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Politics and law from a British perspective (hence Politics LAW BloG): ''People who like this sort of thing...'' as the Great Man said
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Sunday, August 31, 2003
Language and incomprehension about the Arab worldSwings and roundabouts: Arab lands have been blessed, as with manna from Heaven, by enormous resources in oil and gas. Their language, on the other hand, is not an entirely unmixed blessing. An interesting analysis of the various regional languages (it lists 12) going under the banner of Arabic, the product of an investigation to determine how many languages of the Arabic family a resource would need to be in to cover 90% of the people. It seems one would require the linguistic skills of Dr Doolittle. A short piece poses the dilemma to the foreigner: learn standard Arabic (no mean feat!), and one can read the language but be able to converse only with literate Arabs; learn one of the 12 spoken languages, and you can talk to all and sundry, but only in the region concerned [1] For Anglophones, add in the fact that many (far from all) of those they might need to talk to will speak English to some extent. All told, a monopolist's dream of a barrier to entry.
| Saturday, August 30, 2003
Aznar stymies his extraterrorialist judges, apparentlyI alluded in my August 13 piece on the case being brought in Spain by relatives of José Couso (victim of US shells at the Palestine Hotel) to another Spanish exercise in human rights extraterritorialism, this time in relation to alleged misdeeds of the junta era in Argentina. The newish president of Argentina, the Care Bear Peronist Nestor Kirchner [1], has made the brave [2] decision of lifting the lid on the junta era, having amnesties annulled and the like. Tied up with his efforts in a way I'm hazy about, from not having kept across the issue, are the efforts of arch-extraterritorialist investigating judge Báltasar Garzón, which have resulted in the Argentinian courts agreeing to the extradition of around 40 suspects he had identified (including General Jorge Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera). The procedure, however, seems to require the formal extradition request to come from the Spanish government. And Prime Minister José María Aznar, according to today's Guardian, has refused to make that request. (My problem with the story is that this is the only report I can trace: nothing else on Google News or altheweb News. In particular, there does not seem to be confirmation in any Spanish news source.) There was a piece yesterday in La Nación of Buenos Aires saying that, unless Spain made the formal request before midnight on Monday, the case would be out of time, and arrangements to free the detained men would be set in train. Clearly, at the time that piece was written, the decision from Aznar had yet to be made public. Assuming there is no extradition, that is not the end of the arrested men's legal travails: the effect of the annulation of the amnesty laws (the so-called leyes de obediencia debida y de punto final) will be, it seems, that cases previously brought in the Argentinian against some or all of them will be revived. It seems the sort of legal lottery fraught with considerable danger, not to mention unfairness (somewhat reminiscent of the post-Cold War cases brought against East German border guards for shooting escapers: establishing the rule of law by imposing retrospective criminal liability!) But that's an Argentinian affair, of course. Still outstanding, last time I looked - on August 20, was the Couso case. Perhaps the Argentinian case shows how Aznar is planning to shield his Glorious Ally from the importunate Judge Garzón. We'll see.
| Friday, August 29, 2003
Manna against the islamophobesWorthy of note for the headline alone (from the Journal de Tanger of August 29): TETOUAN : UNE STRIP-TEASEUSE MET A NU UN TENTACULAIRE RESEAU MAFIEUX INTERNATIONAL OPERANT DANS LE NORD DU MAROC It seems (it's quite a long story, and all in the one paragraph!) that the woman (ungallantly described as rondelette) plied her trade at a night club in what is described as a village estival - some sort of tourist complex? - near Tétouan, not far from Tangier. A fight was started over who was taking her home (or some such), which, by means no doubt revealed by a fuller reading of the text, caused a local mafia involving all sorts of local bigwigs to be unearthed. Morocco has, over the years, been the classic success story of the LBJ motto applied to the Islamic hierarchy: they are well and truly in the tent, and - for a long time, at least - the impact of the radicals was nowhere near that in Algeria, with not dissimilar social and economic problems. (Though, from memory, the scourge of honour killings is as prevalent as, for example, in supposedly westernised Jordan.) Now, making Iraq a land fit for strippers is the sort of goal that ought surely to be warmly embraced by Wolfowitz, Perle and Co.... | How rainbow will Bustamante's coalition be?Little time, unfortunately, to let the entertainment value of the Golden State pantomime soak in - domestic pantomime duties take priority! But it seems to be bubbling nicely. Cruz Bustamante, as a guy who once (if he doesn't now) yearned, as a MEChA man, for the expulsion of the Yankee from formerly Mexican lands - as discussed on August 24, seems to be aping Lázaro Cárdenas who, as president South of the Border, nationalised the US oil businesses in 1938. (Cruz cannot go quite that far - unless he really has bumped secession up his agenda. But, with his proposal to treat gasoline as a utility, he's going pretty far. [1]) He seems to be offering Golden Staters a chance to turn back the clock, and vote for Pat Brown in 1966 (rather than Ronald Reagan, trailblazer for the Governator [2]). But, it seems, blacks may poop the party: a piece by Earl Ofari Hutchinson (a brother, I suspect) suggests they may - and not only because of the much-hyped nigger incident in 2001: Hispanics in CA may [3] trail blacks in every statistical voting category (proportion of adult population eligible to vote, proportion of eligibles registered, proportion of registered who vote), but that slack is being pulled tight. The piece says there are now 24 Hispanic Dems in the state legislature, as against six blacks. In the US House, the proportions are the reverse (four blacks, one Hispanic [4]): but, perhaps, just for now. Now, turn the argument round: if Cruz wins despite a mass black abstention (the piece says he can't), he's going to be (even) less generous to black interests than if they'd stayed loyal: for the blacks to shed their regularity from pique at a historical slip of the tongue, or through feeling elbowed out, would at best (if Arnie wins) send all the wrong signals to Dem pols pondering election strategy, and, at worst, (if Cruz wins) actually accelerate the elbowing process. Not that I discount the possibility that they know more than me on the subject...
| Hutton: did Alastair Campbell lie about his computer skills?I'm serious. In all the profusion of evidence placed before the Inquiry, so much is susceptible of differing interpretations, matters on which reasonable men of integrity might disagree. Lord Hutton will, in time, have to weigh such evidence and arrive at his own interpretation. What our side [1] needs is to catch out a key HMG player in an outright lie, on which there is no room for reasonable men of integrity to disagree. We are - to analogise [2] - several derivatives in [3]. But the lessons of past scandals is, that doesn't matter. The semen-stained dress from the Gap was pretty damned remote from the Great Fornicator's creative notions of integrity and truth-telling: but it at least got an admission of his false testimony on the record. And, of all modern British prime ministers, Tony Blair's shtick with the voters was, Trust me! He put it in play - just as John Major put his ministers' marital fidelity in play with his Back to Basics speech. So - AC and PCs, then. He told Hutton (143:10) I am Now, there is an initial question of interpretation here: he could be saying that he knows how to use a computer, but chooses not to do so. But I don't think that's tenable, either from the English used (no one would say I don't drive to mean I don't have a car) or the likelihood of the fact of a man of AC's background - he was a hack himself before he joined Blair - age, and position knowing how to use a computer, but not doing so. So, it seems he's talking about ability: he's saying he can't use a computer. That is the statement we have to falsify. It's not under oath, but the effect on AC's credibility, and, by extension, Blair's [4], would be pretty damned close. What's the evidence? Now, I'm pretty sure that, one way or the other, it's out there - in the possession of his erstwhile colleagues in the media. But nothing online that I can find which suggests his protestations of computer illiteracy were questionable. However, I happen to have on tape a BBC fly-on-the-wall docco by Michael Cockerell (a hack specialising in candid political docs) called News from Number 10, which was shot over a month around April 2000, a time when Blair's spin machine was high on the agenda, and during which AC retreated from taking daily briefings to his current position, just behind the arras. The show is illuminating, to an extent, on AC computer use. It shows, in a couple of shots (1:25, 45:00) a PC on a side-table to AC's left as he's sitting; there is a framed photo between the keyboard and the monitor, which, in each shot, is clearly off. So, one might conclude, the PC is there for show; because the janitorial department said, everyone of his grade had one, and it was too much hassle to argue. Or because it was there when he moved in, and ditto with the hassle. A third shot (118:20), however, shows the same PC turned on, with a screensaver on the monitor. If the machine was just ornament or clutter, why switch it on? Now, this doesn't even rise to the level of evidence a judge would leave to a jury. It's rice-paper thin. But my tape is clearly a mere drop in the ocean compared with - for a start, Cockerell's unused footage. A host of folks would be able to testify - and maybe one or two of them have AC at the PC on tape. And, frankly, one gathers that AC is not the most popular guy with those most likely to have the goods on him...
| Thursday, August 28, 2003
Hutton site documentation - update
| The Hutton techniqueApart from the lollipops (in the Sir Thomas Beecham sense) offered by the likes of Donald Anderson, the transcripts tend to be dry and tough meat. Trying to analogise the technique of Lord Hutton and his Interlocutor-General, James Dingemans, it seems that, a lot of the time, they're engaged in something like the sort of puzzle that used to appear in cheap publications for the amusement of young children on long car journeys: one had two badly made line-drawings side by side, which, at first glance, looked identical. The infuriating task set was to spot the deliberate differences between the two. (Often, the production quality was so bad, you couldn't be sure what was deliberate, and what shoddy workmanship.) With Hutton, it's going over the same old memos, recounting the same old meetings, getting the same old answers - or are they? Hutton, as it were, is drawing the various versions of the same event on transparencies and placing them on top of one another: where they diverge could just be an artefact of the inquiry process - a confused question or a faulty memory - or it might be a genuine conflict in the evidence. It might even be that someone is lying. In such a task, the well-meaning amateur can contribute little bar admiration. (Of course, it may be that Hutton is completely flummoxed, and is going through the documentation in detail with the witnesses merely to use up a decent amount of time before going off to write his report. That would, as best I can judge from the proceedings to date, be a very dangerous thing for any interested party to assume!) | Wednesday, August 27, 2003
More Six Degrees stuff: Greta Van Susteren and Joe McCarthy!I have from Howard Kurtz that the well-preserved Fox news babe (Kurtz calls her increasingly blonde - bitch!) that her father, Urban Van Susteren, was Joseph McCarthy's campaign manager in 1946. (Both residents of Appleton, WI, in Outagamie County.) McCarthy beat the last remnant of the First Family of Western insurgency, Robert LaFollette Jr, in the Republican primary for the Wisconsin US Senate nomination (LaFollette having foolishly declined to jump ship to the Dems). Robert LaFollette Sr was the guy who started the initiative/recall business that is providing so much comedy gold in the Golden State right now. (Both LaFollette père et fils bore the name of Marion - just like John Wayne. Not a lot of people know that...) | Where are they now? #1: the Iraq oil bonanzaOne of the illusions apparently widely shared between (large sections of) the pro-war and anti-war camps was that, once conquered, Iraq would be a gold mine for Uncle Sam and his best buddies: Iraq was part of Manifest Destiny, the guys from Brown and Root (LBJ's best buddies, lest it be forgotten) pioneers down the old Oregon Trail. More likely, the Donner Party. The problem, as I tried to make clear with facts before the actual fighting kicked off: comparing the alleged benefits available (the oil bonanza that was never there) and the immense debts that gobbled up those benefits dozens of times over (pieces of March 31 and April 8 respectively). As a stand-alone business proposition, Iraq was as sane as a pyramid scheme. (But, then again, it wasn't really a stand-alone proposition, was it?) The solution, obvious to some, would be to cancel large slugs of Iraqi debt. The trouble is twofold: as detailed in the April 8 piece: first, a big writeoff sets a terrible example for other debtor nations; and, second, most of the Iraqi debt is owed to Kuwaiti citizens - remember them? - whose stuff was trashed in the 1990 invasion. Subsequently, one got SCR 1483, which (as detailed in my May 22 piece) ring-fenced Iraqi oil revenues from creditors till the end of 2007, and uttered a pious hope on debt rescheduling. Coming a little more up to date, the Paris Club (of debtor nations) issued a press release on July 3 which says nothing, except to give a schedule of creditor nations, whose total Iraqi debt is put at $21bn. Which doesn't sound too much. Except that,
My April 8 piece puts sovereign debt at $62bn; and total debt at around the half-trillion mark. The war may, a year ago, have looked like a luxury that Uncle Sam (as hyperpower) could afford - a proper use for the nest-egg he'd built up (on Enron-style accounting, at least). But now, according to today's WaPo Reichsprotecktor Paul Bremer is calling for "several tens of billions" of dollars from abroad in the next year to rebuild its rickety infrastructure and revive its moribund economy... He vouchsafes that ...Iraqi revenue will not nearly cover the bill for economic needs "almost impossible to exaggerate." And it seems to come as a surprise that Oil revenue is lower than U.S. planners had hoped, afflicted by antiquated facilities, power shortages and severe looting. Bremer said Iraq produced 1.7 million barrels on Monday, down from a prewar range of 2.5 million to 3 million barrels a day. His goal is to return production to prewar levels by October 2004. Needless to say, he's expecting the Axis of Weasels to dig deep to reimburse Uncle Sam for the lunatic war they opposed. And now we find (surprise, surprise...) that there is no nest-egg, but a handy deficit (Forbes today). The response of the Weasels to Uncle Sam's outstretched palm? What better than to adapt from the neocons' god, Winston Churchill [1]: You did what you liked: now, you must like what you did.
