Just another planeload of cash

I can't help thinking that if this LA Times story is accurate, those BGIA planes need a searching.

In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda's command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network's operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity.

The influx of money has bolstered Al Qaeda's leadership ranks at a time when the core command is regrouping and reasserting influence over its far-flung network. The trend also signals a reversal in the traditional flow of Al Qaeda funds, with the network's leadership surviving to a large extent on money coming in from its most profitable franchise, rather than distributing funds from headquarters to distant cells.

Al Qaeda's efforts were aided, intelligence officials said, by Pakistan's withdrawal in September of tens of thousands of troops from the tribal areas along the Afghanistan border where Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, are believed to be hiding.

Little more than a year ago, Al Qaeda's core command was thought to be in a financial crunch. But U.S. officials said cash shipped from Iraq has eased those troubles.

"Iraq is a big moneymaker for them," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official.

Well, it's yet another tick on the yards-long list of fuck-ups, and hardly surprising. But why BGIA? Consider this. Back in 2004-2005, this operation was flying constantly from Iraq to the UAE, occasionally from the UAE to Afghanistan, but also from the UAE to Pakistan on charter to "Royal Air Cargo". This entity's exact details are unclear, but let's put it this way - it seems to be from Saudi Arabia, and its aircraft come from BGIA, Irbis Air Co, Air Cess, and Air Bridge Group, a shortlived company associated with Aerocom that wanted to fly between northern Australia and Indo-China with Antonov 12 aircraft.

You may be able to guess why this could be suspicious. Royal also lost an Ilyushin 76 on the approach to Bagram on Remembrance Day, 2005. But honestly, what is it that you'd move between Iraq and Pakistan? It's not going to be anything good. Readers with long memories will remember that it was precisely the delivery of Iraq's new currency that SkyLink Logistics carried out using BGIA's chartered, Sao Tome-registered Il-76 S9-DAE. (See here, here, here, and here.)

There's also another, Pakistani-based Royal - it's even got a website, which tells us that it has ties to the UAE royal family. But then, so did our old friends Flying Dolphin and Santa Cruz Imperial.

Go to school, learn the rules, don't be no faker!

This post from PZ Myers raises a very important point about decentralisation and local accountability. What if the quacks get control? Families and schools are always a problem with regard to liberty - no-one has the right to experiment on the public without their consent, but youth is the one experiment that is performed on everyone.

It may be your right to believe that heliocentrism is an atheistic doctrine that must be suppressed, but it's surely a grave infringement of the liberty of others to enforce it on their kids. Not to mention an infringement of the children's liberty. The glib answer is that you can always send them somewhere else, but this instantly crashes into all the problems of "choice" as a solution for schools (inequality, oversubscribed schools, self-fulfilling signals, lack of real choice in many places), not to mention that it implicitly accepts that the people left behind will just suffer.

Robert Waldmann remarks that there is no evidence that any society has ever put too much money into education. I think he's right. But this is rather what I was getting at in this post. Education is an investment that cannot be readily replaced if it goes wrong - in the example it's much more like the hole in the ground that you can't replace in 50 years than the Ethernet switch, which you can swap out in half an hour. Hence, it's not enough to say that if the creationists (or paedophiles, fascists, jihadis etc) get a school, it will eventually fail. By then the damage is done, it cannot easily be put right, and it bears most heavily on those least able to put it right.

Violent agreement

Here's part two of Wired's interview with John Robb on the occasion of his book. It's cracking stuff - they got Kris "Alexander the Average" Alexander to grill him. But the really interesting thing here is the curious way Robbo and his arch-rival Thomas Barnett are increasingly locked in violent agreement. Consider Robbo's positive recommendations:

Investments in people. Language and cultural training for a large percentage of the force. Knowing the language and a culture is almost as important as being able to shoot a rifle. In my view, nobody should be in Iraq unless they spent 6 months in language/cultural training.

Well, this is something I've been banging on about for years. (Barnett's notion of a sysadmin force is not dissimilar, anyway.) See Pat Lang's recent post.

• Investments in information platforms. Information flows and knowledge development is more important than weapon systems. There are two places where this needs to happen. The first is in civil defense and the second is for the DoD. Robust information platforms that break down silos of information/functionality are a basic requirement for operation of any organization in the 21st Century. They foster innovation and complex adaptive ecosystems (think real responsiveness to the IED problem). IF you have information platforms in place, you can create a level of flexibility in a big organization that mimics a much smaller organization. So far, I’ve not seen much progress on this. Perhaps a military CIO should be on Joint Chiefs of Staff.

