EU Enlargement=Less Crime

The FAZ reports on regions of Germany along the borders with Poland and the Czech Republic. Apparently, despite predictions of a crime wave, it actually fell by 10%.

Adventures in Globalisation

According to IT Week's pet blogger, it's now possible to go to India as a backpacker and work in a call centre handling calls from the UK. For Indian wages, naturally. I'm not sure whether to be amused at the stupidity of literally paying to be exploited, or revolted by the hypocrisy.

One Year Ago in Iraq

It's been reported this week that the rate of violence in Iraq is now down to what it was in April, 2004, by no less an authority than General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I thought I'd look up the Ranter for that month and check what was going on.

First we had this "The Black Weekend and the New War", dealing with the tactics of the Shia uprising and especially its seizure of the symbols of authority. I pointed out that the rising meant the loss of effective authority in a large area of Iraq, and that much of the effort to raise police and paramilitary forces there would benefit the enemy. I suggested that the British army would be called on to for reinforcement, which eventually happened in October. More detail on the 1st Shia Rising was here.

And, of course, there was the lynching of four security guards and the first battle of Fallujah, in which forty people died when a mosque was bombed. At the same time, the shrine city of Najaf was a battlefield and we drove tanks across the sacred cemeteries of Shiism, while helicopters were shot down in droves and the US Marines had to disarm the police in Kut because they were all rebels.

"Although al-Sadr's militia have apparently permitted Iraqi police in Najaf to return to their police stations, one has to wonder how far that development just represents a legitimisation of Shia street muscle - if the cops are the rebels, it makes sense to put them back in charge"

Well, we certainly did that: the SCIRI now holds the Ministry of the Interior.

For the first time in Iraq, there were hostage-takings. Coalition security control collapsed, with the roads too dangerous to use, bridges were being blown ahead and behind of convoys by men in police uniform,until most troop movement anywhere had to go through Baghdad, and anyone on the roads would be considered anti-coalition forces. Despite PsyOps teams broadcasting taunts into Najaf ("You shoot like a goat herder!"), we still needed to ship in more tanks urgently.

The slick staffers of the Green Zone were reduced to half rations and had to eat compo rations because the MSRs were shut. Ahmed Chalabi was raided by the CIA in an effort to recover the secret police files, and Lord Browne of BP said "Thank you..no" to the prospect of prospecting for oil in Iraq.

To cap the lot, we were caught indulging in torture and rape. And the CPA spokesman Dan Senor told the world we were "listening to the silent majority".

Against this background of brutal, criminal scuzz, it ought to be no surprise that convicted fraudster, triple agent, thief and liar Ahmed Chalabi has just been named "Temporary" Minister of Oil. Famously, there's nothing as permanent as the temporary. It should also amuse that Iraq's new government includes temporary ministers of Defence, Oil, Electricity, Industry and Human Rights. To put it another way, all the ministries that have any meaning remain temporary.

Viktory

The US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control has at last added a whole wedge of Viktor Bout's companies to its asset blacklist. Not only that, but the key management including his brother Sergei, Richard Chichakli, Sergei Denissenko and Valery Naydo are on there too. It's not as comprehensive as I might have liked, but the core group is there: Air Cess, Air Bas, Centrafricain, San Air, Santa Cruz, Transavia, Irbis and Moldtransavia are in the list, as are the key holding companies CET Aviation and Southbound Ltd. There are also a few others I wasn't aware of (Air Zory, Business Air) and a couple I was suspicious but uncertain of (Gambia New Millenium).

As a bonus, a nine-pack of companies using Richard's address were zapped, as were a bunch of shellcos I'd never heard of in Gibraltar, Bulgaria and Delaware. Though imperfect, it's action, and would be worth a pint if I hadn't missed out through stumping the streets for Charles Kennedy. In the OFAC press release, there's a nice police-flick organisation chart I'll post here when I find a moment other than now.

Now, can I get away with putting a little Antonov 12 silhouette on the side of my computer for each company?

