn't the only army that's deploying WiMAX. South Korea maintains formidable armed forces for reasons that should be obvious, and they are planning to build their entire command-and-control structure on the technology - which has plenty to do with the fact that Samsung developed most of what the world knows as IEEE802.16e Mobile WiMAX, before it was called that. The US Army bought a large quantity of WiMAX gear for evaluation. I have in the past suggested that the British Army check it out as well; we'd be fools not to, as Airspan's test deployment is in Stratford.

And so did Israel. If encrypting your data before hurling it over the air is good enough for them, surely it's good enough for Hezbollah; and WiMAX is suited to a mesh network topology, where each participating node is a router, therefore simplifying the problem of deployment and increasing the system's resilience. The basic nodes are cheap, too, considerably more so than full size GSM or UMTS base stations.

The Complex Terrain Lab reminds us that the Hezbollah TV station stayed on the air in 2006, despite the Israelis bombing it; a broadcast TV station is in radio terms the biggest target there is. It just sits there, yelling with multiple kilowatts of power in all directions, and by definition it has to be obvious to work; but they couldn't catch it. I always wondered about that. Their satellite transponder would surely be part of the answer, but uplinking is also a noisy radio activity; one use for a secure, redundant, and private fibre loop or four would be to support a gaggle of mobile satellite TV uplinks.

Bashful Brownites

Anthony Wells is arguing about what percentage of don't knows in the polls for the Crewe & Nantwich byelection are actually Labour voters who feel embarrassed to say so - analogous to the "shy Tories" of the 1990s. I would think the number is considerable.

During my candidacy in Egham Hythe, I knocked on and got an answer from around 100 doors. In the event, there were roughly 600 Conservative votes, 300 Labour, and 200 Liberals counted. My own canvassing numbers logged 22 Liberal, 28 Tory, 1 BNP, 1 UKIP, 31 Don't Know among those who said they would vote...and 4 Labour. Yes - four. 5.19% of the total answers, as against 30% of the vote. Redoing the sums, assuming the same pattern for the non-answerers, predicted 51% Tory, 40% Liberal, 7.3% Labour (note this is a two-councillor ward, so votes for candidates must be divided by 2); the event was more like 60% Tory, 30% Liberal, 20% Labour, 10% nutters and spoilt ballots.

Conclusion: There are a *lot* of quiet Labour voters out there.

The Opposite of Architecture

Via Calculated Risk, galleries of repossessed houses in Los Angeles. This one can stand for a common theme.



It's hardly got any windows on the street side at all! Just two huge garage doors. Those doors are a common feature throughout the show - houses whose outward appearance is totally dominated by monster garages, like a great big fat ugly gob. Anything human in the architecture skulks behind the garage, as if ashamed. It's as if cars designed these buildings for their own use - realising, of course, they needed to make provision for the people, but sadly not being quite able to understand their needs.

This is, of course, not irrelevant to why they are already down one-third of their value. Perhaps we need a word for the opposite of architecture?

Public Service Announcement

The Daily Mash: better than drugs.

which in your case you have not got

Remember when we nixed the January 2007 Iranian weapons scare? We explained how pretty much any competent terrorists could build an EFP, and followed up with the revelation that the steel balls came from an Indian bike parts factory. Well, this made me smile.

Iraqi officials also have accused Iran of meddling in violence and had echoed the U.S. accusations of new Iranian-made arms being found in Basra. But neither the United States nor Iraq has displayed any of the alleged arms to the public or press, and lately it is looking less likely they will. U.S. military officials said it was up to the Iraqis to show the items; Iraqi officials lately have backed off the accusations against Iran.

A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin.

When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.

Feel the performance. Feel the power. Feel the steel balls!

scaleydelic!

So we had the world's first military coup motivated by a 3G network licence, in Thailand; we had the shootout between the Chalabi Boys and Orascom security men in Baghdad. Now, there's the Hezbollah/Amal coup de force (or de folie as Robert Fisk preferred), motivated in part by the Lebanese government's desire to control their secret telecoms network, including a CCTV system they installed at the airport to monitor the comings and goings.

Curiously, I've yet to hear any actual details of the system, except that it provides 99,000 "lines" (an increasingly meaningless metric, but one that implies it has a softswitch architecture rather than straight IP) and uses buried fibre. But there are also tales of WiMAX and other things radio. Apparently, the leader of Hezbollah has claimed that their signals were their most important weapon back in 2006. Perhaps - you've got to know when to move your ATGW team back over the reverse slope, I suppose. Some doubt this on the grounds that a fixed net doesn't seem that useful, but then, all mobile networks are fixed at some point, and if the fibre is dual SONET it needs a minimum of four independent cuts to partition the system. The Lebanese Army has now said that

it would handle the issue of the communications network in a way "that would not harm public interest and the security of the resistance". It also said it was reinstating the head of airport security [CCTV Guy].