There's a lot of truth to this, but first of all it's Robbo talking his own book, and secondly it sounds a lot like Barnett's own Enterra Solutions, which Robb regularly savages.

• Investments in information warfare and unrestricted warfare. This is how most state on state warfare is going to fought in the future and it will be very useful to have as a means of going after global guerrillas. This means everything from the ability to mount wars over the Internet to providing training and guidance to US corporations operating in dangerous areas. This is an area that hasn’t been provided the resources it needs. It also, due to the complexity and irregularity of it, requires much more diversity in skill sets than you typically get from the big military contractors or that from within the military. So far, this has been done in an ad hoc way and the results have been far less than they should have been.

This could be lifted from Barnett's blog, frankly.

• Investments in communities in a box. One of the things we see again and again is the need for the ability to provide instant infrastructure to damaged communities. This ranges from a community cut off due to security needs in counter-insurgency to disaster relief. How do you package infrastructure for 20-30,000 people in a box? The military should be solving this.

This is essentially Barnett's thing about "Development in a Box", which also happens to be something very like Architecture for Humanity's recent competition to design a "community tech centre", not to mention the GSM Association and Motorola's all-renewable powered, zero dig GSM/EDGE base station.

So it's going to be very amusing the next time they fall out. More importantly, what light does this cast on UK defence policy? On the first point, there is almost nothing in the MOD's budget that would have a greater rate of return than a sizable retention bonus for Intelligence Corps linguists and agent handlers. On the second, the agonising procurement disaster that was the Army's BOWMAN radio system doesn't need rehearsing here, but I would point out that some other armies (especially the South Koreans) are experimenting with IEEE802.16e Mobile WiMAX mesh networking. It would probably be wise to put some money into a decent scale trial, especially as if the technology takes off it will be cheap - Intel is integrating it in the next lot of its wireless chipsets (Rosedale-2 and beyond).

I'm pretty happy with the existing position on the third point: check out this page at the European Networks and Information Security Agency. There are more Computer Emergency Response Teams in the UK, 14 of them, than any European country but Germany, and they include BT-CERT, where somebody reads this blog - so they must be good.

The airline that wasn't is back

Flying from Sharjah to Bagram AFB today is an aircraft operating for "British Gulf International Company" as opposed to British Gulf International Airlines, using the ICAO code BGI rather than BGK. Why should this be interesting? Well, back in the beginning in 2003, BGIA was supposed to be a company from Sao Tome that had set up a subsidiary with Kyrgyz registration and transferred all but one of its aircraft there. Not that Sao Tome played any significant role in this - the offices, staff, and aircraft were in Sharjah throughout.

This blog later found out that the original Saotomense BGIA had never officially existed at all, not having been registered as a company. Neither had its aircraft ever been registered there before being transferred to the Kyrgyz registry (EX-) and beginning to fly into Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan using the ICAO code BGK. Memorably, they got a DOD fuel card by the simple expedient of filling in the form.

But now, as well as the BGK-coded planes that continue to operate from Dubai and Sharjah to locations in Iraq and (more and more) Afghanistan, there are also BGI-codes out there.

Rates of change

It's fairly usual that big infrastructure systems should be regulated or publicly owned if there is no realistic competition to them. Defining that is more difficult - Railtrack presumably thought it was competing frantically with roads, after all. I propose a different way of looking at it.

What if the distinction were framed in terms of how long the assets involve last? Consider Brough Turner's graphic dealing with the useful lives of different elements in a telecoms (or isp) network. You'll see that the electronics (routers, switches, muxen etc) and optical components go obsolete within 2-3 years, but the fibre-optic (and telecoms copper as opposed to ethernet) lasts 20-30 years, and the digs last 100 years or more. In a wireless context, the kit goes obsolete quickly, the spectrum allocations on a 10-20 years timetable, and the site footprints are of indefinite life.

In a sense, design life is another way of saying money - the longer it takes to replace something, the more capital is involved, and hence the greater the monopoly power that accrues to the owner. We couldn't build another railway, and even if the alignments were available, laying track would be a monstrously huge enterprise. So whoever owns the footprint is always going to have a lot of power. Similarly, the cost of replicating the BT local loop would be impossible.

It's interesting that competition exists in fixed-line telecoms in Britain precisely at the electronic level - you are allowed to put your DSLAMs in their facilities and have your own switches, routers and such. Perhaps the rulebook for utilities should be that competition becomes more appropriate, the less time is needed to make good a bad decision? There's an analogy with education, clearly, and perhaps health - anyway, the cost of replicating NHS facilities would be mountainous.

Falklands Myth 3: An Imperial War?