| Hutton: more confusion on 45 minute claim from senior spookSir John Scarlett [1], is the interface between the UKIC (covering Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), internal security (MI5) and external (Secret Intelligence Service - MI6)) and the Prime Minister. He is Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC, pronounced jic), which has representatives of all agencies involved. He is also a good mate of Alastair Campbell, and, it seems, works hand in glove with him on security issues - two masters of obfuscation and deception working in tandem. His evidence to the Inquiry [2] demands close scrutiny and mature reflection. But one point on which the hacks have seized is a passage (143:24) on the 45 minute claim itself: Dr Kelly had suggested to someone else that the source There is a tangle here, highly useful to HMG in September 2002, that needs unpicking. The layman's understand of WMD is, I'd reckon, weapons that kill a whole lot of people (Hiroshima and Nagasaki levels, say) - rather than, say, the few hundred that a car full of Semtex in a crowded market might kill. Nuclear is the paradigm - everyone's seen footage of the 1945 A-bomb mushrooms - with CW and BW more a perceived threat because of their being unknown, rather than on the basis of evidence of past use. (Poison gas, for instance, is best known (from World War 1) as a battlefield weapon much less destructive than machine guns and - most particularly - artillery firing HE shells).) The paradigmatic delivery system for a 'genuine' WMD would be a missile. The September 2002 dossier hit both points: it alleged that Saddam had al-Hussein missiles with a range of 650km with the capability of delivering both CW and BW (p25a); and that some CW/BW weapons were deployable within 45 minutes (p8a). Now, there was no conflation in the dossier of the missile and 45 minute claims. And, the paragraph that mentions the al-Husseins also mentions delivery of CW/BW by artillery shell. But any confusion in the lay reader would not have been unhelpful to the propaganda effort. But focus on Kelly's comment: Andrew Gilligan's recollections of his May 22 interview with Kelly says: ...He said it took 45 minutes to construct a missile assembly and that was misinterpreted (in the dossier) to mean that WMD could be deployed in 45 minutes. What we thought it actually meant was that they could launch a conventional missile in 45 minutes.... AG's Palm Pilot notes also mention missiles. In neither of the May 29 Today broadcasts are missiles mentioned. But they are mentioned in the Radio 5 interview of that date.) When Kelly spoke to Susan Watts on May 7, he was talking about multi-barrelled launchers. To the Inquiry, she said (177:21) We talked a bit about why such a precise timing Which brings us back to Scarlett. Because, as I understand it, these multi-barrel launchers are battlefield weapons. The sort of gizmo once known affectionately as Stalin's organ pipes. There's not, in the vanishingly skimpy search I've made, much online. This refers to ...122 mm Grad rockets, used in a Russian-made multi-barrel launcher.... Nothing that suggests a MBL could fire anything approaching an Al Hussein. So, perhaps, Scarlett's source and Kelly were on the same page after all - except that, in his May 30 conversation with Susan Watts, he mentions (p3a) Scuds as well as MBLs in this connection. Implications? Already the (London) Independent is running a piece under the head Spy chief undermines key plank of Government's case for war in Iraq. That would only be the case, I think, if the intention or result of the dossier and associated propaganda was to formulate a proposition that the missiles could be got ready in 45 minutes. An indication is that, in the London Evening Standard piece of Dan Plesch (from RUSI) on September 24, he says The dossier also states Saddam may be able to deploy his biological weapons in less than an hour. This dramatic idea does seem threatening, but if the missiles have a short range and there are very few of them, how great is the threat? If a defence expert like Plesch was conflating, what hope was there for the rest of us? | Tuesday, August 26, 2003
On Her Majesty's Illiterate Service?Amongst the avalanche of Hutton stuff, there's a letter from no less a personage than the Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence, Martin Howard (dated July 8), which admits of only three possibilities:
For instance, According to Dr Kelly, based on his extensive and authoritative knowledge of Iraq's WMD programme, notably it's biological programme...and The only other point that we have elicited from Dr Kelly... Bearing in mind that this was a letter copied to the top echelon of No 10 advisers, and carries the handwritten note (to Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell) The Prime Minister may find this of interestone might suppose that a certain degree of care went into its production. Which leads me to suppose that the letter is in fact in code, to which the errors noted constitute some kind of key. The other two conclusions are too dreadful to contemplate, surely? Sir Humphrey must be positively spinning right now.... | Monday, August 25, 2003
Hutton: a taste of the Kelly family wild card - and Blair withholds evidence!The object of the Hutton exercise, for those of us who believed the invasion of Iraq took place under HMG false pretences, is the departure of Tony Blair from No 10 under the most ignominious conceivable circumstances. (That's best case, and vanishingly unlikely - on the basis of what we know now. But - you aim high, and expect to give a little...) A lot of bleating from opponents of the war about Hutton focussing on gossip - a piece in the Guardian today - woman hack - suggesting that it's a sex thing (all the trivia-obsessed witnesses to date being men, apart from Saint Susan Watts, who actually described Kelly's reference to the 45 claim as gossipy - axe-grinding in progress: ear protectors on!). Whereas, the real issue - the issue that Hutton should be examining is, of course, the substantive question of the actual risk that Saddam posed. Now, of course, there was never, as is not now, the remotest chance of a Hutton being delegated by the Great Fabulator to lead a mass debate on the rights and wrongs of the war. He refused, one should recall, a judicial inquiry on the ultra-narrow point of the 45 minute claim in Andrew Gilligan's story right up until the moment of Kelly's DIY surgery. And, chances are that, just like the Franks Inquiry into the origin of the Falklands War [1], a mass debate-style inquiry would, in any case have fudged the issue. Enter the Kellys. I've used the expression wild card before about their impact. The fact is that, unlike all the other main players - BBC, MOD, No 10 - they aren't a complex institution with large numbers of personnel fighting wheels-within-wheels power battles of some antiquity. Nor are they tainted - as those institutions are - by the reputation of being a bunch of professional liars and dissemblers. The greatest impact on Blair during the 2001 General Election came, not from the Tory opposition (which made no impact at all!), but from Sharron Storer [2] who doorstepped him outside a hospital in Birmingham about the cancer treatment her partner was getting (or not). Blair was frit (in both the Lincolnshire and French sense of the word!) because he dare not use his Alastair Campbell play-book against the woman- but the Tories were too much of a shambles to take advantage. Now, the Kellys have a chance of several free swings at Blair. If they have any sense - and have been properly guided by their lawyers - they won't make a Jerry Springer affair of it. There are no TV cameras, there is no jury. The impact that they can make is solely through the medium of reported speech. All the better [3.] Their first salvo is a letter dated August 7 [4] from their lawyers complaining of the HMG briefing - latter admitted by PMOS Tom Kelly - that David Kelly had been a Walter Mitty character [5]. An act of the sheerest hypocrisy, since No 10 had been calling for a period of restraint, following Kelly's death. The fact that Hutton has, as it were, admitted the letter into evidence, is good in two ways:
We have the evidence of the frenzied activity throughout the upper echelons of HMG, right up to Blair himself, over the outing of Kelly in the weeks following his June 30 letter. How much more frenzied, one might ask, has been the activity of HMG in the last few weeks to try and save Blair wretched neck from the Hutton axe? We want Hutton to call for everything HMG has covering the period from their most recent disclosure to date. All the more so since we have the first indication that HMG has withheld evidence from the Inquiry. According to the Guardian today, The government withheld from the Hutton inquiry pages from one draft of its dossier setting out the dangers Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed... The omission is of the executive summary of three pages (3 to 5) from the September 16 draft [6]. On the face of it, Hutton seems amazingly relaxed about this: The Hutton inquiry said it was a matter for the Cabinet Office why the pages of the summary were missing. But, from the first [7], Lord Hutton has clearly tabled the nuclear option of a confrontation but shown exemplary caution in escalating too far too fast. Blair will hope that, the more work Hutton puts into the Inquiry, the more reluctant he will be to threaten walking away. That, however, would be to suppose him a victim of the Fallacy of Sunk Costs. If Hutton whitewashes Blair, it will be because he's long decided to do so. But there is not the slightest evidence that he has made that decision. (Interestingly - ominously - other news outlets seem to have failed to make much of the Guardian report. Watch this space!)
| Hutton: Today woes continue...A small but telling point in today's Today. Around 0755, presenter James Naughtie was chewing the fat with ubiquitous Liberal Menzies Campbell (no relation!) and journo (and Blair biographer) John Rentoul on matters Hutton, and, in particular, the appearance at the Inquiry, scheduled for Thursday, of Blair himself. Naughtie was pleased to reveal that he had been reading one or two of the transcripts - given Today's place in the Kelly affair, one might have thought its senior presenters would have read all of them, perhaps? - and commented on counsel James Dingemans's tendency to ask a question, listen to the answer and ask another. Rentoul joshed that, if Naughtie and his colleagues adopted a similar approach, they would soon be hearing from their superiors. It was left to the aged Campbell to point out the fact - fundamental to the structure of the Inquiry as laid down at the start by Lord Hutton himself - that this method was deliberately chosen so as most effectively to lead the key elements of the mountain of evidence Hutton had received; and that Stage 2, cross-examination, was likely to be an altogether more testing business. (Only fair to point out that the Stage 1 neutral approach has not prevented counsel engaging in some mordant satire; for example, as already mentioned here (August 22), in the examination of the unwisely familiar No 10 spinner Godric Smith.) The fact that Naughtie had so patently failed to grasp such a fundamental aspect of a judicial inquiry investigating his own programme gives one little confidence about the quality of the rest of the Today product. | Sunday, August 24, 2003
Downloading the Hutton evidence: how-to noteAfter a couple of weeks with dribs and drabs, now most of the documentary evidence is online at the official site. The problem is, the way it's done there are hundreds of files to be downloaded, the links arranged on half a dozen pages. My tip (there is, I'm sure, an easier way, but...):
The links on the page will then start to download (to Temporary Internet Files). When all the links have downloaded - some pages have 50-60 megs - be warned! - retrieve them from the TIFs via Tools>Internet Options>Settings (under Temporary Internet Files)>View Files. (Arrange the icons by file type.) Some, but not much, time can be saved by stopping the download straight away, going into Tools>Synchronize, selecting the item in the list, clicking Properties, then on the Download tab, then unclicking Follow links outside.... That way, you do pick up the Hutton files, but do not pick up sundry other stuff - Adobe links and the like. It seems to me that, in terms of car chronology, the software side of computers and the net are around 1915: we've got the Model T, but we still need to Get out and get under at annoyingly regular intervals. The wretched thing never works quite as it should, with chewing gum and elastic bands holding in place parts that would otherwise fly off. | Hutton: A classic English comedy character is born...The Hutton transcripts fall, it seems to me, into three categories:
Into this last category comes Donald Anderson, Chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, the first body to have a crack at investigating the matter. Physically, the guy makes little impression: oldish, bald and Welsh, speaking with none of the music of the Welsh voice - think Richard Burton narrating Under Milk Wood - save a sort of vestigial whining quality. To get the humour of the transcript, I wouldn't use his voice in your mind's ear at all. What you want is something like the voice of John Major. Because, in his attitudes, he struck me as nothing if not a cross between Mr Pooter and Captain Mainwaring. And his interlocutors are suitable dry in their responses. To give extracts would spoil the effect. No gags or one-liners, but several outright LOL moments. Enjoy!