Which, I think, means they're going to let it slide, if they don't actually hook it up to their own signals network. This is of course one of the least obvious features of the whole crisis; all the territory Hezbollah and Amal took was immediately handed over to the official Lebanese military, an increasingly powerful force in politics.

Arguably, this suggests that some of the ideas floated in 2006 about incorporating Hezbollah in the Lebanese military as some sort of reserve/militia/national guard/territorial army/jagers/greenjackets/cossacks/whatever else you call those crazy bastards on the border, as long as they don't bother you and keep the roads open, are being put in effect de facto. Perhaps the military have a deal, under which the Shia will support their commander in chief for president (and they do), and in return they will have a free hand to create their not-state in the south? It's a solution to the problem of a bunch of dangerous and independent-minded borderers that has a long pedigree indeed.

You could call it the Haganah-isation of Hezbollah; it's changing not just from a guerrilla force to an army, but also from a political party to an unstate with a shadow administration, an economy, and its own infrastructure, just as the Israeli founding generation built a mixed economy, a trade union movement, a shadow civil service, and a highly capable semiguerrilla army/intelligence service long before the state became a formal reality. I'm only surprised they didn't start a commercial GSM network as cover for their own command-and-control system; perhaps they will.

Meanwhile, again, this is an example of the democratisation of technology. You don't have to invoke a secret Dr Evil to explain how they built this; annoyingly, I see some people are yelling about Huawei and how it's all teh secret Chinese-Iranian plot. Perhaps. But they'll sell to anyone. And if there is WiMAX gear in there, it's cheap; the base stations are already under $10,000, and the biggest expense in a fibre build is always at Layer Zero, that is to say the business of going and digging the holes and renting the transmitter sites. I suspect right-of-way is less expensive in southern Lebanon than it is in Surrey, armies are rarely short of people if they need to dig a hole, and Hezbollah presumably doesn't have much trouble with NIMBYs. (See also.)

Was this a civil war? Perhaps the idea is wrong; it seems to me more like one of Gwyn Prins' "diplomatic-military operations" in one country, perhaps something an unstate like Hezbollah - or the Sadr movement - is uniquely suited to, as this superb article of Spencer Ackerman's argues.

Viktor Indicted

After not much happened for a while, charges have been filed against Viktor Bout in a US court.

The indictment charges Viktor Bout with four terrorism offenses, including conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to kill U.S. officers or employees, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile.

Prosecutors said he was offering a deadly arsenal of weaponry: more than 700 surface-to-air missiles, thousands of guns, high-tech helicopters, and airplanes outfitted with grenade launchers and missiles. The indictment said his price-tag was $15 million to $20 million.

You can get the document here, at the CTB. The document specifically mentions two cargo planes he apparently produced a brochure (!) on, explaining how they could be used for accurate airdrops into the Colombian backwoods. I'd really love to know which aircraft they were, but there is nothing in the document that helps, and practically all types in the network are capable of airdropping to some degree or other. (An12, An24/26, Il-76...even the An124, if they can get hold of one, can do it, although it would be a tad dramatic.)

Meanwhile, there's been a significant increase in the proportion of flights we're logging from Dubai and Sharjah to various war zones that are carried out by Transavia Export of Minsk, which some think was the first Bout company of them all. It would be nice if the authorities in Sharjah didn't let planes belonging to folk like this leave for unstated destinations; the night of the 5th-6th of May saw no less than four departures to "unknown" or "ZZZ", including one Phoenix Aviation/AVE, one Transavia Export, and two South-Airlines.

The Earliest Wigan Walk Known to Science

Call the anthropologists. I believe I encountered the earliest instance of the Wigan Walk in the history of rugby league on Sunday.

OK, so Wigan played St Helens, their great tribal race enemy, in Cardiff; less obviously, Saints hit a savage burst of perfection and ran up 35 points to nothing in the first half. The moment I recall most is Ade Gardner's try just before half time, or better, Matthew Gidley's part in it. St Helens had pushed on to the Wigan lines, but didn't look like breaking through, and shipped the ball slowly along the face of the defence; then Gidley hit it, running - always the first rule - and immediately drew a marker from the line.

What happened then was what you go for; he stopped in pelt, and turned through 360 degrees around the Wigan man, rolling-out with the ball re-handled from one arm to the other while this went on, and chipped it to the flag for Gardner to race onto, with just little enough weight for it not to get there too soon. Ignorant people always think this game is about force and force only, but folk like Gidley and Rob Burrow, and Sean Long, who incidentally had a superb master's evening, almost worth that bloody club colours gumshield, show it's more than that.