OK, part three of the Falklands 25th anniversary series. The others are here, dealing with command, and here, dealing with Margaret Thatcher.

It's been quite a common idea since the war that the Falklands represented some sort of throwback to the empire, or alternatively a rejection of Europe in favour of it. This is usually coded as being an atavistic endeavour, trying to return to an imperial past associated with warmongering and jingoism, which the people who say this implicitly romanticise in a nice paradox, or else a return to an organic tradition. The determining factor is, as usual, partisanship - the left, especially the pro-European bits, assign values of modernity, realism, and pacifism to "Europe", and irrationality and warmongering to not-Europe. The Right, meanwhile, seems to conflate the Falklands War with the maritime tradition and the Atlantic alliance (we'll come to this in part 4, by the way).

It's a question of meta-narratives, clearly. One of the enduring ones of British politics is the tension between Europe and America, with the Commonwealth being shared between the American side (as leftover empire) and the European side (as the object of internationalist concern). This overlies Basil Liddell-Hart's notion that British military and political strategy fluctuates between "continental commitments" and "blue water". He strongly favoured the latter.

After 1968, when the decision was taken to withdraw from the Singapore base, British defence policy swung sharply towards European NATO (even though the Heath government reversed the decision and British forces stayed in Singapore and Malta up to 1976), and a role centred on the British Army of the Rhine, nukes, and the NATO Northern Flank for the Marines and Navy. Theoretically, a world-wide reach was still envisaged under various promises extended to Australia, Malaysia, and the UAE, but nobody took it seriously.

Much of the big navy had been decommissioned by 1982, and this didn't change with the Conservative government - which resumed Navy deployments out-of-area, but wanted to cut one of the carriers and both the Fearless-class assault ships, thus ending the amphibious capability. The Falklands war caused some changes in this, reversing these decisions and leading to some upgrades in Naval equipment, although no new ships.

It must have felt pretty imperial, though. Canberra and Elk refuelled at the Queen Elizabeth wharf in Freetown on the way south, where they were met by bumboats trying to sell things aboard. The task force took its drinking water south aboard a Canadian Pacific Line tanker, Fort Toronto. New Zealand lent the UK a frigate to cover a NATO task. The RFA's six Landing Ships Logistics had Hong Kong Chinese civilian crews, aboard ships that had been operated up to 1970 not by the RFA but by the British India Steam Navigation Company. In a broader sense, the Argentine invasion was certainly the sort of frontier crisis John Gallagher noted could cause dramatic political shifts at the centre.

But what was the political-strategic upshot? Even if the Navy was essentially saved, there was no great reorientation of total strategy. The next 20 years, in fact, would turn out to be the most European ever. A lot of people didn't think so - François Mitterand, for example, thought this showed Britain would always choose its "vieux comptoirs du Commonwealth" over Europe. The Single European Act, the Maastricht Treaty, the ERM episode, the Amsterdam and Nice treaties, the Saint-Malo agreement on European defence cooperation, the Convention - it was all in the future, as was the Conservative Party's collective breakdown over the issue, and the 1987 Labour Party Policy Review that flipped their position on the EU under pressure from the unions. Only the rush to war with Iraq in 2002 would stop this trend. (Remember that Tony Blair had called the Laeken conference as late as the autumn of 2001.)

As far as the armed forces went, cold-war status went on right up to 1997/8. The Conservative government carried out two major defence reviews, neither of which altered very much except for cutting the whole establishment. The first new amphibious-warfare ship post-Falklands was delivered in 1996. The explanation is of course structural. The persistence of the Cold War, very simply, entrained a north European and North Atlantic strategy, next to which anywhere else was an extra tour, only to be considered in so far as the Soviet Union moved that way under the influence of Admiral Gorshkov.

Today, nothing seems more anachronistic about the Falklands than the notion that Soviet long-range aircraft were once based in Conakry.

Coming soon: part four, an American war?

Dead Pool

The Ministry is doing a ministerial dead pool for the post-Blair era. Strange concept. I have to say I'm not that impressed by his pre-resignation. Not only do I have the feeling it won't be over until something like the Czech joke about Bilak's widow going to visit Husak in jail to tell him how Jakes was murdered at the funeral of some other dinosaur whose name I forget, what really matters is the Blairite continuity or lack of it.

But here goes, anyway:

Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling, Des Browne, Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn: in line for promotion, clearly. Amos, Hain, John Hutton, Jack Straw and "World's Boringest Man" Mike O'Brien: dull, useful placemen, in line for a sideways move. God, this is going to be a boring government, isn't it? No wonder Brown is talking coalitions and "governments of all the talents". David Miliband, Hazel Blears - difficult to see whether to use one of them to square the Special Republican Guard survivors, or crush them. Hewitt - strong Brownite/Kinnockite credentials, but if Brown goes for the idea of pulling the NHS out of ministerial line management, it'll be indistinguishable from a demotion.