Terrorism newspack leaked

Via BoingBoing, across the wires the electric message comes that some random geek surfing Usenet has discovered what appears to be a 30 minute news bulletin on a major terrorist assault on the US, with plague, chemicals and crashing jets. All the stuff Mahmoud Abu Rideh would be getting up to, if he wasn't confined to his house during the hours of darkness only.

Reading the description, it seems that the video (which BitTorrent users can obtain here) was prepared as part of the TOPOFF3 (in the US) or ATLANTIC BLUE (in the UK) joint antiterrorist exercise carried out a few weeks ago. The scenario, at any rate, is identical.

This reminded me of the spectacular media fart committed a few years back by Sky News when they falsely reported the death of a Royal (I forget which). As I recall, an Australian working in the Osterley Park spaceship that holds Sky's network centre accidentally encountered a practice run of the prepared broadcast and immediately called home. Either they, or the person they spoke to, then contacted an Aussie radio station, which ran with the story. The thing then went non-linear and spread like wildfire across the world media, until the rebuttals got it.

Strangely, it was difficult to trace the story on the net, until I found a reffo on the Guardian's website. It was the Queen Mother, and it occurred in August, 1993: just before the web, really.

Meme.

Now, I know I've been seriously remiss here, but I hope this will satisfy both Chickyog and also Yorkshiresoul, who have both seen fit to demand that I answer five questions about books.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Well, I was tempted to say John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, but that is far too pompous and over close to the Ranter's stereotype. Or alternatively something like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which would have been purposelessly provocative. I'm going for Shakespeare, and in particular Richard II - a fantastic, subtle lesson about politics, power and integrity, and not a bad thriller as well, even if the edition we had at school footnoted Act V as follows: "The badness of some passages has led certain scholars to suggest this was added by some other author".

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

No.

The last book you bought is: Hunter Thompson, Kingdom of Fear. His last book and possibly worst, a shaggy and disjointed ramble of a memoir that now reads like a suicide note.

The last book you read: Bob Dylan's memoir, Chronicles. I enjoyed it less that I thought I might - it felt strangely like something a gifted trickster might write and pass off as Dylan's work. Which itself is slightly Dylanish..

Five books you would take to a desert island.

Ernest Hemingway, The First Forty-Nine Stories. Economic, tense, and humming with wonder at the world. Unlike his novels, in which his bullshit filter failed about 1941, the short stuff always remained as clear as metal.

J.G. Ballard, Complete Short Stories. Shorts again! This bricklike tome races through an unique world of ideas from 1962 to the present. Ballard's novels, again, although they can be brilliant, can also drag - the ever-present danger of the novel of ideas is that there isn't enough plot to propel the thing along. (A bit like the difference between a hobby website and a blog.) I can't imagine taking The Day of Creation to a desert island, for example, and anyway it's too weird to reread. I can't see why I'd want to read Crash on a desert island, or any of the other Ballardian hard stuff - it's entirely part of a crowded world...

But I will also take The Kindness of Women, the other half of his semiautobiography and ten times better than Empire of the Sun, which is very much the Ballard that exam boards like. Presumably the annual school sales keep him in Scotch.

I think I'll want science, so I'm going to cheat and ask for the complete works of Richard Feynman.

And finally, another cheat - Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour Trilogy, about the struggle for integrity, the effort of being a decent person, and also extremely funny. Oh yeah, and Penguins used to publish it as one volume.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Charlie, because he's a real live writer.

Laura Rozen, out of curiousity.

Georg of Ostracised from Österreich, because this has to break out of the Anglosphere.

Soizick says:

1: Dylan Thomas; Portrait of the Artist as a young Dog
2: No
3: Sigmund Freud; L'homme Moise et la religion monothéiste
4: Sigmund Freud; The joke and its relation to the Ucs
5: J.Stiglitz; The roaring nineties
6: F. Kafka; The Castle
F.Kafka: Diary
M.Proust: A la Recherche du Temps perdu
Sophocles; Tragedies
W.G.Sebald; The rings of Saturn

And When It All Came Crashing Down...

...I became withdrawn. The only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keepin' on, like a bird that flew.