| Bustamante: the Party of Treason's actual, real life traitor?The California Dems' best hope Cruz Bustamante - last noticed here on August 7 - has been a member of an organisation dedicated to kicking the US out of lands formerly held by Mexico: the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán. The what? Having previously brought you the US Motion Picture Project, we proudly present the next in the series, Organisations You Never Suspected Existed. Back in the era of Black Power and by any means necessary, it seems that the idea caught on with some Hispanics of a racially pure South-West, free of gringos and gringo power, just for Chicanos. The land of Aztlán. As you look into the group, it's immediately striking that it has no head office website (no sign on Google, at least). There are sites at the various colleges at which it's organised, but, it seems, nothing central. The UC Berkeley site links to documents that describe the philosophy and aims of the groups. As, for example, this, which puts its final objective thus: A nation autonomous and free - culturally, socially, economically, and politically- will make its own decisions on the usage of our lands, the taxation of our goods, the utilization of our bodies for war, the determination of justice (reward and punishment), and the profit of our sweat. And, for the racial basis of the outfit: With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán. What, you might enquire, is a bronze culture? And how do they define the bronze continent? The other striking thing is that the materials (that I've seen, at least) produced by this group are all in English! As if our little bronze brothers are so deracinated from their bronze culture that they are forced to speak gringo, lacking fluency even in the language of their previous pale-skinned oppressors. Let alone Nahuatl or Hopi. (The UCB page includes some Spanish phrases, which serve rather as the Gaelic cupla focal in the speeches of (Southern Irish politicians [1]. Such as La Raza de Bronze Unfortunately, there is no word bronze in Spanish. It's bronce. Which any mother-tongue hispanophone would know. I know, typo...) (Aztlán, in case you wondered, is the mythical homeland of the Aztecs - according to this piece. Which - apologies to anglophone bronze supremacists - is in Spanish.) Unlike the actual mix of cultures in Mexico (as much the product of mestizaje as the Mexicans themselves), the race-based bronze culture of the MEChA [2] is, if it exists at all, thoroughly artificial - rather like Kwanzaa. The Bustamante connection with the organisation (members call themselves mechistas - again with the Spanish!) is explored rather hysterically in a piece from August 11 in Front Page. Opening par: HIS FAMILY NAME CAN MEAN "GRAVE DIGGER" IN THE SPAIN his ancestors left to become colonizers and exploiters of Mexico. And thrown in quite gratuitously (One of Mexico's notorious presidents, 1837-1839 & 1839-1841, had been Anastasio Bustamante.) That's like inserting a reference in a bio of Gray that the Confederate States were led in the Civil War by Jefferson Davis! Quite how seriously Bustamante is tied in today with the miscegenated race crusaders of the MEChA is not clear. The Front Page piece says that Bustamante has refused to distance himself in any way from MEChA and its desire to return Aztlan to Mexico. We'll see.
| Saturday, August 23, 2003
Some aid on copyright limbo, perhaps...A piece of news that had passed me by - but a bill (HR 2601) has been introduced in the House (a couple of months ago, in fact!) to tackle the problem of copyright chilling exacerbated by the Sonny Bono Act, as approved by the Nine Boneless Wonders (or seven of them) in Eldred v Ashcroft in January. The idea (the bill has its own site, with links to text, etc) seems to be that copyrights would only be preserved beyond 50 years if owners applied to the government to so request. What the political dynamics are in Congress, I've no idea. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford U, involved in all of this on the side of the angels, has a piece from June 25 on the launch of the bill, saying This was a strange day of feeling Congress sometimes somehow might work. It's very early, and we have yet to weather the criticism and opposition. And of course, if money lines on this one, we will not prevail. But every, from Members to staff, took this as seriously as anyone could hope. Let's see what happens. Another case of the Ninth Beatitude... | Friday, August 22, 2003
Online historical newspaper archives - few and well-hidden!The priceless quality of a contemporary newspaper account is twofold:
However, decent collections are carefully corralled behind pay-only barriers. Free collections (that I've found) are few and far between.
Hats off to Brooklyn Library, the Crimson guys and Utah U for their initiative. But it's an eclectic bunch, by any criterion! The problem is made worse by the fact that, so far as I can see, there is no comprehensive listing of such free online historical newspaper archives as exist. The lack of a decent etext effort from the two main national libraries of the anglophone world is an utter disgrace (compared to the sterling effort made by the Paris Bibliothèque nationale). An enormous trick was lost when a proper slice of funding for millennium projects was not devoted to getting printed heritage online. Still, as Oscar Hammerstein said, Be thankful for the things they got... | American Short Memory Syndrome againWhile the GOP has lately been gripped by the fantasy of world domination, the Dems, it seems, have their own daydreams going, on the general theme, We wuz robbed. The Party of Treason, let it not be forgotten, for the best part of a hundred years an unholy alliance between the Scots-Irish-led one-party states of the South and the machine-manipulated North under the thumb of their Catholic fellow ex-Hibernians. Democratic was just their little joke. All of that, apparently, is to be forgotten. Choose your Year Zero: Dems, it seems, tend to make theirs the advent of the Great Fornicator, the only Dem president, after all, that most of us have very many clear recollections of having seen on the nightly news. (What images does the average voter retain of Jimmy Carter whilst president: apart from the one where he's jogging and about to pass out, that is...) A piece in Slate works the sleight of hand. It considers
The common factor, of course, is that the GOP in all of these have been exploiting the rules of the game. (Just as, in Texas, the state Dem legislators have, with their skipping the state every time the matter comes up.) I haven't looked; but I'd be very surprised if a good half of the rules of those four games were put in place by Dem majorities, or - as with the impeachment rules - before Honest Abe was a twinkle in his father's eye. And considering that, in the glory days of the 20th century national Democratic Party - from 1932 to 1968 - most of Dem power was acquired illegally - or by operation of Jim Crow voting laws - I'd say that represents something of an improvement in the quality of political cleanliness! (The piece refers to the 1960 election, in which Mayor Daley - father of Al Gore's mascot during his Florida travails (love the bird-flipping symbolism!) - swung the Illinois electoral college votes to Saint JFK with his crooked Cook County stuffed boxes. But strangely doesn't mention the fact! Not many (as I recall) popular votes in key states needed to have switched to Nixon for JFK to have needed those crooked Illinois EC votes.) Now, as has often been pointed out in connection with the Davis affair, the recall, initiative and the like were introduced by Western insurgents (most of them Republicans!) in reaction to the cosy machine-led setup in the East (where GOP upstate politics were as compromised as the downstate Dem machines). (Perhaps Hiram Johnson and friends would have managed their coup against the Southern Pacific without the example of Wisconsin and the other insurgent states - more research needed!) The zeal with which the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law has been circumvented - and that's not all GOP! - makes it clear that few practitioners take this sort of bleating seriously. The trickier the rules, the more scope for smart operators to make a killing - why else are the rules for Federal elections still governed (mostly) by state law? Of course, the goat-getting sanctimony is part of the game, too. American politics are fun for all the family - and big bucks, too. Who's not loving that? | Hutton: where are we?I've now read all bar the latest day of transcripts. And, mindful of my injunction to myself to avoid second-guessing Hutton (August 14), it's worth pausing for reflection. The more so, perhaps, because, at the end of yesterday's proceedings, Hutton laid out his provisional schedule for the rest of the hearings. With Tony Blair appearing next week, it seems that, as far as Stage 1 is concerned, we've turned for home. Rising above the level of detail (for the very good reason of having not yet having a frightfully comprehensive grasp of it!), we have two main areas of interest: the process whereby the September dossier was drawn up; and way in which HMG dealt with the 45 minute claim in Andrew Gilligan's May 29 broadcasts. In both, the strategy is, so far as possible, to protect Blair - the citadel, as it were - by concentric fortifications. (Or, perhaps, watertight bulkheads is a better analogy...) The further away from Blair responsibility for components in decision-making in both processes is fixed, the better. In both cases, one has a body primarily concerned with the case - with the dossier, the JIC; with Kelly, the MOD. And, so far as possible, that body must be seen to take the key decisions. Number 10 (Blair and his people) must be seen as having an incidental role - commenting, presenting, taking an overview. Naturally, ultimate responsibility is Blair's. But, to adopt the distinction made by Sir Kevin Tebbit [1] between responsibility and culpability - avoiding the latter is the name of the game. Thus, for example, the stress regularly made of injunctions - by Jonathan Powell, at one point, for example - that nothing should be included in the dossier that the JIC were not perfectly happy with; indeed, the insistence that John Scarlett, head of the JIC, should produce the first draft [2]. And a similar insistence, when it came to handling David Kelly, following his volunteering himself in his June 30 letter, that the MOD should take the lead, and handle the case primarily as a personnel matter. Not to doubt that these injunctions were not accurately and contemporaneously recorded. On the contrary, they seem to show that a strategy of protecting Blair was well entrenched well before September 2002 - not with a public inquiry in mind, of course, but rather the sort of press interest that previous scandals (starting with the Bernie Ecclestone million pound donation to the Labour Party) had generated. I infer from the questioning that, in both cases, Hutton is less than convinced. For example, on the dossier, Campbell attempted to downplay the blizzard of emails within No 10 communications staff commenting on the various drafts - referring to one guy involved thus [3]: Danny Pruce is a very, very good When Godric Smith (one of two men sharing the title Prime Minister's Official Spokesman) was questioned yesterday, he initially trivialised his own role [4]: 8 A. I was not routinely copied into drafts Whereupon counsel methodically took him through the paperwork which rather undermined that position. Some sessions are remarkably dull: Smith's is studded with nuggets, and demands to be read for comedy, if not content - Smith was evasive beyond the dreams of Gilligan, and chose to fence with counsel. Who was not impressed, as, for example at 120:16: 16 Q. Did you think Mr Pruce was somehow going well beyond his When it comes to the treatment of Kelly, a constant theme, often evoked by Lord Hutton himself, is whether the disclosure of Kelly's name - whether or not by the guessing-game technique which he appears to find particularly distasteful - was necessary to meet HMG's objectives. The counterfactuals he proposes [5] suggest that he is entertaining the possibility (to put it no higher) that the disclosure might not have been necessary. The next event will be the release from Saturday of the documentary evidence held by the Inquiry (to date, only pages referred to in oral evidence have been placed online). We are promised (threatened?) 6,000 pages worth. The rogue Gilligan email clearly suggests that there may be evidence the Inquiry has yet to get its hands on. The wild card - of which, so far as I'm aware, we've had no hint at all - is nature of the contribution of the Kelly family and (in the Stage 2 cross-examination phase) their lawyers. The family may well have already had an effect on proceedings, in their opposition to TV coverage tipping the balance in favour of exclusion. They do not have the institutional interests that civil servants or the BBC have; or the political interests of Blair and Co. Useless to speculate further on what they might do. The hope has been that, to misquote LBJ, there will be a wider war: that the evidence produced in Stage 1 will blow apart the narrow terms of reference confining the scope of Hutton's work, in such a way as either producing a confrontation between Hutton and Blair, or a fuller examination of the basis on which the invasion of Iraq was undertaken. Nothing that I can see has emerged yet to succour that hope. But - the Fat Lady's still resting her vocal chords on vacation: plenty of time left...
| Thursday, August 21, 2003
The Open Government Code that's a state secretIn ploughing through the transcript of Wednesday morning's evidence to the Hutton Inquiry, I come across a reference in the examination of Sir Kevin Tebbit [1] to the Open Government Code. Now, it is one of the better remembered aphorisms of Sir Humphrey Appleby, suave and orotund Permanent Secretary in the 1980s sitcom Yes, Minister, that (quote approximate) One may have openness: or one may have government. So it crossed my mind to see what sort of an oxymoronic animal this code might be. Especially since, according the transcript (15:7), it nobly enjoins that Officials should not omit information merely Now, there is a text online at the Department of Constitutional Affairs. It's the right document [2] But it does not include the passage quoted. The transcript says it's in Part 5: the online document only has two parts! Nor is the Hutton site itself any help: whilst pretty much all the documents referred to are up on the site - at least the pages referred to are - there is nothing (that I could spot) that looks like the OGC. Clearly, the words quoted are necessary to an understanding of the Code (even if, on the basis of experience, one flatly disbelieves that they have substance). Yet they are not, it seems, made available to the public. A check with Mr Google - searching on "open government code" "political embarrassment" - produces two items, one of which is a 2003 press release from the Public Adminstration Select Committee, which monitors HMG performance on implementing the Code, saying The evidence...also shows that government must really deliver on openness, resisting the temptation to seek to avoid political embarrassment!. Oh dear...