One of the fan traditions is that Wiganers supposedly never stick around for a beating; considered a sign of spoilt arrogance. And on Sunday, with 25 minutes to go - there they were, filing out of the ground. But this was Wales; at Wigan's old ground, Central Park, a home fan leaving could easily have been at home in five minutes. In Cardiff, where did they go? To watch the rest on TV in a pub? To sit on the coach and chunter, with the crispdust?

Anyway, this has given me enough confidence to point out that Keighley are having a good year. Kly ! Kly! Boing! Boing! indeed.

The Only Way To Defeat This Is To Surrender

This should be the biggest story in the UK; you know the Government just explicitly took powers to give the congestion charge ANPR camera data to the Americans, or actually any other state outside the European Economic Area? And what does Boris Johnson plan to do about that?

I can't help but think, however, that this is a great opportunity for the creative utilisation of this - via Schneier, why not get a personalised registration incorporating an SQL injection attack? You probably can't do this in the UK, however crafty you are with where you put the bolts. (They don't make a bolt shaped like the bottom half of a semicolon, after all.)

But a T-shirt with the following message:;INSERT INTO watchlist (pnrs) VALUES 'ADDINGTON/DMR';COMMIT TRANSACTION That would be cool. One of the nice things about QR codes, of course, is you can do these things graphically. Look into my eyes...



More seriously, this is one of the many things that worry me; the reason why I'm so keen on a carbon tax is that it's an option that doesn't involve creating a vast mass-surveillance system as collateral damage.

Doomed To Technology

BoingBoing apparently thinks this little line-shaft workshop is bizarre and incredible. Maybe. But I had one of these as a kid in the 1980s; it went with a Mamod steam engine, and had various tiny machine tools - a press, a pillar drill, a buffing wheel, and eventually we rigged a little dynamo to have it generate electricity, thus making the hop from the first industrial revolution and mill buildings to the second and electric motors. (Have I mentioned I once worked in a printing plant in Shipley - this was in the summer of 2000 - where the machinery came from Germany in 1963...East Germany?)

And it rocked, especially because it filled the house with the unique smell of live steam and hot oil. Oh, and that time I fired it up without my dad being around, with the result that the safety valve wasn't quite correctly seated, and extremely hot steam under pressure launched it into the fucking ceiling? Sorry, mum. But technology ought to scare you occasionally, right?

Surely they can't have been that rare. Here's a quote from the comments at BB:

Inspired by my Grandfather I built my own peripheral for it. BTW, it had a standard, open interface for everyone to hook up their own shit to the engine... it was a drive wheel, hooked up to the flywheel where you could place a rubber band and drive anything you could imagine. I chose to drive a tiny Electric Motor, that was hooked up to a flashlight bulb. It just might have started my ongoing involvement with science.

Yes, I did that too; I think the aim was trying to build up enough steam pressure to overload and burn out the bulb. If I had really been militant about it, I suppose I should have thought of some way to link it with the ZX Spectrum, but I don't think it put out enough wallop even to drive one of those.

And I never finished the rocket-propelled boat, even though I did get as far as cutting and soldering tin plate sections (more than the joint forces of the Government, BAE, Thales, Vosper Thorneycroft and Babcocks Rosyth can say for CVF).

Donal Blaney: Hypocrite, Political Whore, and Torture Fan

Blaney:

Donal Blaney said...

I do not bandy the term "nazi" or "racist" about in the same way the left do.
2:05 PM

Blaney:

This is how the Nazi traffic wardens of London behave when they see a nice car that they decide they want to tow.

Blaney:

First, a confession. I was appointed a house prefect at school and I handed out a record 400 punishments over 14 months for a variety of offences, most of them trivial. In doing so, I recognise that in many instances I abused my power.

Blaney:

Now we know where the thousands of extra police are being deployed - on low level "crime" rather than preventing and investigating violent crimes and burglaries that are what we're all most worried about.

Blaney:

Where do I accuse anyone of plotting to suppress an accusation of paedophilia? What drugs are you on to have written such nonsense?

Blaney:

Secondly, a Labour council candidate was arrested last week on suspicion of child porn offences. Needless to say, had he been a Tory it would have been the lead story on the BBC and in the national press.

Blaney:

Thatcher would use nuclear. She wouldn't want us dependent on foreign gas and oil in today's world. It is the one area, apart from cuisine and gun rights, where the French are better than us.

How many nuclear power stations did she build, Don?

Blaney:

Cut Petrol Tax, You Greedy Sods

Are you against the market, Don?

Blaney:

Amnesty International once again show their true political colours in a campaign ad against the practice of waterboarding. This sanctimonious clique of naive peaceniks and leftist fellow travellers want us to fight the evil psychopaths who indiscriminately kill innocent men, women and children of all colours, creeds and religions with one arm tied behind our backs.