Lord Falconer - no, can't see a future for him, whack him on the list. Ruth Kelly: the unions despise her, so does the press, and it's only a matter of time until some council or planning issue goes pop. Jowell - whatever she's got on Blair can't harm Brown, surely? Hoon - much the same.

Goldsmith - that bastard would survive a nuclear holocaust, and turn up perfectly pressed in the smouldering aftermath to justify it. Chief Whips - for a start, who are these people? Simply a tactical issue, anyway - does the benefit of having your own thugs outweigh the risk of offending the last ones?

Beckett - might survive for the sake of credentialism, but her seat is probably wanted for Miliband or someone.

I'll go with Falconer, Beckett (if Miliband is saved, else Blears), Jowell, Hoon, and Hewitt with the proviso that the Department of Health will be reduced enough to count as a demotion.

Tories, meanwhile...

Andrew Lansley - numskull, associated with Hague's 2001 campaign. Gotta go. Francis Maude - doesn't have a department to shadow, so can't get very much wrong, and anyway has managed to survive from 1997. David Davis, William Hague - needed to prop up Dave from PR, like a drunk's less pissed friends. Oliver Letwin - the tribal right hate him, but more importantly he's bound to fuck up epically at least once. Might make it to the first reshuffle. The rest - really, I've no idea. Who are these nonentities?

Out of sheer schadenfreude, I'll list Philip Hammond, my MP, because he's a slimy old git. But I suspect he's really going to shadow Pensions until he draws his pension. I suspect George Osborne might crash at some point.

So...Lansley, Letwin, Duncan (bright, but flaky), Osborne as a long-range target, who else? Liam Fox is a thin layer of sane over an abyss of right-wing crazy, and there's always the chance he'll plunge through.

Desert Viktory

"Whoever dared paint markings on a plane's wing was a swine," said one of Pierre Clostermann's comrades the night of the 8th of May, 1945. Latest reports from Sudan suggest you can do pretty well painting them out, too. The Sudanese government has been caught using various Antonov-26 aircraft to bomb villages in Darfur, having repainted them to look like the UN's food airlift.

This raises the question, of course, of whether some of the "UN" aircraft are actually UN-registry ones, that is to say Kazakhstan. Viktor Bout's airlines have relied on this coincidence before, taking advantage of the fact the UN World Food Programme is often operating in the same places with the same rugged Soviet planes, chartered from similarly dubious owners.

So far, none of these have been spotted. The UNSC report, for example, mentions one with a Sudanese civil registration ST-ZZZ, a fake. The plane is probably serial no. 57303506, which used to be registered in Russia as RA-26563 before its sale to Sudan. It has occasionally been reported as "UN-26563" masquerading as a UN aircraft. (That registration does not exist either.) There's a photo, as well as a copy of the report , here.)

It's the stuff. Sudan has been a significant market for both Viktor Bout and Britain's own friendly local warzone airline Avient, and here's something interesting. In the photograph of a gaggle of Mi24 (Hind) attack helicopters on the flight line at El Fasher, you can see the nose of an aircraft in Air West colours. Air West (ICAO: AWZ) is also known as East-West Cargo, and is a company on the UN Security Council asset freeze list. A scan of its aircraft roster shows planes swapping in and out with Irbis Air Co, GST Air Co, and BGIA, including a Yak-42 that was also caught operating into Iraq from Dubai in mid-2004.

Frustratingly, the UN also took photos of an Il-76 unloading armed Land Cruisers there, but it's impossible to make out the registration. It doesn't look like any of the Airwest ones, though, nor GST, neither is it Avient's Z-WTV.

I've been to a marvellous party..

From my hometown newspaper's 75 years ago column, last week:

There was the most hilarious party in Ilkley on Saturday night. It was described as a "poverty party" and a gathering of about 20 people assembled in a well-known house with their shabbiest garments, sat about on orange boxes and chairs without backs, with tallow candles as the only illumination, and for refreshments ate fish and chips without knives and forks, cheese, and bread and water.

Everyone declared it had been one of the jolliest gatherings they had known.

In 1932.

Nonexistent state update

An interesting story from Pacific Magazine on the Bougainville fraudster king we covered back in October, 2004.

Jim Gamble: no integrity at all

The next big miscarriage of justice makes it to the BBC. Great.

But this is impressively dishonest from Jim Gamble, former supercop and head of the Home Office's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre:

He also defended the record of the operation and told the Radio 4 programme that more than 90% of the individuals tracked by police had pleaded guilty.