| Wednesday, August 20, 2003
US officers still at risk of Spanish war crimes caseThe last time (August 13) we were with the case of José Couso, the Spanish cameraman killed in questionable circumstances by US forces at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on April 8, it was for the results of a US investigation exonerating the military personnel involved. At that stage, I had no information on the progress of the case taken by the relatives to the Spanish authorities. Now, I have a little more. There is a site with some (rather scanty) materials on the case. There is the original complaint of May 29 (RTF), and a piece from July 9, which says that the Juzgado Central de Instrucción nº 6 de la Audiencia Nacional had overruled a decision - I assume, by investigating magistrate Guillermo Ruiz de Polanco (my piece of June 11) - to drop the case for lack of jurisdiction. There is no sign, on the site or elsewhere, that I've traced, of any form of opinion or written reasons for either Polanco's decision or that of the Audiencia Nacional overruling him. And nothing after July 9. The piece from that day ends Así que la querella sigue adelante. I'll be doing my best to keep up... It seems - and I'd want better information than this to be sure of the position - that the war crimes case is still alive. And, still, for all the fuss that the King of Fuss Donald Rumsfeld made about Belgium's extraterritorial pretensions (June 12) I have yet to hear a peep from him or any of his mates on this arch-weaselly behaviour of the erstwhile Iberian doormat. | Hutton: mystery email from Gilligan raises the anteAs I described on August 12, in Phase 1 of the Hutton Inquiry, the stated object was to get out the basic facts. Which is not to say that witnesses haven't been challenged on their evidence: but this has usually been to clarify what evidence is being given; or to put inconsistencies between pieces of evidence, oral and documentary. In fact, most of the time has been spent with counsel putting documents before witnesses for commentThat way, they can't pretend they've been ambushed on cross when they're recalled to give further evidence during Phase 2. In short, in the questioning to date, it's been assumed that the witnesses have been telling the truth. Today, we get the first real escalation. The surprise lay not with Prince of Darkness Alastair Campbell, who is generally credited with an excellent performance: according to an ITN TV journo, he occupied his hands by clasping them together and taking off and putting on his watch - for fear that he might find them punching Lord H on the snoot. (Others have been there before: Guardian hack Michael White, for one.) No, this was a nasty case of reflux from troubled BBC journo Andrew Gilligan: in questioning AC [1], counsel [2] put to him an email sent by AG to some apparatchik of the Liberal Democratic party [3]. An outstanding document in several respects:
He (Dr Kelly) should be asked what kind of threat Iraq was in September 2002 and if he was able to answer frankly, it should be devastating. It apparently (according to Martha Kearney on Newsnight) also suggested questions in relation to Susan Watt's reports on the 45 minute question that would tend to flush him out as her source. (One can't be sure, because, counsel didn't mention Watts, and, unlike the rest of the documentary evidence put to AC, it's not online.) The suggestion is that AG, the loosest of cannons, finally slipped his ropes and started blasting away on his account in a private war against AC. And Kelly was the cannon-fodder. Now, because Hutton's is an ad hoc inquiry, he has not taken evidence under oath, nor issued subpoenas to gather in documentary evidence. AG, presumably, hasn't committed any sort of crime. But, despite the mountains of documents that have been produced, it's clear that the written record is full of holes. In the end, Hutton will be crucially reliant on his evaluation of the credibility of the various witnesses. And it very much looks as if Gilligan's (what little there was of it) has just gone up the Swanee. Brown trousers all round at the Beeb, I fancy...
UPDATE (August 22) There is not one email but two! According to the Guardian (August 22), in addition to the Liberal email, AG also sent one along similar lines to a Tory MP on the FAC, Richard Ottaway. Ottaway, it seems, only saw fit to disclose this email after the Liberal email had been made public. | Tuesday, August 19, 2003
Beware low-flying porkers: Roy Hattersley speaks sense!The spluttering dinosaur of a bygone age (how many mildly active pols are there still in the saddle with well-remembered Spitting Image puppets? his did, of course) has nailed the lie about the much-fawned-over Today programme, home of the equally physically unappealing Andrew Gilligan. In the Guardian today he says Its declared purpose is to lead the news...[It] succeeds in its objective by always stimulating controversy and, wherever possible, arranging confrontation. The result is often about as informative as two cats fighting in a sack - not least because politicians, knowing the Today formula, have worked out defence mechanisms by withholding information. Today does not routinely provide online transcripts for the benefit of the plebs. (Even though, it appears from the evidence provided to the Hutton Inquiry, such transcripts are routinely produced - in many cases, for the purpose of rapid rebuttal of Alastair Campbell's Diatribe of the Day.) But various Today interview transcripts are included in the Hutton cornucopia - and pretty sorry reading they make. The stuff is even more tedious when heard. One might compare it with the Japanese tea ceremony - where the ceremony, rather than provision of light refreshment, is the object of the exercise. But, at least, there is some intrinsic benefit in the tea ceremony: tea is, ultimately, served. Whereas the bizarre ritual conducted in the Today studio every morning yields no information at all. And neither party expects anything different. It was, as I understand it, to give the programme something other than pointless shadow-boxing matches with the pols that Gilligan was hired, as a sort of combined Woodward and Bernstein in the defence field. He would boldly go and sniff out stories, rather than relying on reacting to press releases - which, absent an actual war, is what a defence correspondent tends to do. There was also, I believe, a belief that defence correspondents generally were a little too close to the military-industrial complex (Mark Laity was, as I recall, one suspected of a modicum of regulatory capture - in the end, he was captured outright: he went to work for NATO!). Gilligan is a passing phase, I'm sure: the real problem is that the political interview - in Today as elsewhere - no longer works, except as WWF in suits. Some days, I can read the whole of the online Guardian (the main home page links that I'm interested in, at least) in the time that just one of these shouting matches takes to blow itself out. But - without Today, there would have been no Hutton. I'll rejoice thus far. UPDATE (August 23) Already, Richard Sambrook, the man in charge (very loosely - in more sense than one) of News at the BBC, is, according to the Guardian (August 22), apologising for his evidence to the Hutton Inquiry! To wit, apologising to the above-mentioned Mark Laity for saying (more or less) what I said: Mr Sambrook said Gilligan...had been employed because the BBC "needed a correspondent who would ask questions and hold to account as well". Though Laity was not named in the evidence, the former BBC reporter said it was a "damaging and totally inaccurate remark". Sambrook says that all he was doing was giving the rationale of former Today editor and the guy who hired Gilligan, the flamboyant Rod Liddle. Why small fry Laity gets his apology is slightly puzzling - suggests that BBC brass, under the battering from events, the Inquiry and the Murdoch press, are punch-drunk and ducking at anything (Sambrook, one would hope, would not have apologised without sanction from the top). The Corporation seems to be turning itself into a neocon blogger's bishop-bashing fantasy of itself... | David Kelly 'phonetap': illegal or not?Newsnight journo Susan Watts recorded a phone call with DK - but not with the intention of broadcasting. The BBC Producers' Guidelines - the internal code of practice to which all BBC employees should attend - gives the practice a clean bill of health [1]: It is permissible without prior referral for programme makers to record their own telephone conversations for note-taking purposes, or to gather evidence to defend the BBC against possible legal action. Such recordings should not be broadcast.. I'm not so sure the law is as clear as that. I have yet to see what I would accept as an authoritative view on the point. For instance, a legal summary provided by the Call Centre Management Association says, in answer to the question, Can I record telephone conversations on my home phone? says Yes. The relevant law, RIPA [the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 ], does not prohibit individuals from recording their own communications provided that the recording is for their own use. Recording or monitoring are only prohibited where some of the contents of the communication - which can be a phone conversation or an e-mail - are made available to a third party, ie someone who was neither the caller or sender nor the intended recipient of the original communication. Now, SW recorded the call (which she made from her own home), transcribed, and, from memory, made the transcription available to third parties (Newsnight colleagues, initially). The Act itself seems fairly clear: s1(1) says that It shall be an offence for a person intentionally and without lawful authority to intercept, at any place in the United Kingdom, any communication in the course of its transmission by means of....(b) a public telecommunication system. And s2(2) says (2) For the purposes of this Act, but subject to the following provisions of this section, a person intercepts a communication in the course of its transmission by means of a telecommunication system if, and only if, he...(b) so monitors transmissions made by means of the system, ...as to make some or all of the contents of the communication available, while being transmitted, to a person other than the sender or intended recipient of the communication. Recording of a call for later use is also covered (s2(8)). The only relevant case of lawful authority (s3) could be s3(1), where consent to interception has been obtained from sender and receiver: in this case, DK apparently knew nothing about the recording, and was thus scarcely able to give his consent. The criminal sanctions imposed by the act are fairly draconian - up to 2 years imprisonment; however, the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions is required for any prosecution under the Act. (A note on the law drawn up for universities has examples and links; RIPA has Explanatory Notes helpfully provided.) So, at worst, a purely theoretical problem for SW and other journos who do the same as she did? I think so. Though we have the salutary example of the US human shields - who may be prosecuted for breaking US laws imposing economic sanctions on Iraq. If the will is there for a government to do its (perceived) enemies damage - and Hutton has shown that HMG's hatred of the BBC is of Bilboesque intensity - no law is too arcane!
MORE A sidelight on BBC subterfuge: a reporter sent under cover as a trainee policeman to get the dirt on the Manchester fuzz has been arrested for (but not, I think, charged with) fraud. Senior plod are very far from amused, it seems: could a hostage exchange be in the offing - journo let off, in exchange for the embarrassing footage shot? | Monday, August 18, 2003
Hutton: Susan Watt's evidence[Transcripts August 12 (afternoon) (from 155-14) and August 13 (morning)] The contrast with Andrew Gilligan's is remarkable. Where AG shuffles, hesitates and squirms, SW mostly answers with the directness of a Yankee schoolmarm. Where AG's records leave a lot to be desired, SW is constantly referring to notebooks. Her written submission has Attachments going up to K and beyond! Her approach to her work appears cautious where his seems (at best) cavalier. (Her handwriting is perhaps suggestive.) She is the prim-looking woman with pudding-basin hair and schoolmarmy specs -yesterday's Independent speaking! - in a profession where (for women, at least) an attractive appearance counts for much. On screen, she is noticeably loathe to smile - by contrast, her colleague, Martha Kearney (her 'do is much improved from her bio photo) has a broad, mischievous smile as a default facial expression. SW's Newsnight bio (not the worst photo in the world) says she got a physics degree at Imperial College (the #1 specialist science college in the UK) - nothing about a graduate degree. I'd place her as middle middle-class, probably did not go to public school; socially, a cut below her Newsnight colleague Stephanie Flanders (daughter of Michael, and previously mentioned here as aide to Lawrence Summers). Even in these days when the Director-General of the BBC talks like a reformed barrow-boy, class matters. What matters more, in both the BBC and the Civil Service, is a long-standing prejudice amongst the British elite towards specialists of every kind. In the Civil Service, men like Kelly are, after a fashion, segregated. However eminent in their field, they cannot aspire to the top jobs. As a matter of deliberate policy, high fliers - civil servants marked for greatness - are moved on from ministry to ministry, so that their expertise remains that of administration rather than health, education, defence, or whatever. Specialists like Kelly are viewed as tradesmen - the equivalent, in the Indian Army, of Viceroy's Commissioned Officers. (It seems that this attitude had a good deal to do with DK's complaints against the MOD). And something of the same afflicts the BBC. One finds, for instance, that a correspondent posted to Israel - a land where raw information is produced in two of the hardest languages in the world for an English speaker to learn - has scarcely found an apartment when he's moved on to Peking or Moscow. They don't want him to go native - they don't want him to tamper with his natural ignorance, and know more than his superiors about the country he's in. She's been ploughing her steady furrow at Newsnight for eight long years now. And whilst others - notably the Graham Norton of economics broadcasting, Evan Davies - have moved on to better things, she hasn't. Her apparent animus towards her employers, therefore, is not utterly without foundation. On the other hand, he got the story, and she didn't. Or, rather, a story: the fact that the 45 minute claim was uncorroborated and single source (para 7 below). A couple of general points on SW spring to mind:
Abbreviations as before.