Blaney:

Hectoring and abrasive, Humphrys has become a parody of himself. In the same way that Jeremy Paxman's sneer seems to have become more exaggerated as the years go by, so it is with Humphrys' aggressiveness.

Hectoring and aggressive, eh?

Blaney:

I obviously agree that torture is not the answer.

I think I draw the line at permanent physical harm to the prisoner. Humiliation or psychological interrogation techniques are, in my view, not a problem - but we're all entitled to a different view. Waterboarding doesn't do the prisoner any permanent physical harm although he may be reluctant to shower or use a flannel again in the future when/if he is freed.

I am aware that the CIA has in the past used a creative interview technique which involved blind-folding a suspect, placing him into a helicopter and for the helicopter to lift a foot or two off the ground. If the prisoner didn't answer questions, he was told he faced being pushed out of the helicopter from (as he was told) hundreds of feet up. This too concentrated the mind.

(Note that he therefore goes against the British Army's doctrine on human intelligence collection and sides with, ah, the Gestapo. Are you against the troops, Don?)

Feel free to add any more Dons you find interesting in the comments. Unfortunately Don's forgotten how to use the moderation function, or something.

The Joy of Linux

So I actually bought a printer; in fact, a printer/scanner. And I considered buying two pairs of jeans after showing up at the count with interesting new holes. Am I descending into bovine consumerism? And the obvious next step was to qualify it with the Linux Lappeh.

It wasn't quite the "And then my troubles began..." experience like the BIOS reflash in January, but I was very amused by the fact that XSANE both throws a dialog box containing the following words:

You are trying to run Xsane as root! This is DANGEROUS! Please do not file bug reports for anything that happens when running Xsane as root: YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN!

and also suggests running as root as a generic troubleshooting option in its documentation. Well, I did, and all went OK. As I said to Soizick: the great thing about using Linux is that you get to feel like a mad scientist.

I recommend and endorse hplip.

Gordon Brown: My Part in His Downfall

You may be wondering why this blog missed a week; the answer is, of course, a repeat of my 2006 candidacy for mayor of Aspen Runnymede Borough Council. As in 2006, I shocked the local Liberal party with the radical option of actually going and knocking on doors; as then, I achieved absolutely nothing. Both Egham Hythe seats went Conservative with about 600 votes, followed by 200-odd for the Labour candidates and just below that for me and the Runnymede Runningmate.

It is of course completely ridiculous to try and draw conclusions from this, but I would point out that the Labour vote came as a surprise; 7 out of 100 voters I canvassed said they would vote Labour, which compared to the result suggests that pollsters should be applying a truly heroic "Bashful Brownite" adjustment to their results. And yes, people do vote BNP out of ignorance, or at least the guy who shouted that he was going to vote fascist did; they didn't put up a candidate.

It didn't seem the right moment to tell him, though. Later, I was chatting to a Tory who claimed to be impressed by Brian Paddick when I noticed a business card stuck to his fridge: Xxxx Xxxxx, Legacy Systems Architect, Home Office E-Borders Agency, based in one of those ridiculously named po-mo office parks by Heathrow (Civil service readers will know the one I mean). "Are you the E-Borders chap?" I asked. No, he said. "Well, thank God for that - or I'd have to kill you."

No, I didn't quite say that - I'm not actually Hunter Thompson. Actually I said that this was good news, because we were doing everything we could to crush his dreams and frustrate his plans. To which the Tory replied "Great! He keeps parking his sodding car in my driveway! And the FUCKING ALARM goes off EVERY NIGHT!" There's a surprise - a Home Office surveillance bureaucrat unaware of the costs of false positives, and completely inconsiderate of the ordinary citizen? Who could possibly have guessed?

The count was completely normal, and if anything less fun than the last time; all that stood out was the fact that another ward has a 'kipper who is actually Vietnamese (how's that work?).

Still, I have the satisfaction of being present at the LibDem Sorpaso; the moment we overtook Labour in share of the national vote. And unlike the original one, we didn't even need to include the estimated GDP of the Mafia to do it.

Blue Streak, Black Arrow

Bill Higgins is boasting about buying a very cool secondhand book indeed; Manned Spaceflight Operations, stamped "Edwards Air Force Base".

I'll see that, and raise him the best comment ever. We didn't track down the Texas Instruments thing, but Colin in comments brought us this:

Well, I watched this one: In the bad old 60's when tubes (valves to fellow Yorkshiremen) were top technology and our missiles needed lots of them, me and my fellow tech men had to sort out the best from the worst in large vibrating testers. The 97% not-so-good one's were either used for the parking lot improvements or were spirited away for the booming home stereo market.
The parking lots eventually became too high to use so they found some other way. This occurred in my sight at DeHavilland Lostock and DeHavilland Hatfield. This all sounds very similar to your TI story. Colin.