Well, that's enough Bob Dylan. The original advice issued by Lord Goldsmith on the legality or otherwise of an invasion of Iraq, the one issued before the infamous "page of A4", the one Blair has struggled with all the mandarinate's considerable resources of evasion and secrecy to suppress, the one whose very existence was denied by the head of the civil service to Parliament..it's been leaked to the Daily Mail. Go and read it, before they lock it in the subscription ghetto.

Now, I bet you never thought you'd see a link to the Daily Hell on this blog. But this is a hella hella scoop, frankly one that puts anything the lionised Trevor Kavanagh has ever done in the shade.

Incredibly, in a matter of days, the prime minister has been caught lying again about Iraq and also has been shown on national television admitting that he did disclose Dr. David Kelly's name to the press. But, apparently, he just intends to keep on stumping like nothing had happened. After all the inquiries and investigations and demonstrations, he's still there. It must be difficult to realise, to internalise a real shock like this; hence the Dylan at the top of the post.

There are others, too. Remember this? And what, indeed, about the head of the civil service? He told a parliamentary select committee that there was no full legal advice issued prior to the one-page summary. He lied. This should be a resigning matter, but don't hold your breath.

IXIS-CIB: Oil going over $300...

Al-Jaz has got hold of a confidential forecast by some French investment bankers that suggests the oil price may reach $380 a barrel by 2015. Now, there seems to be something of a competition among bankers at the moment to see who can do the most terrifying Oil Price Deathwatch, what with the Goldman Sachs boys predicting a "super-spike" above $100. But perhaps it's good news that the cash people are suddenly aware of The Issues. (By the way, that price does include 2.5% inflation annually, so it's not quite as scary as it looks.)

A brief point: you hear a lot of people on the net who say that everything is going to be all right because "the market will adjust". Indeed it will. But all the things flobbering lefties advise (public transport, local production, taxes on aviation fuel, smaller cars) are going to happen too - because they are the market adjustment to $100+ oil prices. If something gets too expensive you use less of it (except for a couple of bizarre lab flowers known as Giffen goods).

More Greek/Turkish childishness

Why can't they just play nicely? A maritime incident has occurred in the Aegean, where Greek and Turkish coastguard vessels confronted each other after a Greek fishing boat allegedly infringed Turkish territorial waters. At the same time, a Turkish general announced that certain confidence building measures might be suspended after a Turkish flag was defaced. Bizarrely, the flag incident took place at the Greek Military Academy, whilst Greek and Turkish delegations were discussing an agreement on the prevention of aerial incidents. According to the report, the flag was left in a room used by the Turks: so whodunnit?

The aerial incidents hotline doesn't seem to help very much: yesterday, there were 22 airspace violations involving as many as 34 Turkish aircraft. It isn't clear from the source whether this is a count of the aircraft involved or the number of sorties, but 34 sorties in a day on one sector is quite an effort anyway. This has been going on for some time, as well.

Grow up.

Frigates to Taiwan: a development!

Ye may recall my obituary on French crook Alfred Sirven, the former World's Most Wanted Man and kingpin of the Elf-Aquitaine scandals. There's an interesting report (French) in Le Figaro on a new development in one of the scandal's many wings. Renaud van Ruymbeke, the judge who is still investigating the "frigates affair" section of the case, has been questioning the Director General of Thales, the French weapons and electronics conglomerate and successor to the frigates' manufacturer, over the point of who is going to pay back the money.

The original kickback was paid with Elf funds, but it seems that rather in the same way as the hospitality given by BAE to various Saudis was booked to the final contract price, the cost was then recovered by charging it to the Taiwanese taxpayer as part of the bill for the accursed ships. Unsurprisingly, the current Taiwanese government is not happy about this and has demanded a refund from Thales of the $600 million bribe.

(Pause to gasp at the sheer magnitude of the bung.)

Article 18 of the contract between the French and Taiwanese governments, Thomson-CSF and the DCN explicitly states that no intermediaries could be paid without rendering the deal void. Unsurprisingly, when Taiwan invoked an arbitration clause, the Swiss courts gave them best. It seems that ticklish talks have been going on between the parties to the case because the French government is trying not to get stuck with the bill. (The ships were built, after all, in the state shipyards of the Direction des Constructions Navales.) Still less does Thales itself want to face a half-billion cash call surrounded by the worst possible publicity.