| Fair and balanced? Maybe. But accurate...The latest online laughfest from the ambulance chasers is the complaint (PDF c1MB) filed ten days ago by Fox News against Al Franken for trademark infringement. In the description of Franken (page 4a), is included the following: In 1998, Franken wrote and hosted a political television program called "Lateline," which appeared on the NBC television network. Upon information and belief, Franken's guests on "Lateline" included well-known political figures Richard Gephardt, Jerry Falwell Robert Reich. Now, as any fule kno - if he's done the least bit of checking, Lateline was a sitcom, in which Franken played the character of a reporter, who therefore had no guests at all! (He may have stood in for the anchor once but...) Having watched some eps - there is something of a thriving market among UK broadcasters for cancelled US shows as cheap late night filler - Franken was tedious, but I thought Megyn Price and Miguel Ferrer made a cute couple. In case you were wondering. If Jayson's still looking for a job... | Sunday, August 17, 2003
Hutton Week 2: have Blair's men held back documentation?Week 2 - witness list - is mostly about the Downing Street-MOD nexus - on the construction of the September dossier and on the hunting down and outing of Kelly. To date, the embarrassing memos have been largely internal in either the BBC or the MOD (the product of Alastair Campbell's 15 inch battery excepted). But that naturally follows from the fact that last week's witnesses were mostly MOD or BBC. And the (to date, unrebutted) )assumption is that all parties have supplied to the Inquiry every item of documentation (in whatever medium) conceivably relevant to it. So that, this week, it would only be naturally for the preponderance of documentation made available for the first time should have originated in, or be traffic to or from, Downing Street. Given the evidence of epistolary dysentery in the form of AC's correspondence with the BBC, one would expect a deluge of missives to and fro. Whatever the yield turns out to be, I am sure Hutton is bearing in mind the possibility that the choicest morsels have been held back. Of course, apparent lacunae in the record may be the result of parties chosing to use the old dog and bone instead. Or even - the spoilsports! - rendezvous-ing in St James's Park (the tête-à-tête venue of choice for British spooks, according to the TV, at least). Consider email: the point sprang to mind reading a piece in the Observer of today on the latest idiot to put himself in line to be fired for sending a smutty email from work. But - I'm assuming here - he sent the email from his business email address. What if he'd gone into his own Hotmail, and sent it from there? What if AC, Hapless Hoon and the rest of the Whitehall Warriors used Hotmail, too, for their more compromising correspondence? And sent from their own laptops? We don't know. Not evidence at all. Just something to be borne in mind. | The Gilligan bombshell - what the Plawg said at the timeCuriosity overcame me, and I looked. The record is scanty: nothing on G Day (May 29) or the day after; on May 31 a long piece on WMDs - but talking about the apparent campaign being mounted by USG (in the form of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) to downgrade the importance of the whole WMD issue. And then about the transcript of the secret meeting between Straw and Powell at the Waldorf on February 5. The meeting that the Guardian later accepted never happened (a volte-face which itself seemed less than kosher). The 45 minute claim figures only tangentially in a PS on the maunderings of a Blair groupie betrayed. There was a debate in the House of Commons on June 4 calling for an independent inquiry into the handling intelligence on Iraq. But, on June 5, I was underwhelmed. (Honest injun...) I fully expected Labour MPs to rally round, for fear that a fatal attack on Blair would be fatal for them too - at the next election! In fact, I said, Only if the proverbial smoking gun appears from out of the blue - and there must be shorter odds for winning the lottery! - will it be politically advantageous for Labour to ditch Tony B Liar. Now, I would point out that, even after a week of Hutton, there is still no smoking gun. (The infamous Presentationally memo from Hapless Hoon's man, effectively condemning Kelly to trial by TV - here and here - which includes the deathless words I understand that No 10 would be content with this approachfalls distinctly short of something with Blair's fingerprints all over it.) But the odds of finding one I suspect are shorter, perhaps by a factor of a million or more. (It links a transcript of a performance by Blair's walking Glasgow kiss, John Reid on the Today programme - home of A Gilligan - on June 4 which is illustrative of the Alastair Campbell approach to government presentation.) And a piece later in the day suggesting , re the possibility of smoking guns, that email is such a very tempting medium for indiscretion - it's just possible that someone, after a couple of beers, has provided the necessary. Now, the volume of documentation that has emerged even after a week - unnecessary, ill-considered or, to use Kevin Marsh's word, bonkers - rather confirms the temptation is frequently yielded to, beer or no beer. As of yet, the really bonkers missives disclosed seem to have come from the BBC. When the Prince of Darkness himself (Alastair Campbell, that is) appears before Hutton next week, the balance may be redressed. (There are a couple of further pieces in June - finishing on June 17 dealing with Robin Cook's appearance before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee - still yawning at that stage. Little did I know....) | Saturday, August 16, 2003
Hutton Inquiry: Notes on Evidence of Andrew Gilligan (BBC journalist)Something of an experiment here, in attempting to deal with the enormous volume of material being thrown up by the Hutton Inquiry. These notes are, I'm afraid, even less polished that the average piece here: verbs missing, that sort of thing. (Tech note: no way I could find to turn MS Word product into HTML that Blogger will accept - formatting is therefore all to cock!) My thought is that the product of my heavy digging on the material might prove useful to to readers with genuine green fingers. We'll see. The order of the notes generally follows the order of the transcripts, which come in two files, morning and afternoon. The morning session finishes on page 90. References are made thus to page and line numbers: 92-17, to pages alone p10. Copies of the pages of documentary evidence referred to in proceedings are available on the site - at the evidence tab on the home page. At present, only individual pages are up; the evidence index page says that, from next Thursday (August 21), most of what they've got will be made available. In almost all cases, when a document is referred to in the transcript, the page number (and the file name in the evidence section of the site) is given. I, therefore, generally don't reference document page numbers here. They are all short PDF files, mostly 30-40KB. (Conceptually, if not physically, the evidence is in arch lever files, with each page individually referenced. Thus BBC/2/110 would be page 110 of File 2 of material supplied by the BBC. Indexing is by page, not by document. A long letter, therefore, will have as many reference numbers as pages.) Abbreviations: AG-Andrew Gilligan; DK-David Kelly; RS Richard Sambrook (head of BBC news); AC-Alastair Campbell; LH-Lord Hutton OR Inquiry counsel asking the question. August 12 (Transcript Part 1) 1 Has the June 30 DK letter confessing his meetings with AG (see top of here) (and other material) been tested for authorship analysis? Use of Cusums and the like. 2 AG memo to RS: We spoke on the phone whenever Iraq was in the News- Newsvery odd capitalised. 3 Hutton p15is keen to know how folk got DK's phone numbers, whether they called him on land line or mobile, etc, eg 23 LORD HUTTON: May I just ask you something, Mr Gilligan? 24 Where did you contact Dr Kelly? Did you telephone him? 25 A. Yes. 16 1 LORD HUTTON: To where? 2 A. I am not sure. I think I would have probably used his 3 home number, probably his mobile. 4 LORD HUTTON: That is his home number in Oxfordshire? 5 A. Yes. 6 LORD HUTTON: So you had both his home number in Oxfordshire 7 and his mobile? 8 A. Yes, I did. 4 Refreshment for May 22 meeting (p17): one soft drink for 90 minutes of hard talking meeting - seems stingy (probably 330ml servings?) 6 Q. That shows a bottle of coke and a bottle of Appletise. 7 That shows the time on that. Can you help me with the 8 time on that? 9 A. That says 4.15, 16.15. That is the time I went to the 10 bar to buy the drinks. Who drank which? Why not coffee (grownup drink)? Or water - why didn't they get some mineral water? AG has an Amnesty International do on according to his diary: Amnesty media awards……6.30 for 7.30 BAFTA (?) Did dinner come with that? Gilligan won an award! Radio Sale of illegal landmines, Andrew Gilligan for Today, BBC Radio 4 Why wasn't the fact mentioned? 5 Notetaking (18-3) How can he possibly manage without taking any notes at all (as opposed to a verbatim transcript)? 3 Q. Did you make notes throughout the meeting? 4 A. No. It was like our other meetings, in that it was 5 intended as a general discussion of issues around Iraq. 6 I started out without taking notes actually and then 7 I asked to take notes when he got on to interesting 8 topics. 6 AG relationship with DK (p18-19) Something not quite kosher there. (May be in the strange way AG expresses himself.) Eg, conflict on May 22 meeting: DK saying to pick AG's brains, AG saying DK was being polite 18-25 7 [Made sense at the time!] 8 AG's Bin Laden leak 13-22 - AG saw a secret document on the Iraq-Al Qaeda link that sparked a leak inquiry in which DK was a suspect Not really followed up by LH with AG? 9 DK-AG conflicts on when they met Why should, eg, DK make up a meeting in 2-02? 14-17 10 Notes of earlier meeting (not May 22 - but which?) (19-2) Was this on A4 pad or reporter's notebook. (If latter, writing incredibly small) - judging from size of holes on LHS, must have been A4. BUT - AG says 19-12; 12 Q. Into a notebook? 13 A. Yes. 11 Notes of May 22 meeting (physical) )19-19) Why does printout from personal organiser have kelly.txt and kelly_cont.txt at top of page? Did AG write these? Why include the file extensions? Strange pattern of abbreviations (or shorthand, as they call it): eg, he abbreviates programme to prog in line 14 (starting it was small…) but uses in full two lines down. No abbreviation for Iraqi(s) etc. Could be artefact of situation that AG could not touch-type, was working on a fiddly machine and trying to concentrate on what DK was saying, no secretarial matters. Even so… He writes all in lower case: there's a particular psychology behind this: I don't think it's just a question of speed: in fact, you would have to override the reflex to go for the shift key. (For instance, there is a great deal of lower-case-only on fan message boards by people who, their prose suggests, know perfectly well how to punctuate. Using LCO makes it more informal, more like IRC, more spontaneous.) Reason: on personal organisers, UC requires special key sequences! One mystery solved... What does isq ba mean 24-1? 12 What does There is a bit more in there. 26-3 refer to? 13 The only documentary evidence of the famous introduction of AC into the discussion is the word Campbell in AG's Palm Pilot notes. The first retailing of the story to the FASC goes: Q457 Mr Olner: Who from Number Ten asked for the dossier to be changed? Mr Gilligan: I asked this. The source's claim was that the dossier had been transformed in the week before it was published and I asked, "So how did this transformation happen?", and the answer was a single word, which was "Campbell". I asked, "What do you mean, Campbell made it up?", and he answered, "No. It was real information" - this is the 45 minute claim - "but it was included in the dossier against our wishes because it was not reliable. It was a single source and it was not reliable." No indication in the FASC evidence that this is not a verbatim account of the conversation. To LH 27-2, he says 2 A. Yes, it was something like: how did this transformation 3 happen? This is the very crux of the story: yet AG hadn't, before his first FASC interview, settled on a single way of expressing it - to be consistent. 14 At 27-13 Hutton gets AG to confirm that AG first mentioned the idea of sexier - and then 27-19 to contrast that it was DK who first mentioned AC. 15 The Master Prospects Log At 28-8, this is referred to: 8 Q. Can we then turn to look at what you first produced for 9 your Today broadcast. This is BBC/4/202. I hope now 10 that BBC/4/202 should be on-line. This is a log. It 11 says: 12 "Gilligan has a very good story. He has not stood 13 up yet. I will explain in the meeting." 14 That is ET and we are told somebody obviously has 15 made an annotation. Who is ET? 16 A. That is probably Eloise Twisk. She is one of the people 17 on the programme. There is a single online reference (apart from the Hutton transcript) (Google search on "eloise twisk" bbc) to Eloise Twisk: from Oct 01 as Assistant Editor of BBC Radio One News . Why doesn't LH ask for an explanation of the role of Suzanne Mooney? At the bottom of the entry, it says: Suzanne Mooney 28/05/03 1756 which looks like the author, time and date of the entry. [Later documents suggests it may be the person who printed out the hard copy, and the date and time on which that was done, not referring to the origination of the document at all.] In fact, there are a dozen items returned on Google for "suzanne mooney bbc"- mostly, it seems, dealing with her as a science producer on the Today programme. Just a loose end, I'm sure. More puzzling is the line just above: from Today Master Prospects for Sat May 24 28/05/03 Why would a document be made on May 28 to discuss stories for possible inclusion in a programme that already went out four days earlier? 