I have a reader who worked for De Havilland Dynamics? That's ridiculously cool. Where were you on the 17th? Eh? Eh?

Bourgeois COIN

The Independent has been doing a great job tracking a crucial new trend of our times; the way modern counterinsurgent practitioners are making common features of suburban life into quiet weapons against the common enemy. 12th April:

Under the protection programme, sometimes called School Councils or School Shuras, villagers agree to provide a small quota of night watchmen to take turns on guard. "Parent power is exactly what it is," an education official said. "We bring parents, teachers and some key people in the community together to agree to protect the schools."

In Logar province last month, a primary school was saved by a gang of furious fathers who chased would-be arsonists into the night. The head of the local PTA, Basir, said armed men approached a co-ed primary school for more than 600 students after midnight. "They had guns and petrol to burn the school. But the guards saw them and started shouting," he said. "Everyone came out of their houses and when the terrorists realised, they ran away."

What are you doing for the PTA, Mick and Ruth? Well, I'm organising the jumble sale, and Mick is leading the school council to cut the Taliban area leader's head off and stick it on a spike.

Elsewhere, in High Wycombe, only yards from RAF Strike Command's nuclear bunker, dinner parties and interior decoration snobbery are deployed to win hearts and minds.

"It might seem a bit aspirational to be thinking a few dinner parties can change the world, but it's got to start somewhere," says Richard Hoyle, 50, another guest of the Hickmans. "Anything that's breaking down barriers has got to make a bit of a difference."

Aspirational; now there's New Labour for you.

You're fit, but don't you just know it...

Time for some rugby league blogging, right? I saw London knock Castleford out of the cup on Saturday, and I can report that I'm beginning to think London (sorry, sorry, Harlequins RL) are getting to be dangerous. Cas dominated the first half and went in 12-0 up, but ended up with a 42-14 thrashing. They were, as it happens, missing their star loose forward Jon Westerman, who I was looking forward to seeing, but I doubt he'd have changed anything. When a team just gets run over like that, individuals don't matter much.

What does matter is that London are ferociously fit this year; Brian McDermott has really prepared a side almost as tough as he is (hey, he's been a Royal Marine Commando, a prizefighter, a British Lion, and a Yorkshire Dales hill farmer; enough macho to kill a normal man). And they are making a strategy of it; every time I've seen them recently, they've soaked up the pressure in the first half and then unexpectedly cranked up the speed after the break, which is a killer if you haven't either got the stamina to match it or a 20 point lead. It's an old Wigan trick from the 90s; it's probably as old as the game.

However, I would like to say that whoever introduced those inflatable sticks you whack together to generate noise deserves everything they get. It's not just the volume, it's the odd piercing quality of the sound; I can happily put up with RL terrace fixtures like the old dear driven by a truly disturbing blood lust, but this is new. Perhaps that's what pushed the youth-team guy who picked a vicious brawl in the club bar after the match, incidentally hurling his target at my girlfriend, over the edge. (He also saw his way to trampling on a Cas shirt and assaulting someone who looked to be his father, so who knows.)

hey hey hey, ring ring ring

This looks like a must-read; Kevin Myers' personal history of 1970s Belfast, complete with fundamentalist landladies, Provos concerned about the morality of using a condom in the initiator for a carbomb, the only civil war in history where both sides were receiving welfare benefits from the same government, the UDA as the only terrorists in history to have a regimental blazer, and the unpleasant but undeniable fact that so many people Myers knew were enjoying the war.

This bit specifically got my attention:

While Catholics were discriminated against by the Stormont civil service they were admitted into the then imperial civil service, run from London. This included the Post Office telephone system, which recruited and trained many Catholics, who became the most sophisticated electricians in Northern Ireland; some of them were in the IRA, whose bomb-makers became the finest of any terrorists in the world, while the loyalists, supposed inheritors of Ulster's great engineering traditions, continued to make what were in essence big fireworks.

You want historical irony? You want the sociology of technology? Right there. In a sense, nothing could be more appropriate for a bunch of reactionaries like the UDA than that precisely their aims - making damn sure no taigs got above semi-skilled in the shipyard - were actually sabotaging their military effectiveness. As for so many places up north, the second industrial revolution - electricity, chemicals and all that German stuff - was never particularly welcome.

Which is why, perhaps, this guy may have been more of a threat than I'd otherwise have thought. I mean, who hasn't called John Reid a tyrant? But it's this bit that's more interesting; he's a BT electrician. ISTR the Operation Crevice team were trying to recruit BT linesmen at one point; not just to chop the wires, perhaps.