Even more interestingly, the go-between in these discussions is exactly the same man, Andrew Wang, who distributed the original sums to Taiwanese and probably also French men of power, and fled Taiwan after the mysterious death of a naval officer involved in the case. Part of the mission given by Thales boss Jean-Paul Perrier to former exec Jean-Claude Desjeux, his contact with Wang, seems to have been to keep him from spilling whatever further beans there may be. This, of course, put him in a strong position: the deal appears to be that 55% of the bill will be paid by the DCN and hence the State, 30% by Thales, and some 15% by Mr. Wang personally. After all, he is reported by Le Monde to have personally received in the region of $500 million, so he really ought to contribute something. That suggests that French taxpayers will be in the hole by $275 million to pay off their servants' bagmen.

Ill-Coordinated Iraq Roundup

Read this, and also this. It's worth it. Then ask yourself why a Bulgarian helicopter full of mercenaries was clattering around with Fijian security guards aboard to guard the security of the security guards travelling in it. Then read this Washington Post story regarding life as a mercenary in Iraq, and enjoy the following stupidity flash:

"Rich and others said they were frequently fired upon by U.S. soldiers and Marines at checkpoints. "I've been shot at numerous times by our troops, and that's in a black Suburban with American flags," Rich said. Still, they say cooperation with the U.S. military on the ground is largely positive and voiced sympathy for the far younger, low-paid U.S. servicemen, who they say regularly approach them asking about jobs at Blackwater."

Other stuff that shot across the week: the continuing phenomenon of mass corpse finds. Whoever the 50+ people fished out of the Tigris were, one thing cannot be disputed - they're dead. Somebody shot fifty or so random civilians and shovelled them into a river. It's possible, of course, that they were the supposed hostages of Madain, or that they were the accumulated dead of several days of violence - or perhaps an unrelated massacre that went unreported. Things are, famously, getting better in Iraq. You can shoot fifty people and nobody notices.

God knows what the story was about the "hostage crisis". Some suggest the government got it up to justify a sweep through Madain. Others say the local Shia sheikh did to justify turning the army loose on his Sunni neighbours. Or perhaps the Sunni wanted the government to bring in their army, or the Americans, to protect them from the Badr Corps? Whatever, the people in the river are still dead. As Robert Fisk put it, dead people don't come back to life, whatever you say about them.

If you follow one of the links above, you'll reach General Keane's report in which he says that the enemy might be saving up for a spectacular attack. He also says that “You can’t go anywhere without finding them, unlike last July and August, and some are operating independently.” Them being the Iraqi army. But what this may amount to is demonstrated in Samawah, where the Dutch army has been replaced with a token British force for the time being. It is planned to deploy an Australian battalion there, but the local police chief doesn't want them. He claims that his own forces can handle the situation. Isn't that what we officially want? Unfortunately, everyone seems to think his police force is effectively a unit of the Badr Corps, the SCIRI paramilitaries. So, handing over to Iraqi security forces in this case means putting the rebels/terrorists/militia/guerrillas/insurgents/whatevers in charge, or at least institutionalising a party army.

This problem, people, is going to come up again and again until whatever end the mad crusade in Iraq finds. Now everyone has a militia - it's the vital fashion accessory for the Iraqi politician in style - everyone is a potential warlord, and the temptation to rebrand them as police or army will be intense. Unfortunately, experience (in Afghanistan post-1992 for one) shows this rarely works. Even in decent, calm, democratic Eire, the Irish army for years had an acrimonious split between the regulars and the citizen force, both being identified with opposite factions of the Irish civil war.

Read this. Please

John Robb says interesting things about Iraq, as does Steve Gilliard.

SAS vs. Bill

Some SAS men have been detected by local cops outside the PM's residence, on a "Routine training exercise". God knows what that was about.