16 When did AG tell his bosses about the DK story? Commenting on The Master Prospects Log 29-4: If it is from 24th May, I did 5 not tell anyone on the programme about this story 6 until -- at least I told one of the editors I met in an 7 awards ceremony it was not a formal conversation. I did 8 not tell anyone in the office about it until the 9 Wednesday. So I think this must be another story, 10 I think. The awards ceremony must be the Amnesty awards ceremony on May 22 (the evening of the meeting with DK). If he did, that would have been in time for the log to have been created on May 24 (though internal evidence suggests it to be more likely created on May 28). Why doesn't he name the editor he spoke to at the awards? His memory is good enough to identify whoever it was as one of the editors, it seems. Why distinguish the editors from anyone in the office? Isn't a not a formal conversation just the sort of thing that might give rise to a very short note as in the log? 17 AG's efforts to corroborate DK's story The two senior contacts 30-9: his story: 16 A. I said I had been told that the dossier had been 17 transformed the week before it was published and that 18 this was done at the behest of Alastair Campbell. No mention of the 45 minute claim? He's told 30-25 25 I think you should keep digging, something like that. Strangely, he's not asked about the way that was said, the context. Without anything as theatrical as a wink, it could have been meant as a patent hint that the speaker knew or suspected there was something to find. Or it could have been a throwaway comment; or it could have been facetious (ie, that AG didn't stand a hope of finding the truth on the point). There must be additional possible readings of the line. When it comes to textual analysis, he's right about the difference between the recent intelligence in para 5 of the Dossier and the conclusion drawn. But, in fact, the discrepancy is apparent from para 5 itself: it mentions intelligence [that] has become available and says it confirms the JIC assessment that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons. But the items of recent intelligence listed, as AG points out, do no such thing. He takes 700 words going through several later paragraphs of the dossier to make the same point. His point 36-6 that his search on the BBC equivalent of Lexis showed almost no references to the 45 minute claim in the period since the launch of the dossier, suggestive of HMG lack of confidence, has, no doubt, been tested. 18 Charges v challenges There is a strange passage at 43-7: 7 LORD HUTTON: You said that it made Dr Kelly's challenges 8 more credible. 9 A. Charges. 10 LORD HUTTON: Challenges? 11 A. Charges. 12 LORD HUTTON: Did you regard him in his conversation with 13 you on 22nd May as challenging the Government's claims? 14 A. With respect my Lord I said charges rather than 15 challenges. I do not think he set out to sort of take 16 on the Government in that sense. I just think he was 17 expressing his professional opinion of the dossier and 18 saying what he said. 19 LORD HUTTON: Yes. Yes. I don't see how charges - which is an analogy from criminal law - is somehow weaker than challenges. 19 Language not like JIC reports AG says he's seen one 45-4 - and the JIC language is more cautious. 20 The missing manuscript version of May 22 meeting At 49-12, AG says the second note of the meeting he produced has been mislaid. There is a feeling of The dog ate my homework about this, given the importance of the meeting (consider how important AG thought it was at the time) - but these things happen… 21 The What my man said note The note 49-21 sent with quotes for use in the May 29 piece to assistant editor Miranda Holt. Nothing novel, but cleaned up from Palm Pilot notes. Notably in Courier, not the ghastly sans font the BBC material on the Hutton site is usually in. Yet AG says 22 A. This is an EMPS message. EMPS is our internal computer 23 message system at the BBC Moreover, the first quote has DK volunteering the sexier idea (ie, that the dossier had been transformed to make it sexier). Whereas we've established 27-13 that it was AG who first used the word. (Hutton quizzed AG on the point.) This, I suppose, is part of the journalistic convention that it is legitimate to put quote marks around gist statements. 22 Language lapse Talking about the phone calls made to Miranda Holt on the DK story 54-10, he says parenthetically I did not tell her his name, I told her his 11 position He can't mean that literally, presumably. He must be talking about the agreed formula he used 71-4 that DK was one of the senior 5 officials in charge of drawing up that dossier 23 AG briefing of MoD press office At 55-1 is introduced the question of what (if anything) AG said to the MoD on May 28 in relation to minister Adam Ingram's appearance on the May 29 programme. Interestingly, the first answer he gives to the first challenge on the point 55-22 smacks of his evasive FASC performances: 22 Q. So who was the person who had contacted someone to talk 23 from the Government side about this story? 24 A. Well, the contact with -- deciding how the programme 25 should get a Government response is the responsibility 56 1 of the office team. He says 56-6 I spoke to Kate Wilson, who is the chief press 7 office at the MoD, on my mobile phone about 7.30 and 8 I told her. 9 Q. And what did you tell her? 10 A. I cannot remember exactly what I told her because it was 11 a mobile phone and I did not take notes of my 12 conversation. I suspect an element of hyperbole when he goes on to claim 56-19 that it was one of dozens and dozens of calls I made 20 that day to MoD press officers. But he goes on I know I took her 21 through the outline of the story. Part of the escalation of the BBC-HMG dispute on the MOD's part (later evidence) was because they said AG was lying on this point. Later, 62-10, AG talks about what he said: it seems he referred in so many words to the two most striking allegations, the 45 minute and the sexing up claims. He said he put the gist. 24 Holbrook June 29 letter Notable 60-11 on two grounds: that - from the Director of BBC News - it misspells the name of John Humphries, one of BBC's Radio 4 best-known and longest-serving news presenters! And that it claims that AG rang the MoD on May 28 mainly to talk about a cluster bombs story that wasn't his! Unchallenged (yet!) evidence of AG was that one journo would brief this way on a colleague's story. If true, you'd have thought Holbrook would have known it. 25 AG's May 29 call to MOD This 60-20 is truly odd: Defence Secretary Hoon alleges in a letter to Sambrook that, at 0850 on May 29, AG called the MOD Press Office. Mr Gilligan said he was calling to 24 'note that he had spoken to the Chief Press Officer 25 before the programme was broadcast and that was what he 61 1 had said'. He then rang off without offering any 2 explanation. For some reason, it puts me in mind of National Coal Board Chairman Ian Macgregor during the 1984-5 miners' strike turning up to a meeting with the unions with a bag over his head. 26 Live and unscripted Another strange phrase from AG in this exchange 69-21, on AG's first May 29 broadcast, at 0607: This is me speaking live and 22 unscripted. 23 LORD HUTTON: You are speaking? 24 A. Speaking live and unscripted. 25 MR DINGEMANS: Live and unscripted. 71 1 A. Yes. There's some in the phrase that screams bumptious teenager. And when examining counsel repeats the phrase like that, I'm pretty sure he showing he's not impressed! 27 What is, and what isn't a quote There'll be a separate analysis of the language of both of AG's May Today broadcasts; but, in relation to his use in the 0607 broadcast of the word wrong - that HMG knew the 45 minute claim was wrong when it put it in the dossier, he makes a strange distinction 71-14: This is not intended 15 to be a direct quote from David Kelly. I make it clear 16 that on one occasion when I do quote him directly in 17 this piece, I make it clear by bracketing him with the 18 words something like -- where are we? Where is it? 19 Yes, here we are: "because to quote the source, he said" 20 and then at the end I say, "that is a quote from our 21 source". A bizarre game of Simon Says for those up at that ungodly hour! 28 AG's admission he was 'Not perfect' on wrong The 0607 was the only broadcast in which he said HMG knew the 45 minute claim was wrong - the rest, he toned it down. On the 0607 wording, he says (p72) But I have to say that with the benefit 25 of hindsight, looking at it now with a fine toothcomb, 73 1 I think it was not wrong, what I said, but it was not 2 perfect either, and in hindsight I should have scripted 3 that too. For a journo, and adjusting for the infelicities of language - should one trust a hack that looks with a toothcomb? - that ranks with the best begrudging expression of regret of Sir Humphrey Appleby himself. (Not quite in the Fonz class, perhaps.) There was no apology, as such 73-15. Interestingly, he left it to counsel to point out that, at the end of the 0607, he did make a problematic distinction between deception and mistake 74-3. He does sound grateful for having been reminded of this helpful passage. (LH 74:14 points out that the press coverage of his May 29 broadcasts was his 0607 allegation of bad faith. AG replies 18 A. Yes, but that was not an allegation I would necessarily 19 support. From memory, someone in the FASC accused AG of ducking and diving when it came to stating his position on these matters…. 29 A close reading…not meant to be read A classic AG line 75:13: On a close reading of this, I do not 14 think it quite supports that interpretation but 15 obviously these words are not meant to be read, they are 16 meant to be heard. 30 The 0607 singleton and AC's selective quoting AG takes the line 75-17 that he should be judged on the overall effect of his output on the DK stuff. He only said wrong once. He goes on 76-12 to say that 12 The Government has used on occasions in the past 13 a particular technique where it quotes selectively from 14 a particular detail of a report that it believes is the 15 weakest detail and then uses it to discredit the whole 16 report. He suggests that that's what HMG is doing with his umpteen reports on the DK stuff. Which implies that one should take all the day's output into account. Whereas, of course, the not perfect report - the 0607 one - was his first to be broadcast. (And had travelled more than half way round the word before the first of his toned-down pieces went out - at 0732.) 31 Kevin Marsh flawed reporting email Marsh perhaps the worst affected with (what may prove) the terminal BBC disease cacoëthes scribendi of the email. In this case 77-3, one can't - on the evidence - dispute his general thrust: AG is a loose cannon. The implied criticism of his predecessor as Today boss, Rod Liddle, may be noted for future reference - Marsh must be on Hutton's list for Week 3, surely? [Marsh's 30 May email to AG 78-17 -is sophomoric verging on gushing. I suspect that AG is not to only BBC ordnance in want of strong rope!] 32 BBC Governors' arse-covering The Minutes of their June 6 meeting include 80-9: careful language had 10 not been applied by Andrew Gilligan throughout". Elsewhere, from memory, that's presented as the view of one guy (the 0607 broadcast amongst the Governors, as it were). I'm not sure whether these minutes are made public as a matter of course. When the BBC brass appear, time enough to get into the politics. 32A DK's FASC evidence DK's version differs 81-5 on various important points (who raised 45 minutes, role of AC, DK's view of the dossier) August 12 (Transcript Part 2) 33 DK's public line diverged on inessentials, too; he suggests in an MOD interview 90-25 that, at the May 22 interview, AG took notes with notebook and pencil - and not his Palm Pilot, as AG said. All this mildly corroborative - or not - detail is really empty calories, I suspect. Essentially - there's a great deal of the stuff - FASC and ISC evidence, MOD interviews, etc - put to AG in the Inquiry. But really, it's a he said, she said. [The question of corroboration from elsewhere - Susan Watts, for instance - we'll come onto.] There is the first derivative question: how far the various actors resolved the emerging conflict of evidence at a give time whilst the affair was in progress. And why, in notable cases (the FASC, for instance), they resolved it more or less in favour of DK. 33A DK misled the FASC and ISC After reciting all that testimony to the committees, counsel puts it to AG that DK denies AG's version of their meetings 113-6. AG replies with a version of Mandy Rice-Davies' He would, wouldn't he? - He 10 was an employee of the Ministry of Defence, he had to 11 keep faith with them; 34 How voluntary was DK's June 30 confessional letter? Counsel raises the point 113-19: it seems extraordinary to have volunteered the 20 letter. 21 A. Yes, I mean I still do not know the exact circumstances 22 under which Dr Kelly came forward; 35 AG's lack of contact with DK post May 29 He seems to have tried but not too hard 116-19. His excuse is essentially not wishing to compromise DK. In which case, why did he even try twice? [In fact, there was a leak inquiry ongoing in which DK was a suspect - as discussed with the MOD people later in the week.] (The point is not the morality of it - Daily Mail finger-wagging at BBC rats deserting the guy for whose peril they were responsible. It's just another factor going to AG's credibility.) 36 AG's second FASC appearance There's a teenage shrug at the start of discussions 119-5: I understand that both the Foreign Affairs Committee 5 and you, as the person who contributed, are happy that 6 it should be published by this Inquiry? 7 A. Yes. I mean it is up to the Inquiry what it does with 8 the evidence. Reads to me a whole lot like "Whatever!" This is the extremely fraught session. AG blames this for a couple of errors: First 120-2 his statement on the alleged transformation of the dossier by AC: That is the claim we have always 3 made and that is the claim that the source has always 4 made and that is the claim that the source continues to 5 make. The part in bold, he admits was wrong. Second, a statement on whether the source claimed that AC inserted the 45 minute claim 150-13: I did not quote the source as saying Campbell 14 inserted the 45 minute claim in the dossier. The 15 source's only mention of Campbell was in the context of 16 the transformation in the broader process of the 17 dossier. (The line AG was actually taking was that the 45 minute claim was an example of the transformation - it was the classic 20-23. It was a whole big thing - MPs burst their blood vessels all over a cross-purpose conversation.) 