The Bombardment of Walthamstow Rages On

This NYT story is nonsense. Various rightwing barkies have taken the opportunity of the French armed forces' deliciously 007-esque mission to rescue the sailing yacht Le Ponant to tout the following story around the media: the Royal Navy has been ordered not to detain pirates under any circumstances, for fear that they might something or other, because of the Human Rights Act. The details are opportunely left open; the usual formation of the story makes only two testable claims, one of which is that landing a captured pirate in Somalia would likely be illegal because the local authorities might cut their head off, and the other being that the pirate might claim political asylum aboard ship.

What the story does not actually say is why this would stop anyone from detaining pirates, or for that matter why the same doesn't go for the French. After all, as a State party to the European Convention on Human Rights, France has the same legal obligations. Now, the first claim is obviously true in the sense that yes, Virginia, Somalia is a nasty failed state run by a mix of more-or-less Islamist warlords and Ethiopian army officers. Handing someone over to this lot for trial might well be illegal. But has nobody else noticed that it would also be intensely, profoundly stupid?

Who on earth would want to return captured pirates to the state, or rather un-state, that permitted them to operate openly from their territory? Even if the Somali authority they were returned to actually wanted to try them, you've got to assume there's a significant chance of them getting away. In fact, the French mission gives us all the information we need; the pirates collected the ransom, went ashore, and seem to have planned just to drive off with it, which doesn't inspire confidence in local law enforcement.

Further, there is no legal reason whatsoever to give pirates captured off Somalia to the Somali police. Pirates have a special status in international law they share with slavers, torturers and those responsible for genocide; they are hostes humanae generis, enemies of all humanity, which in practice means that any state that can catch them has effective jurisdiction in the case. Once the pirates are caught, there is absolutely no reason not to take them to a proper court back in London, or wherever. That given, why should we need to even think about handing them over to a jurisdiction where they might escape, be tortured, or be put to death?

The second testable claim is that a captured pirate might claim political asylum. This is true. A longstanding principle of the law of the sea is that of exclusive flag state jurisdiction, which means that a warship of state A is for all intents and purposes part of A's national territory. The principle holds in a weaker form for merchant vessels. Americans really ought to be conscious of this, because they fought a war against Britain in part over the principle.

Now, a story. When I took my MSc in 2003-2004, my International Law course was taught by Commander Steven Haines, who had just resigned from his post as a senior legal adviser to the Royal Navy, round about the same time Elizabeth Wilmshurst walked out of her similar post at the Foreign Office. In fact, I heard Wilmshurst's name for the first time from him. He didn't give his reasons, but do I need to draw you a fucking diagram? (He's also the only person I know who ever had control of a nuclear weapon. Cool, eh? Pity he took so bloody long to mark essays.)

Haines took part in the 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone, where he was involved in the decision as to what to do with limb-choppin' war criminal Foday Sankoh after his capture. The military were keen to fly him straight out to Illustrious, as he's not known for being a great swimmer and would be very unlikely to escape; Haines opposed the idea on the grounds that he might claim political asylum, which would have been politically more than problematic. Instead he was confined at the airport and then in the Freetown police station with a guard reinforced with British troops, but later cheated the courts by dying before he could be brought to trial.

So the problem is not new, but it's not like it helped Sankoh any. And there is no reason why some one can't spend their political asylum in prison; it doesn't confer immunity for one's crimes, and piracy is a crime. (That is both bathetically and pathetically obvious, but there is an important point here which we'll come back to.)

To recap: yes, it would be illegal to hand over a pirate to Somali warlords for trial. No, this does not constrain anyone in catching pirates, because anyone who can catch them can try them. And frankly, not handing prisoners to the Somali "government" is a feature, not a bug. Yes, you can claim asylum aboard a foreign warship; no, this is no deal-breaker.

So what did those thrillingly tough and macho Frenchmen do with their six captured buccaneers? They, after all, aren't letting themselves have their national essence sapped by do-gooding lawyers and bickering parliamentarians' quibbles, right? Up to the yard-arm? Walk the plank? Hand them to the fun-loving fellas from Ethiopian Military Intelligence? Er, no.

Six pirates sont transférés à bord de la frégate Jean Bart et ils seront remis à la justice pour être jugés en France.

So yes, the six pirates were brought aboard the Jean Bart and will be tried in France.

Far too many people who should know better have swallowed this transparent bollocks at face value, or indeed, at a considerable premium. For example: here's Information Dissemination getting it wrong. Here's Abu Muqawama getting it wrong. Here's Abu Muq getting it wrong again after initial treatment. I don't have the stomach to look into the fever swamp.