Fake Hospital Inspectors

This of people posing as hospital inspectors is deeply sick and Ballardlike.

Howard's Mind Flips

Michael Howard, it seems, wants to say that his father came not from "refugee stock" but from "immigrant stock". Let us leave the point that the very phrase suggests a genetic superiority of one over the other, and move on. As one says.

Howard initiated the Great Asylum Cry back in the mid-90s when he attempted to legislate that those persons whose applications had been rejected, who could not work anyway, would receive no state benefits and hence no food. The courts shot him down, but the aim was achieved. Murdoch liked it. Howard did, of course, not mention that he had placed a hiring freeze on the Immigration Service. Nor did he mention that, once the most secure border in history was gone and there was a race war in the Balkans, a few more refugees might perhaps not have been the least probable development.

No, a national hate campaign began against the Economic Migrants who were posing as refugees. (A point to anyone who remembers the term Economic Migrant - where did that get to?) They were Spongers. They were, illogically, Bogus Asylum Seekers, not that anyone ever suggested they were not seeking asylum.

More recently, Tony Blair's answer to this was to make a show of Murdoch-mandated toughness whilst quietly issuing a lot of work permits. In a sense, it was a rational workaround. Importantly, you could now be an Economic Migrant honestly - but the BAS hate campaign went on.

Not so long ago, Michael Howard harped on his father's flight from a fascist Romania to the UK. Now, his dad had quite clearly a well-founded fear of persecution: the legal test of refugee status. The Hechts went on to make good. But tonight, Mr. Michael Howard denied them. They were not refugees, he said. They came to do a job!

Or, in other words, they were Bogus Asylum Seekers. What on earth is wrong with the man?

New Iraq's New Airline

Years ago, I asked why the aircraft belonging to the new Iraqi Airways were all registered under 9L-, that is, Sierra Leonean registration. Stranger yet, some of the well-travelled Boeing 737s involved had Sierra Leone registrations sequential with various VB ships. 9L-LEG, serial no. 22885, for example, had seen service at Trans Air Congo with 9L-LEC, an An-12 pictured in Baghdad in 2004 with "Skylink" titles and widely held to be a Boutster. They all officially belonged to some lot called Teebah Airlines.

Now, I finally bothered to check this, and it turns out Teebah belongs to Sheikh Hussain al-Khawam, head of one of Iraq's biggest tribes. Interestingly, the al-Khawams are also on reports of the beneficiaries of Oil/Food scams. Funny that. Yer man's business manager, Hatim al-Khawam, was also appointed by the US/UK appointed Iraq Governing Council as Ambassador to Greece. Small world..

(Note - post edited to add more linky goodness)

Hip Down: A Look on Skylink

An Mi-8 helicopter (NATO name Hip) has been destroyed by Iraqi rebels/insurgents/terrorists. Aboard were eleven men - three Bulgarian aircrew, two Fijian guards, and six US "security contractors". They are all reported dead. One of them apparently survived the crash and was then murdered by the shooters, who filmed his death and published the film on the web.

If you think I'm going to link it, you need to go elsewhere. Snuff movies and jihadi propaganda are not part of my core business.

Depressingly, crashes lend the most information available on the worldwide black aviation market. Regulars will recall TYR reports on the spate of Viktor Bout-related aircraft that went down earlier this year. For a start, recent information leads me to the conclusion that Skylink Air & Logistics, the Canadian firm who run Baghdad Airport, are one of the Bout customers in Iraq. I doubted this originally, after Doug Farah suggested it: there is a dubious Skylink Express in Russia. However, I am now aware that SkyLink were the operators of a regular Antonov 12 service between Dubai-Baghdad, whose details fit those of the continuing flights by British Gulf International on the same route (BGIA has the ICAO code BGK). That doesn't explain all the others: Jetline, Jet Line and their isotope Airline Transport, Air Bas, Irbis, Sky Traffic Facilitators, Click, Georgian National (NOT the official Georgian national airline), or Falcon Express Cargo Airlines, the FedEx subsidiary whose Beech 1900 flyers say the induction course is a showing of Air America but won't say if certain aircraft ever worked for them.