"That's not about credit card fraud," he said.

"That's people who - the allegation has been levelled against them, the evidence has been collected and they, at court or through accepting an adult caution, which 600-plus of them did, have said I am guilty of this offence."

Ah, police logic. We got a conviction, so they're guilty. They must be guilty, because we got them. This is why they accepted cautions - because they were offered them as an alternative to being raped or stabbed in jail.

I've no idea why anyone would think being falsely accused would be less frightening than being accused of something you actually did, especially when it was based on "evidence" that was given out as near-infallible and was incomprehensible to most jurors. Gamble, of course, is not going to rock the boat now he has his own little budgetivorous organism.

Back in Bradford

Last weekend, for the first time in years. A couple of things - first of all, they're knocking down the first attempts at regeneration now, whilst a lot of the empty sites that used to be mills are still empty. The whole 60s grey tickytacky city centre is gone, leaving half a mile of rubble. Oddly, the remaining Victorian buildings seem to reassert themselves in the power vacuum, the sight lines being recreated onto the Wool Exchange and others. The changes to the street plan also have this effect - Market Street, Priestley's favourite, is a major road again. (Bet it's shit on a weekday, though.)

How did I not notice how many weird religious entities there are in town before? Not just the Muslims (although I saw tract-pushers in the city centre, something I don't remember seeing very often before), but the Scientologists and weirdo yank Christian sects. The Abundant Life people have had their supermarket-size hangar for years, but it's the first time I saw it as a religious building rather than an unusual B&Q.

What does it mean? Yorkshire has a tradition of sects, and I suppose the lag between Bradford and Leeds in the last twenty years doesn't help. I can't help seeing it as worrying, though.

The Indy takes a holiday in sane

The Independent appears to have repented of its indulgence of Martin Durkan's quackery, publishing a report on various scientists usually considered to be "climate sceptics" whose work Durkan misrepresented or even falsified.

Dr Friiss-Christensen said that a graph he had produced some years ago showing the link between fluctuations in global temperatures and changes in solar activity - sunspot cycles - over the past 400 years had been doctored. The documentary used the graph to pour scorn on the idea that the global warming in recent decades is the result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide. Solar activity, the programme stated, is the cause of global warming in the late 20th century.

However, Dr Friiss-Christensen has issued a statement with Nathan Rive, a climate researcher at Imperial College London and the Centre for Climate Research in Oslo, distancing himself from the C4 graph. He said there was a gap in the historical record on solar cycles from about 1610 to 1710 but the film-makers made up this break with fabricated data that made it appear as if temperatures and solar cycles had followed one another very closely for the entire 400-year period.

"We have reason to believe that parts of the graph were made up of fabricated data that were presented as genuine. The inclusion of the artificial data is both misleading and pointless," Dr Friis-Christensen said.

"Secondly, although the commentary during the presentation of the graph is consistent with the conclusions of the paper from which the figure originates, it incorrectly rules out a contribution by anthropogenic [man-made] greenhouse gases to 20th century global warming," he said.

It's a start, I suppose. Meanwhile, their response to criticism on the radio-kills-bees fairy story remains nonexistent - perhaps they are a little embarrassed that the German researchers involved are publicly displeased in much the same way Friiss-Christensen is.

Libraries gave us power

Everyone's vexed (h/t to Dan Hardie) about the spankin' new city academy in Peterborough that, courtesy of Perkins Engines, will be offering education with a total ban on "unstructured play". It's the most expensive state school ever built at £46.4 million, but hey! Perkins put up all of £2 million out of that, always assuming that (unlike most City Academy sponsors) they didn't get a sweetener from the DFES and actually bothered to pay. Well, it's impressive that they managed to come up with a form of schooling that will punish the sporty kids and the geeks alike - no mass football, and no sneaking off to the library either. Do they even have a library, I wonder?

The obvious reference is Dickens, and Dsquared mounts a defence of Mr Gradgrind in the comments. But this is wrong. This isn't Victorian, it's 18th-century - panopticon-a-gogo. I'm surprised they haven't promised to isolate a newborn to see if they speak Blairite by default. But if you think that's nightmarish, cheer up. The worst is yet to come.

Teh Grauniad's education diary reports on Hylton Red House School in Sunderland, which has got its very own call centre that will apparently

raise aspirations, develop career paths and help youngsters to develop skills

Raise aspirations from what? And which skills will it develop exactly? I think I can guess - mindless obedience to a script, tolerance for management-by-fear, and therapy-babble sales motivation. (I was once fired from a call-centre job for hanging my jacket on the back of my chair.) Ideological state apparatus, anyone? You'll be glad to know that this exercise in regimentation is brought to you by the private sector. Or not really. The corporate sponsor is actually a nationalised industry, EDF Energy. That's EDF as in the French state electricity company, the biggest generator of power in the world. I wonder what their French workforce, mostly communist, would make of it.