So why, do you think, is this story being pushed so hard? The ur-text is this Times article, which consists of pure assertion - there is no information in there implying the central claim, that the RN has been ordered not to detain pirates - and a quote from swivel-eyed Tory Julian Brazer MP apparently reacting to the Times reporter. Repeat it a few times, and voila; new facts.

But who, pray, is keen on demonising the very idea of law as a constraint on state action? Try this comment at AM:

Ultimately the very notion of law itself may be bought into disrepute. As it is already in the ranks of the American forces.

See? It's those bastard lawyers who MADE us torture them. Indeed it was; just not the same ones. This kind of embrace of raison d'etat has something of the power of all the ideas of a liberation from freedom about it.

By the way: as well as the Reuters report, Liberation has photos and commentary from the guy who runs Secret Defense.

Update: I'd forgotten that the original Captain Kidd was commissioned by the Navy to hunt down other pirates. He was a countergang that went wrong. Now there's a far better lesson for you.

Announcement: TYR RanterCon, 17th April

Here is the news; we're meeting up on Thursday, the 17th April, after 1900 at the Globe pub in Southwark. Here's a map; your nearest Tube station is Borough. There is no dress code, but I've been asked to put the whole thing under Chatham House rules (you can say what was said, but you can't say anything that would identify who said it).


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You Say Virgin, We Say Die!

So, after the Phorm evilhood, and the weird brokenness detailed here, and the 30-odd hour no-notice outage they dropped on me just after I started working from home, literally driving me to drink (the nearest operational open WLAN I found was in a pub), now Virgin Media comes up with this. It's not just the delight with which they want to deliberately spoil everyone else's day to extract cash from non-customers, it's the contempt, to say nothing of the ideological horror within revealed by someone who thinks bus lanes exist to make buses go slower. Well, I've got all the contempt anyone can handle, so I've just churned to Bogons.net. I'll be cancelling on Virgin just as soon as they hook up my new ADSL link.

The real minimal state

Well, I never imagined Robert Mugabe's new survival gambit would be just to pretend it wasn't happening. But it does permit us to answer the question of just how small a state can get and still function; to be clear, I don't mean a state in the juridical/diplomatic sense, but rather in the political, realist sense. The Grand Master of the Knights of Malta's house in Rome has some diplomatic privileges, probably because nobody cares enough to change this. But Mugabe's continuing occupation of the office of president of a political entity called "Zimbabwe" certainly does have consequences; specifically that while he's in there no-one else can get in. This has fairly serious negative consequences for Zimbabweans in general, and also for anyone who believes in the principle that tyrants should be held responsible, as his residual occupation of the presidency gives him non-trivial bargaining power.

As far as we know, he's closeted in Government House with a small group of officials, notably including military leaders, political thugs, and the governor of the Central Bank, who has the keys to the remaining foreign exchange and knows how to start the printing press. Noises are being made that the military will not "fight the people of Zimbabwe over election results"; that might mean they would fight over something else, or else define the targets as something other than the people of Zimbabwe, or it might mean the army is unwilling to take any action.

Other than, presumably, protecting Comrade Bob himself. A few weeks ago, it emerged that the political entity known as "Chad" actually extended precisely to the radius of action of an Mi-24 helicopter based in N'Djamena. But now, it appears that "Zimbabwe" in the political sense consists of Government House, the central bank, and a small field of fire around them, and the numbers to Robert Mugabe's bank accounts. Not even the top level domain or the corporate or aircraft registry.

The obvious answer to this is secession; make local arrangements, set up a shadow administration, and simply ignore them right back.

....here I am!

I have been away, cutting down to only very restricted Internet/computing usage, and living in a district that would make Abu Muq piss his baggy pants. (Walthamstow, he says. You've never been to Bradford, have you?) Which is amusing, because (as in every poor/immigrant 'hood in Europe) every second business is a mobile phone/computer shop. You can pick up a wrap, an Algerian hooker, and an 8GB Nokia N95 in the same queue. But I succeeded in not opening my laptop for a whole seven days, which is a record for me at any time since 2004 at least. This gives rise to a challenge; how quickly can I resynchronise myself with my auxiliary brain? So far I've spent all of today slurping up a week's worth of blogs, to say nothing of the e-mail; the comments, the spam, the news services, and a number of high-activity mailing lists.

And isn't it fucking horrible? I just decided to skip Sadly, No! and a few others; one forgets just how much ideological trench warfare blogging we get through in a week. Anyway, to business. (Speaking of which, there's the work re-sync coming up tomorrow. Thank God I zeroed my inbox before going on holiday. And, yes, I have been reading them; you want to know whether you're going to have to run off the plane and form a defensive perimeter around your job...) I am delighted to see that a hitherto unknown revolutionary political-theatre collective, something similar to the Space Hijackers, successfully staged a demonstration that satirised literally every feature of the Blair/Brown years in one chaotic afternoon of low-level violence, massive traffic disruption, heavy-handed policing, and blanket media coverage.