37 Mail on Sunday article This article 122-3named AC in connection with the dossier - none of AG's BBC pieces did. This time, it was personal, as it were. The question of BBC approval gets discussed. There is a Kevin Marsh email suggesting he would never have agreed if he'd have known AC would have been named. AG's reason for going further than the BBC pieces 123-19: I had had a difficult relationship with Mr Campbell 20 during the Iraq war. He complained about my coverage 21 several times; and I thought he had a particular issue 22 about some of my reporting. I did not want to be the 23 first to name him in this context… 38 HMG-BBC war From 124-10, a slew of complaints from AC about AG's work. Nothing surprising here: we've always known AC believed in a constant (creeping?) artillery barrage of complaints as a way of giving his guys cover to cross No Man's Land and slit throats - that's an analogy, in case he's reading…. That was his job. All that's new - and there's a definite frisson - is seeing the stuff on Downing Street letterheadings. Interestingly, after several pages of this, he asks AG 133-21 why the BBC could not specifically have apologised for 'the wrong point' (my para 27 above). AG ducked and dove - and Hutton was not best pleased: 23 A. I think that is probably something that you would have 24 to ask Richard Sambrook. 25 Q. In which case -- 134 1 A. But I mean, I think that probably is a question for him. 2 LORD HUTTON: What was your attitude? What would have been 3 your attitude? Were you aware of this letter that was 4 sent to Mr Sambrook? 5 A. Yes, I was aware of it. 6 LORD HUTTON: Did you have a view on it? It may have been 7 for Mr Sambrook to reply to it, but did you have a view 8 on that particular question? "Does it still stand by 9 the allegation made ..." 10 A. My views, as a rather lowly member of the BBC hierarchy, 11 are not really of much account, to be honest, when 12 answering this kind of letter. This is a very high 13 level letter. 14 LORD HUTTON: But you had made the allegation, it was you 15 who had said this on the programme. 16 A. As I said this morning, the wording in that first 17 two-way was not a fair reflection of how the whole story 18 was covered either by me or by the BBC… 39 Was DK shopped to The Times? An article on July 5 or 6 gave details of AG's source which suggested that someone who knew the source had leaked those details 135-2. AG denies contact with the Times. 40 DK's status as source Part of the debate has been about how senior DK was in HMG. AG described him in the 0607 piece (para 27) as 136-7 one of the senior 8 officials in charge of drawing up that dossier AG says this was one of the descriptions DK offered to him as being fine. 41 How big did AG think the story was? AG said not big, not the lead 136-18: it was 6 intended as a contribution to the debate. The follow-up: did DK realise how big it would be? AG says 19 sometimes in a specialist field you sometimes get that, 20 you know, you cannot see the wood for the trees. 42 Governors: AG's lack of notes The July 6 minutes 138-17 quote Stephen Whittle (Controller of Editorial Policy, no less) on the dispute about the AG-MOD phone call (para 23 above): "... said the BBC's weakness in this area was the lack 18 of solid and reliable notes about what was said to the 19 MoD about the allegations made by Andrew Gilligan's 20 source." He seems, from the evidence in so far, to have a valid point across the piece - and not just on the MOD issue. 43 Rubbish from CENTCOM One AC complaint that Sambrook upheld was this from AG from Iraq 127-11: It 12 might just be more rubbish from Central Command Rubbish, he agreed, was a bit strong. (Objectively, I suspect, one of AG's more accurate efforts, though!) 44 AG's first FASC session - more cross-purposes conversations Sir John Stanley, who got apoplectic in AG's second session, was almost as agitated in the first 142-2. On the 45 minute question, they'd asked Jack Straw whether the claim was exactly the same as it was 5 in the intelligence assessments applied to the 6 Government.. Straw replied (p143) that The same report [the Iraqi source's 45 minute claim] was 10 reflected in almost identical terms in the JIC's 11 classified work. Stanley enquired of AG whether, given this assurance, are you 14 saying that the Foreign Secretary is lying to this 15 Committee? AG could appreciate the work of a fellow ducker-and-diver: he replied I note the words 'almost identical' in the Foreign 21 Secretary's response. The Foreign Secretary's assurance was not on point (p144): We never mentioned the JIC. And he 12 made it clear that it was real intelligence. AG knew it; and I very much suspect Straw knew it, too. Sir Humphrey would be proud of them both. Counsel wearily asks 13 Q. So would it have been too much to have made that clear 14 to the Foreign Affairs Committee? AG tamely says …sometimes you do 19 not always come up with all the points you think you 20 could have made at the time… But then later 145-25 spots something his Learned Friend missed. I notice at the answer 146 1 to question 452 I do make that point: 2 "As I have said, the JIC did not enter into my 3 report…. | US Motion Picture Project - the ultimate Jewish lobby?It came as a surprise to one who had, on the strength of one viewing of Braveheart (which makes Jayson Blair look like George Washington, veracity-, if in no other-, wise) rejected the possibility that any work of Mel Gibson should be the cause of genuine enlightenment. Without his forthcoming Godpic The Passion, the resulting furore and the consequent lurch into print of one Christopher Orlet in Salon (in the sit-through-an-ad section), I would never have learnt that there was such a thing as the US Motion Picture Project. Apart from a blog piece citing Orlet, the USMP as I assume it is acronymed is online in the form of one, single item. Can't help feeling there should be a fanfare here. But here it is: Erens, Patricia So, for 55 years plus change, there's been a bunch of guys riding shotgun with the studios, making sure - what? That villains shed their yarmulkahs for shamrocks, berets or bowler hats? Or was there a quota? Or a fancy-shmancy points system, like up at Michigan U? Was there, like carbon trading - Warners trade a Bugsy Siegel lookalike for a loan of Marilyn Monroe? Who were its members? How was it financed? Who was in charge? So many questions... Now, I reckon that effectiveness and discretion are the two attributes of a worthwhile lobby. The latter, the USMP has in spades - Rudy Vallee to AIPAC's Ethel Merman . And the former? I'd love to see the stats. Post-Mel, probably best not to speculate. (1947, of course, was the year that Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire was released; noted, rightly or wrongly, for being the first movie whose main theme was antisemitism - a Jew murdered by a Gentile soldier. It seems that the original script deal with the murder of a homosexual, but that was deemed too difficult. I don't suppose the USMP had anything to do with the switch...) | Friday, August 15, 2003
New Blogger software, new SNAFUsThe problem which means that posts appear on the main page in pretty much random date order looks as if it's persistent [1]. Sanity continues, however, on the archive pages, where chronology is still, thankfully, strictly observed. So much for life under Google.
| Lord Hutton: World Exclusive! (modified rapture only...)Some off-topic research in aid of barring the onset of Transcript Fatigue, and I stumble on a bizarre factoid concerning the man who currently is holding a scalpel to Saint Tony's wedding tackle. To wit, the names of Lord and Lady Huttonappear on a page headed Wedding Coverage Commendationson the site of Vaughan Ives Photography of London, beneath the following glowing recommendation:"We're absolutely thrilled with the photographs … they are really wonderful." To use a word of Susan Watts, let's triangulate. There is only one Lord Hutton; and he did get remarried in 2001 (according to the Guardian of July 31). That's all the information I have. One might speculate as to the circumstances in which the good Lord's name thus appears, but I shan't. One might actually find out; but that would be actual journalism - which I'm prepared to leave to the professionals. It's not without interest that Lord Hutton was one of the Law Lords involved in the Pinochet extradition litigation. The House of Lords (the top UK court) decided in November 1998 that the General could not rely on sovereign immunity. One of the Law Lords who heard the case, Lord Hoffmann, turned out to be a director of a company linked to Amnesty International, a party to the case he had heard. Hutton was on the panel that decided that the decision in the sovereign immunity case should be set aside on the basis of - Hoffmann's conflict of interest! It's a funny old game... (While I have the URL to hand, a Pinochet timeline.) | Thursday, August 14, 2003
Hutton: dealing with the materialToday marks the end of four days of evidence before the Hutton Inquiry, each day producing around 40,000 words of transcript: a length equivalent to a decent-sized novel every week. In the months preceding the war, primary product was in distinctly short supply: press briefings, speeches, sermons (courtesy of Saint Walter Mitty, of course), public sessions of the UNSC (Blix-Baradei v Straw-Powell, a great tag-team contest!) - but we plebs did not get a sniff of the good stuff. Everything else we got was filtered through the information equivalent of the military-industrial complex: politicians, government officials, journalists - the whole Discovery Channel full of reptiles that are under His Lordship's microscope right now. Now, we've moved from famine to feast: the key players are spouting on the record, boxcars of documents unloaded, the Big Boys are, as it were, letting it all hang out, Hutton oblige. Like the Christmas turkey, we have enough for roast, fricassee, curried, sandwiches - all sorts of meals. The daily play-by-play is on a newspaper site near you - the Guardian does pretty well. I couldn't possibly cope with anything of the sort. The other exercise in futility would be a daily box score, or attempting to predict the result. Being a poor man's me-too Lord Hutton is scarcely appealing, either. No, I'll be taking things at Hutton's own, steady pace, looking strictly at the interstitial, the incidental - allowing the evidence to ferment, and sniffing the effluvia. There is, it must be said, a particular difficulty in digesting information in the Q&A form. Even when, as in the case of Hutton, the questioning is not confined by strict rules of evidence (eg, not asking leading questions on examination-in-chief (direct examination) or tiptoeing round the hearsay rule), and the factfinders are professionals, and not the flotsam of the average jury, the information is harder to take off the page (one gets a sort of intellectual tennis neck, following the ball going to and fro between counsel and witness). If one compares, say, the length of a witness statement, with the length of the testimony needed merely to introduce all the facts in that statement on examination-in-chief - the latter will be much longer. The benefit of Q&A is, of course, the testing of the evidence, face to face: both the interrogator and the fact-finder can judge the demeanour of the witnesses - which, of course, for the present inquiry, Hutton has denied to the plebs by excluding the broadcasters' TV cameras. But the cost is that the resulting text is harder to work with. The Hutton Inquiry [which I will, from time to time, refer to as simply Hutton - which is not, I think a usage common on the other side of the pond] offers a new paradigm for a judicial proceeding. One has now the TV movie paradigm of three acts: the first gives the background, identifies the defendant (innocent - natch!), shows the crime, makes the arrest; the second is the difficulty of the hero lawyer in finding the evidence to save his client; the third is the courtroom sequence where he does so - usually by fingering the guilty party. There's also OJ, the TV soap-and-rolling-book-pitch. Hutton is miles away from either. There is no particular structure (beyond Hutton's two stages: just the facts and then cross-examination); no timetable; no guilty-not guilty outcome. Hutton can follow his nose wherever the evidence leads him. There's no rhythm or shape, as in a play or film; unlike the movie director, he doesn't have to worry about bringing his inquiry in on time and under budget. (I'm sure he's a full schedule of witnesses on a spreadsheet right now. But he's only revealing that a week at a time.) Now, that system has the defects of its own merits: easy to get bogged down in trivia, ceasing to see the wood for the trees, losing public sympathy. For instance, in Ireland, the Flood and Moriarty Tribunals into various aspects of governmental wrongdoing tended to lose the great public goodwill they started with as months dragged into years without much in the way of results [1]. Far too early to tell if anything of the sort is likely to happen with Hutton, of course.
| Wednesday, August 13, 2003
Hutton - journos, notes and rememberingPloughing through Day 2's evidence (thank Goodness Hutton's only taking evidence four days a week!), I'm impressed by the fact that Gilligan has difficulty being certain whether or not he met Kelly during specified periods in the last couple of years; yet credits his memory with sufficient power to dispense with written records of conversations - not all, but most - on the basis of which he breaks his stories. Given the technicality and complexity of the topics he discusses with his specialist sources, and the breadth of his own remit (roaming over the entire subject of defence) this rank amateur finds it incredible that he can trust his memory to keep the skeins of information from getting tangled. Lawyers, doctors, scientists all make notes: Gilligan, not so much. And whatever happened to Pitman's and Gregg's boon to humanity? Don't journos do the shorthand thing any more? [We're only at Day 2 - this may be jumping the gun by miles. But, when it comes to reliability of evidence, it is, I think, a point to watch. The materials we - the peasants - have on Hutton are all written [1]. We can flip windows, compare and constrast, and read stuff over and over: and even then, getting even the barest outline clear in the brain is a job of work!]