This is doubly depressing because it's pointless. I recall when call centres were touted as The Future for Yorkshire in about 1996. It was already clear that this was not going to last, because the cost of telecommunications was falling fast. Therefore, it was going to get outsourced, and sharpish. It's a special case of a more general principle, which is that it only makes sense to specialise in a low-margin, labour-intensive commodity product if your comparative advantage is cheap labour. And that ain't going to happen so long as we share a planet with Bangladesh.

In the same issue of Educashon Grauniad, Blairite poohbah David Puttnam pleads for schoolchildren to be allowed more freedom to fiddle with the computers, pointing out quite rightly that there is a big gap between setting up a LAN party for your mates and school IT lessons on PowerPoint. Pity about that. Meanwhile, we've got a call-rate to keep up.

I strongly object to a society where suggesting that schools should have playgrounds makes me feel like a deranged idealist.

PS: Note that the Crooked Timber thread also shows that Dan Hardie and Dsquared are gradually heading closer and closer to a genuinely explosive blogwar, like Britain and Germany in 1911..

Myths of the Falklands 2: Thatcher's War

The Falklands War represents a big part of the Thatcher mythos, to the extent that it's become part of the media's operational code that you can't divide the two. This is founded on a couple of facts, and more myths. The fact is that it undoubtedly helped her win re-election from a fairly ugly starting point. (The counterfact is that, had it gone the other way, as was possible, she would almost certainly have been doomed.)

The myths, though, are much more productive. The first one is that the war represented a personal achievement for Margaret Thatcher, that her strength of purpose and decisions were crucial to success. The second is that the war somehow represented Thatcherism, for good or ill depending on partisan allegiance.

The official myth of Thatcher begins with the notion, as retailed in her memoirs, that the invasion came as a total surprise and no power on earth could prevent it. But, on the 2nd April, 1982, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, came in full uniform to an emergency inner cabinet and briefed that a carrier group could sail within 48 hours. Thatcher, inspired, swept aside the objections of pitiful wets to order the sinking of the Belgrano and win the war, with the vital support of the Americans.


It's a myth. As Brian Barder points out, it is simply not true that "No one predicted the Argentine invasion more than a few hours in advance". Regular intelligence warnings had arrived for months, the South Georgia crisis had arisen, and by the 2nd of April, the Royal Navy had been increasing its readiness state for several days. On the 26th of March, when a specific intelligence warning from a source in Argentina arrived, the first shipping movements had already begun (RFAs Greenleaf and Fort Austin being set in motion south). The key value was the time it took for a Valiant or Swiftsure-class submarine to sail south at maximum speed - Spartan made it in a week and a half, sailing on the 27th March. To put it another way, sailing the sub on the 23rd would have put her in Falklands waters on invasion day. On the 20th of March, the government ordered Endurance to South Georgia with Lieutenant Keith Mills's marines aboard.

It was the obvious moment to take action, but the Thatcher cabinet was torn between the will to wound and the fear to strike. The Argentine admiral in command, Rear-Admiral Allara, had always assumed that the presence of a submarine would kibosh the operation. Unlike in 1977, when the Callaghan government deployed HMS Dreadnought, the chance was passed up. The government kept dickering, while the Navy staffs made quiet preparations.

On the 29th of March, Fleet HQ at Northwood warned off the carriers and Sandy Woodward's escort group in the Mediterranean, whilst setting up a 24-hour operations watch for the South Atlantic. The military must accept a little criticism here - "order, counterorder, disorder" was rife, with 40 Commando, Royal Marines, being stood-to for the South Atlantic with no word of how to get there, stood down, stood to again, and stood down again without anyone bothering to tell 3 Commando Brigade or Mike Clapp's amphibious-warfare HQ about it.

Finally, the government took charge once the damage was done. But, as we discussed in Myth 1, it was far from clear about what it wanted. Northwood didn't issue a clear aim until the 12th of May, probably because it didn't have one itself. This begs the question of whether the Chiefs of Staff had one, which begs the question of what the government thought it was doing. (It also reflects badly on the Chiefs that they didn't insist on a clear grand strategy, or come up with one themselves.)