I refer, of course, to the people who staged the mock Olympic torch relay through London. It was a great idea in itself, but the genius was in the details; who would have thought of including nameless foreign security police beating up thought-criminals while pretending to be Olympic Committee bigwigs? And then, they set about Sebastian Coe, a real Olympic bigwig and one of the most annoying men in the kingdom? And then, who would have imagined a sort of Jim'll Fix It slot in which the ambassador of a vicious dictatorship got to pretend to be a world champion runner with the aid of thousands of cops?

Working Tessa Jowell in there was inspired ("Your Excellency, Auntie Tessa fixed it for you!"), but having the speeches drowned out by a monster sound truck advertising the products of some other country that didn't toast its industrial base by playing dire pseudo-stripper cheesepop at maximum volume right there in Downing Street? Genius. It just says it all - the authoritarianism, the obsession with "events", the utterly whorish foreign policy, the corporate arse-licking, the total absence of anything like taste or class, and the fucking people. Seb Coe. Tessa Jowell. Yes!

Hand that man an Arts Council fellowship. Seriously, it's like a committee of Chris Morris, Mark Thomas, Linda Smith (yes, I know) and Tim Ireland designed the whole thing. They'll never try the real one now, will they?

Torture Lawyers

If you can read you should read this if you read nothing else this decade. It's all about how the Americans started torturing people, whose idea it was, how men like John Yoo came to provide the legal justifications, who was keen (the ideological core of the administration), who didn't want to know (the FBI and, curiously, the US Navy's Criminal Investigative Service). It is intensely depressing, and the only hope in it is the precedent from Nuremberg that a lawyer who is involved in a war crime in their legal capacity can be just as guilty as the torturer.

Here's the most significant bit, if that means anything at this level of degradation:

On September 25, as the process of elaborating new interrogation techniques reached a critical point, a delegation of the administration’s most senior lawyers arrived at Guantánamo. The group included the president’s lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, who had by then received the Yoo-Bybee Memo; Vice President Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington, who had contributed to the writing of that memo; the C.I.A.’s John Rizzo, who had asked for a Justice Department sign-off on individual techniques, including waterboarding, and received the second (and still secret) Yoo-Bybee Memo; and Jim Haynes, Rumsfeld’s counsel. They were all well aware of al-Qahtani. “They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy,” Dunlavey told me, “and Addington was interested in how we were managing it.” I asked what they had to say. “They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in D.C.,” Dunlavey said. “They came down to observe and talk.” Throughout this whole period, Dunlavey went on, Rumsfeld was “directly and regularly involved.”

Beaver confirmed the account of the visit. Addington talked a great deal, and it was obvious to her that he was a “very powerful man” and “definitely the guy in charge,” with a booming voice and confident style. Gonzales was quiet. Haynes, a friend and protégé of Addington’s, seemed especially interested in the military commissions, which were to decide the fate of individual detainees. They met with the intelligence people and talked about new interrogation methods. They also witnessed some interrogations.

Addington. Addington. At every ugly hinge of the Bush years, he's there. I'd never heard of him until at least 2006, when the Stiftung turned me on to the story. I wonder if he was a member of the White House Iraq Group? Another one we never cleared up.

This depresses me for other reasons; at the end of 2001, I was just about still prepared to defend them. I never imagined they would want to keep the prisoners indefinitely; better in their hands than those of the Northern Alliance, right? The penny finally dropped for me with the decision to refuse them POW status in early 2002. But looking back, should I have been angrier earlier? Not that it would have helped; but I do think I consistently underestimated them. I was always opposed to Iraq - but right up to the end I didn't really believe they meant it.

It seemed so crazed, the only explanation I could think of was that it was an exercise in madman theory (and you all know what I think of that); once the inspectors went back in, and they started cutting up rockets and flying Mirage F1-CR recce planes, wouldn't this be the end? Or at least, wouldn't it be enough for us? What I didn't realise, of course, was that they wanted war for reasons that had very little to do with the war; for Blair it was presumably to cling to the US. And for Addington?

His significance, I think, is that it's all been about law; they wanted and dreamed of escaping the constraints of the legal state, and no wonder they started at the top.

Update: Pathos to bathos in a flash. Yes, that should have been John Yoo, not Woo. Perhaps they should have hired John Woo; he'd have danced round his own arse on the tip of a Tomahawk missile while chop-socking Addington into diced wanker and collapsing Osama's occiput with a diamond-edged writ. They'd have told all they knew, willingly.