But it's a start. SkyLink have a reputation for flying in bad places, that they claim is for humanitarian reasons. Depressingly, though, they seem to have a history of dealing with people that one might choose not to. Over Kosovo, they were commissioned by something called the International Rescue Committee to drop food to refugees - a laudable mission, no? But that story tells more, though, because the list of Moldovan Antonov 26 operators of the time is a grim document. There are few, and several are firms strongly associated with Viktor Bout. It must have been Tepaviatrans or Renan. In Afghanistan in the late 90s, SkyLink are credited with flying their Antonov 32s when "the Russians wouldn't", apparently after the Taliban's detention of one of Viktor's Il-76s. Not that the load of an An32 is much, but one would love to know what the relation was.

Heli Air, then? A Heli Air Services in Bulgaria owns a number of Russian-built big transports, but they seem respectable. I seem to recall a similar name in a DRC report, so this will have to run a while.

ASBOs: the power of one

A week ago, I asked exactly who had experienced the fear, harassment or distress that led to anti-Menwith Hill campaigner Lindis Percy being slapped with an ASBO. I now know something about this: the body that applied for the ASBO was the Ministry of Defence. Just think - one old lady committed on pain of hell fire to nonviolence could commit fear, harassment and distress to the entire British armed forces and over 100,000 bureaucrats, armed with everything from SA80 rifles (not that they go off) to strategic ballistic missiles as nuclear as hell. And all that by protesting outside an installation where nobody actually works for the MOD. Nuh. They used to be mostly NSA civvie spooks, but my last information said many more uniforms were in evidence. Either way, you'll find more guys ballin' and throwing out pitches than laikin' Rugby League.

Now, I wasn't aware that you could have an ASBO solely on the word of a thing, rather than a human being. Or perhaps the MOD lawyers found someone (perhaps themselves) to fill in the papers.

Whatever, I think it will be well worth knowing who was behind it. Calls and FOIARs will follow on Monday.

MG Rover: The Filth Keeps Dripping...

The Independent on Sunday:

"Amid mounting anger last night among more than 5,000 workers facing redundancy, it emerged that the so-called "Phoenix Four" directors, led by John Towers, are the biggest creditors to MG Rover. This means that the directors, who have already made about £40m from the company after buying it for £10 each, will have the largest claim to any proceeds raised from the sale of the carmaker's assets, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the administrator, confirmed."

Tim Worstall, via the Torygraph:

"Those figures neatly match interest payments made by MG Rover on "loans from group undertakings" (of £10.9m in 2003 and £10.1m in 2002). Another note reveals that MG Rover had loans from "group undertakings" of £411.5m in 2003 and £391.5m the previous year.

Anyway, these interest payments meant that - while MG Rover was heavily loss-making - Techtronic made a pre-tax profit of £11.6m in 2003 and was proposing to pay dividends of £32.5m. The previous year it made a similar profit and paid dividends of £18m.

Seems pretty clear there, eh? Someone lends you half a billion interest free and you then loan it on with interest. Do that for a few years and you’re pretty wealthy.

The Yorkshire Ranter, November 13th 2004:

"Another interesting fact is that BMW loan. The loan was made, free of interest, to Techtronic. Techtronic disburses it as required to MG Rover. But Techtronic charges MG Rover interest on it, interest that presumably benefits only the Techtronic shareholders."

We don't report the news, we write it...

Anti-Japanese Demos, Perhaps..

It is reported that China is in the grip of mass demonstrations against all things Japanese. I'm sure it's true, but then again...what about this? If this is accurate, here we have a serious rising that chased off the police and the local administration, with no sign of "anti-Japanese". Two things come to mind: one, that a good hate campaign is a time honoured Communist device to divert criticism. As late as 1968 the Polish Party was at it with an anti-Jewish propaganda drive to take minds off next door. The other is that, if you are a Chinese communist official faced with this, wouldn't you be tempted to give out that it was all about Japan?

Another point: this has happened exactly where you might have expected it, neither in the big city nor in the dirt-poor backwoods, but in the zone of transition between the two.