Decisive? Hardly. But the Thatcher government did at least avoid some of the possible traps. In April and early May, there was a lot of military quackery abroad, with wild suggestions of "making a bang in the South Atlantic" (as Michael Rose liked to say) by crash-landing Hercules aircraft full of SAS onto the Stanley airfield in order to....er...kidnap the Argentine commander, or something, or of launching a Vulcan raid on Buenos Aires, or (for Christ's sake) blowing up the Exocet plant in Toulouse, despite the fact the French intelligence services were helping to prevent any more of the missiles reaching Argentina. Fortunately, they built on the rock and not upon the sand.

Then there was the temptation of relying on the Americans, who had little interest in seeing their pet dictator walloped, or of grabbing for a compromise solution. There was the US offer of the loan of an aircraft carrier to be manned by the Royal Navy, which given the timescales involved can only realistically have been a white elephant intended to scupper the expedition. (Imagine all that requalification for the 3,000 ratings involved, on equipment never seen before in the RN.)

Whatever judgment is drawn on Thatcher should be tempered by the fact she could rely on some outstanding civil servants, specifically Sir Frank Cooper as MOD Permanent Secretary and Sir John Hunt as Cabinet Secretary, although the shaky performance of the Chiefs counterweighs this. Whatever, it's pretty clear she did better than Tony Blair or John Major would have, but not as well as Jim Callaghan, who scored the jackpot by heading off the war in the first place.

On the second, broader topic, a detailed consideration shows that to win the war, Thatcher had to rely on a whole swath of institutions and cultures she had not the slightest regard for. Early on, the MOD(Navy) called in the chief executive of P&0, acting for the whole shipping industry, and the National Union of Seamen, to thrash out the conditions under which merchant ships and their crews would serve. It was concluded that they would get a 150 per cent bonus and stay under their normal discipline until action was joined. A less Thatcherite solution is hard to imagine.

Hence, the scene south of Ascension, where Atlantic Conveyor drew alongside the fleet tanker RFA Tidepool to refuel underway. This had of course never been imagined for the big container ship. As the transfer was going on, Soviet Tu-95 Bear reconnaissance planes flew overhead several times to take photos. The Navy, the RFA, and her master hoped the Russians would show the images to someone who would spot the key detail - Atlantic Conveyor was the leader, with the fleet tanker keeping station on her, not the other way around.

Similarly, just to get started, Devonport Dockyard had to turn around RFA Stromness, which they had just completed stripping of stores and equipment before putting her in mothballs. This had taken weeks, but she was readied for sea and loaded with a huge range of supplies (a portable fuel-handling terminal, thousands of feet of aluminium runway planking) and several hundred Marines within days. The BLACK BUCK Vulcan raids relied, as the V-bombers always had done, on direct interworking between the engineering wings and the aerospace industry.

It's fair to say, I think, that Margaret Thatcher cared politically for nothing less than the merchant fleet, the unions, shipwrights, or for that matter, the Navy. A lot of military people look back to her with nostalgia, but then, by definition they were younger then. And, with the exception of the Falklands, it wasn't a bad time to be a soldier - overseas postings were either sunny (Belize, Hong Kong, Cyprus) or dull but comfortable, like the vast bulk of the army's bases in Northern Germany, with good beer, kebabs, and duty-free perks. And very little action.

No, this was more like the death ride of the post-war consensus. Some people, like Fort Austin's captain Sam Dunlop, had done the whole of the second world war.

None of this prevented the media, and Thatcher's spin doctors, from rolling the whole thing into the Thatcher myth - the photos of her riding a tank during Exercise LIONHEART-84, endless pompous blather. Meanwhile, the merchant navy vanished, as did the shipyards, BAE converted itself into a machine focused on Saudi shenanigans, and the military didn't lay down another amphibious ship until Ocean in 1995.

Rugby League Bloggin' - The Fix is In

Well, for the first time this year I got to a game on Sunday. London (...sorry, Harlequins) and St Helens. As always, a tough first half, with some hope, then a horrible rout. But the hard thing is League at the Stoop - I never saw London there the first time round, and I'm familiar with seeing them at Griffin Park. Now, Griffin Park (Brentford FC) is almost eerily like most RL grounds, caught among the streets, scruffy. It also had a great clubhouse bar, shared by the fans, players, and the Sky TV crew.

The Stoop is, ah, different. Prices have doubled (20 Quid To Get In?), and the gates are terrible (yes, why not make everyone queue twice), and it's all oddly out of place. The bar is run by Welshmen, presumably for Union reasons. But, why worry? There was a frankly good crowd, split between the usual London RL eccentrics, exiles, and some people who could be new converts.

But it's not this I'm thinking about. It's the bloody Australians. For years, everyone hoped that one day, they'd do a World Cup in a country where huge audiences for league are obvious. They always dodged, just as they took great care to do nothing for the Pacific Island guys. Now, they're finally doing one. But they've done a horror.

In 1995, 10 teams competed in the Centenary World Cup. Three groups were organised, one including both England and Australia. This was a little dodgy, but it went well and nobody cared. In 2000, a 16-team World Cup was organised in the UK, widely considered A Disaster. Well, praps. At the time, the railway system was in a condition of collapse, and two of the cities involved (York and Gloucester) were full of Royal Engineers struggling to prevent them from vanishing under floodwater.

Naturally, the concept of a World Cup was the problem, and so nothing was done between 2000 and 2007. Now, though, the Aussies have uncorked a horror - the draw will put England, Australia, and New Zealand in the same supersize group with one unlucky loser. It's the same kind of franchise bullshit that tore the game apart in the 90s, and y'know why? It's institutionalised cheating, is all.

Morality

So Lord Browne is gay. Who knew? Well, I did, simply because people have googled and hit this site at a rate of 20 a day since March, 2004. Think digital privacy doesn't matter? Think again.

But let's ask another question. Back in 2005, BP killed a dozen workers at its Texas City refinery, in an incident that US federal investigators later attributed to incompetence and penny-pinching on the part of BP managers. Jordan Barab covered it in great detail. But it took the Mail two years to even mention it.

I can see their reasoning. I don't have to like it, but I can see it. Shareholders' returns...pro-business...yup. BP was coining it. But why this fit of morality? Is the Mail against business? Alternatively, we have to consider the possibility that Paul Dacre really does think it's better to fry people alive in burning kerosene vapour than make love to them in a manner he (or the Rothermeres) dislikes.

By the way, it's painful to think that Ségoléne Royal actually brought up workplace safety in the French presidential debate last night. Imagine that.

Digital Dave signs up to WLAN psuedoscience

I didn't grok the significance of "Debi Jones", a Tory councillor quoted by the Sindy's latest WLAN pseudoscience scare piece, until I checked in on this row at the Ministry. In a box-out that doesn't appear on their website, Jonathan Owen quotes "Debi Jones, Tory councillor for Hightown in Somerset" as saying that:

"It seems strange that these stories are only coming out now and seem to coincide with the proliferation of mobile phone masts."

Well, except that they aren't and they don't. It turns out Debi Jones is a Cameron/CCO top list candidate and ex-TV presenter, so presumably the Tories have OK'd this as a campaign issue, despite Dave from PR's tendency to use the word "digital" at every opportunity. How dreary.

BTW, can I propose a rule of political discourse? Can we all agree that any politician who wishes to use the words "digital" or "analogue" first publicly define them? They do not mean "new" and "old", nor do they mean "good" and "bad".

Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite

The Ministry reports on some Tories' bright idea, a website where people who don't want to be contacted by canvassers can "sign up" to be taken off their lists. The man behin it, Tory councillor Jeremy Kite, turns up in comments to defend himself.

A clue: it seems not to have declared that Tory canvassers were the ones who would avoid your door, and there is (as Kite admits) no procedure to share this information with the other parties. It's hard to see how this isn't intended to produce the following effect: "What's this, canvassers? I signed up to say I didn't want to see you. Bugger off!" and either abstention or a spite vote for "somebody else" - who is by definition the Tory candidate.

It's also not so fantastic for Kite to be encouraging the public to opt out of politics.

Myths of the Falklands: Number 1, Command

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

Myth number one: Command.

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

It's a myth, of course.

The Chiefs of Staff Committee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One hope for this rested on Admiral Sandy Woodward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Logistic Blindness

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

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

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

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

The National Inquirer, now fortified with Patrick Cockburn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Big Miscarriage of Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did I mention the Home Office must be abolished?

All the atrocities, and how to take advantage

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

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

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

The Rays from Outer Space Strike Canary Wharf

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

It gets worse, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Don't Care

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

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

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

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

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

Diplomacy by visualisation

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

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

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

Iran Non-War Watch

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

More updates from the crime beat

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

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

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

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

Maglev is Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update on Falcone, Chichakli

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

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

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

Here Comes the Equestrian Statue

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

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

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

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

Apparently that is the Ferguson prescription.

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

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

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

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

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

Yet today we live in a different world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus wept. Sewerage, anyone?

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus Pathetic Python Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Admin Notice: Withdrawal of Enetation comments

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

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

The lost opportunity

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

Pathetic Python Sunday

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

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


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

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

The cost of UAVs

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

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

Political GOTO considered harmful

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloggin' Rugby League: Warrington for the Cup?

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

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

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