MORE The Guardian had a piece yesterday on the Palm Pilot, the mode of recording used by Gilligan (hereinafter, AG - Gilligan is a bugger to type!) for the crucial May 22 meeting with David Kelly (hereinafter DK). Supposedly you can get 30wpm. And Google News, on gilligan shorthand, threw up a Guardian piece from July 21 on the (then) first signs of BBC folk deserting the sinking journo - noted for future reference. YET MORE Proper shorthand (100wpm or so ) seems still to be widely taught to British journalists yet not to American (both 1998 sources). Is that still right? How many British hacks the age of AG still use it? | US findings on shelled Baghdad hotel put Spain's war crimes extraterritoriality on the spotNews from AP yesterday that A U.S. military investigation has concluded that U.S. soldiers who fired on a Baghdad hotel [sc the Palestine Hotel] April 8, killing two journalists, had strong reason to believe that hostile forces were using the building to direct fire on the Americans. One of the journalists killed was Spanish cameraman Jose Couso (my piece of June 11). Couso filed suit in the Spanish courts on May 29 against Lt Col Philip De Camp and other US personnel claiming that the shelling was a crime against humanity. I can find nothing to suggest that that case has since been thrown out. So, now what will the Spanish do? The Belgians, of course, decided to junk their extraterritoriality law a few weeks ago - damn! I spent hours mugging that stuff up! Jose Aznar's tongue is barely a lighter shade of brown than Walter Mitty's. And arch extraterritorialist Baltasar Garzon is tied up with the Argentinian extradition pantomime. [Just a holding note, Hutton oblige.] | The emerging Gilligan problemMaking a preliminary skim of Day 2's transcripts [1], a couple of things strike me:
Immense relief, therefore, to get onto Susan Watts (the Newsnight reporter). She's organised, clear-thinking - and there's a little humour, too. For instance, on Kelly's views on the 45 minute claim - much the same as given to Gilligan, she says: I had no reason to believe that he had particular access that would make that a comment that I would want to use with confidence in a Newsnight report. In other words, whatever they do on the Today programme, on Newsnight we have standards! A LOL moment from the BBC, at last! | John Gunther - a sorry association indeed!As a source for detail on American life around the end of World War 2 - stuff that mostly isn't online or otherwise easily accessible - I've long been accustomed to turn to Gunther's Inside USA. Without ever having read its 900-odd pages from cover to cover. Well, I'd got up to page 52 - in one of his chapters on California - when I read: My friend Walter Duranty suggests a point here. Oh dear, oh dear. Duranty furnished more evidence for the old notion that America's idea of achieving an equable climate was to have one's head in the oven and its feet in the freezer. First, there had been Woodrow Wilson's police-state, the Espionage Act and the Palmer Raids. Then, when a certain current in society drifted off to Hiram Evan's KKK, red-baiting went out of fashion. It started coming back with the Depression in the form of the Committee on subversion of 1930 chaired by Hamilton Fish , followed by the McCormack-Dickstein Committee [4] which started work in 1934, and thence to the Dies Committee [2]. (My dead-tree source for what came to be known as HUAC is The Committee by Walter Goodman (1968)) Now, since the end of the USSR, we find that Communist activity in the US was something more than a figment of the conservative imagination [3]. But Walter Duranty was hailing a Soviet paradise in the columns of the New York Times in the early 30s, for heaven's sake! No wonder they want to take his Pulitzer Prize away. But, evidently, the solid citizens of New York were far from outraged to read pleasant reportage of their ideological foes at the breakfast-table. Something requiring explanation there, at least to little me. All told, rather disturbing to learn that Gunther was pals with the guy in 1947!
| Meanwhile, at the Mother of Parliaments....Gilligan committee was a zoo!Comparative Politics 101 teaches that, whereas US Congressional committees do vital work and attract some of the best politicians in the nation, UK House of Commons committees are devoid of power and influence, and hence largely consist of sad sacks: on the Government side, bitter ex-ministers, aspirants to office with tongues as brown as black-and-blue, and professional backbenchers [1] ever coarsening their shtick in a pathetic effort to snaffle 90 seconds on the regional TV evening news; and, much the same on the opposition side, only worse since, of course, any hope of preferment rests on their party winning the next election [2]. As fallible as any generalisation - for instance, recommendations of the Commons Public Accounts Committee are often accepted by HMG (because it's effectively staffed by the National Audit Office, and therefore knows what it's writing about) - it holds true in the case of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, the one charged with the investigation of the Kelly affair in particular and HMG's march to war in general. And, as if they wished to showcase their frailties, they chose the day of Andrew Gilligan's testimony to the Hutton Inquiry to release the, hitherto secret (though leaked), transcript of their private session with Gilligan on July 17. The Fred Karno of the FASC is one Donald Anderson, first elected to the Commons in 1966, who is retiring at the next election. Anderson's function in the Blair Circus is a strange one: though not a minister, he often appears in TV current affairs programmes (BBC's Newsnight and the like) kinda-sorta answering for HMG, but without engaging the responsibility (to borrow from the French) of HMG [3]. He sometimes opposes, but usually supports government policy, whatever it might be. Either way, he avoids an embarrassing Gaullian empty chair [4] for Labour. Anderson's crew, you will remember, following their first interviews with Gilligan, Campbell and others, concluded that Campbell [5] did not play any role in the inclusion of the 45 minutes claim in the September dossier.Then came Kelly's admission to his bosses that he'd blabbed to the media, and his strange outing by a thousand hints from HMG's spin machine. The FASC interviewed Kelly on July 15, as a result of which they concluded that Kelly was most unlikely to be Gilligan's primary source. Gilligan was invited to reappear on July 17. A brief report followed on July 21 - which mentions in passing the FASC's July 17 meeting with Gilligan, but focuses (para 3) on his refusal on the ground of protecting his source to answer, in writing, or in private oral evidence, the question put to him by our Chairman: on what date, and at what time, did the meeting with this source take place? He also refused to disclose any further information about his source over and above that given in oral evidence on 19 June. It bleats (para 6) that it is unsatisfactory that a witness who enjoys the full protection of Parliamentary privilege should be free to make an allegation against a third party, however serious, without revealing the source for that allegation. Of course, Gilligan made his allegations first outside the protection of Parliamentary privilege, and Alastair Campbell or whoever else thought he was libelled would find no such obstruction to suing, (Whereas, over the years, numerous honourable Members have failed to be so generous.) The FASC stands on its dignity, though. A quality, we find, noticeably absent from its July 17 meeting with Gilligan. The reports on the day (for instance) had been of Anderson appearing after the meeting in high dudgeon: Mr Gilligan clearly changed his mind in the course of the evidence, in particular in relation to serious allegations concerning Mr Campbell. But the transcript was held back, supposedly because the BBC and Gilligan pleaded for them to do so. If Gilligan is (as the Committee suggested after the meeting) unsatisfactory, how is one to describe the conduct of certain members of the Committee? Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay, for instance, gives a performance which urges the inference (no doubt without the slightest justification) that the hearing followed an excellent lunch [6]. Other members present a more interesting case. For instance, Gisela Stuart (Lab) - German by birth, one of Blair's Babes, a junior minister in 1999, sacked after the 2001 election for no reason I can trace - made one or two interesting interventions. She asks Gilligan (Q191) If you were to look back at the last 12 months and the reporting in relation to you as the Defence Correspondent and the Today programme, would there be occasions when with hindsight you would now say that actually you were wrong? An excellent question of which political interviewers might usefully take note. Not surprisingly, Gilligan has no answer, off the top of his head: I cannot think of any. Again, this is not a question I prepared for by looking back through all the stories I have ever done. (He then volunteers that I made a bad mistake on one story about three years ago which we did correct on air.which not have been the wisest thing.) Stuart, however, was not flying blind. She went on (Q192) May I just talk about one particular story which you may recall? It was reported on the Today programme on Wednesday, 24 February, and it referred to RAF planes in Cyprus. You came on to the programme and said that.... The steno reported some parts of the questions as inaudible - but no matter. There are several sentences in all. She's not finished. (Q195) Okay. Let us look at another occasion of where a spat arises between you. Let us take it a little bit further back to last November and it was about support security in Dover. You were reported to have said on the Today programme... The poor sap is meant to remember back nine months on a completely unrelated topic! And do we think she gave him notice of the question? Finally (Q196), she turns to something relevant: an on-air conversation with Today presenter James Naughtie on the day a leak of the September dossier on the day it was published. She reads to him from a transcript of the conversation, and raises queries upon it. Even Anderson is prompted to ask Q199 Can I ask Ms Stuart, is that an exact transcript of what Mr Gilligan said at the time? To which she replies So I understand it. One is naturally minded to ask, how could a humble backbencher, without a Civil Service (or even, inferring from Anderson's query, the FASC staff) to help her, come up with such a set of richly researched questions on her own? Could it be that, still a loyal Babe harbouring the desire to return to the ministerial ranks, she received assistance from a Blair spin machine intent on skewering the BBC's point man in the struggle between the two? The other Labour members battle away to secure the reputation of spinmeister Campbell and his master. But the highest dudgeon emerges from Conservative MP Sir John Stanley (strangely, the only Tory present at this meeting). A Minister under Thatcher (last in office in 1988 [7]), he unleashes on Gilligan (starting at Q290) for changing his story, finishing by asking him ...whether you wish to consider before the Committee moves to private deliberations, which I think will be extremely serious, whether you now wish to make a very full and frank apology to this Committee for having, in my view, I believe, grievously misled this Committee? Why should a Tory member strive so hard for Alastair Campbell's honour? Perhaps, because he had something of a set-to with Campbell during his 25 June session with the Committee (starting Q922, and again at Q1152 - on the second, Dodgy Dossier) and wished to even things up a little? Something more substantial than that, surely? Gilligan himself scarcely endears himself to the reader of the July 17 transcript. For example, at Q263, he talks about the corroboration he sought from other sources of his single source (ie Kelly), finishing his answer with Clearly I have more than one source in the totality of my career.How old is he again? And his answers on the allegation that Campbell inserted the 45 minute claim - even when read in cold print - require more cold towel work that I've been able to give them. If he is lying - and what exactly might he be lying about? - he is the least plausible liar in the world! High time for the amateur inquisitors to leave the stage for the professionals: over to you, Lord Hutton..... [Helpful timelines to July 18 and from July 17.]
| Tuesday, August 12, 2003
Hutton Day One - the tone is setIn his opening statement on August 1, Lord Hutton adopted the words of the chairman of an earlier famous enquiry, Lord Scarman: This Inquiry is to be conducted -- and I stress it -- by myself. This means that all the decisions have to be taken by me. The first thing Hutton had to do was to set his own pace. The substance of his inquiry largely concerns two professions - in the loosest sense - with the attention-span of a gnat. Harold Wilson's a week is a long time in politicsseems straight out of the horse-and-buggy era: these days, for week, read hour! Hutton slows the game down right down. By the two-stage schedule of witnesses, for instance - the first round, straight testimony without cross-examination, the second picking up matters arising from the first, with witnesses having the opportunity to cross-examine. And, more than once during Day 1, we were told a witness would be coming back later in Stage 1 to answer questions on further elements of the matter. By the welter of documents put to witnesses, in several cases, documents which counsel James Dingemans must have known the witness knew little or nothing about. In what till now has been a he said, she said, Hutton wants to establish himself on the foundation of written material. (It's where Dingemans is most comfortable, apparently.) Examination on documents is something even the hardest TV interviewers seldom if ever do: pols and journos won't be used to it. So it puts them under pressure, and underlines the fact that they are on Hutton's turf [1]. After a couple of months of this - a he said, she said but with a steno taking down all the particulars - the chances are pretty good that witnesses will have provided cross-examining counsel a truckload of material for Stage 2: discrepancies between witnesses, within a single witness's evidence, between oral evidence and documentation are pretty much inevitable.... The absence of direct broadcasts of proceedings also helps Hutton in keeping charge of proceedings. It makes the inquiry different from most spheres of public life, where cameras regularly go - and assimilates them to the one area where they regularly don't: court rooms. No doubt Hutton had visions of Judge Ito losing control of the OJ Simpson courtroom; worse, had visions of himself playing up to the cameras. Who will the lack of cameras help more: Tony 'Mister Showbiz' Blair or Lord Hutton? Answers on a postcard... Having read the Day 1 transcripts - morning and afternoon, there is nothing particularly striking that emerges beyond what was headlined yesterday - confirmation of disquiet within the UKIC on the September dossier [2] - Martin Howard, Chief of Defence Intelligence in the Ministry of Defence (page 131 line 6ff). The visible results were as slight as those of the site of a major construction project after one day of work! Much of the evidence concerned points of information relating to the drafting of the September Dossier - on the workings of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and its relationship with the Cabinet Office Assessment Staff, for instance [3]; details of Kelly's employment history (did the Ming Dynasty mandarinate have a more arcane structure?) and his experience [4]; and similar bread and butter issues. We've got six pieces in a 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Not much for four of our earth hours; but, according to the Hutton calendar, a damned fine day's work! [The online transcripts are, I surmise, lifted straight from the product of the stenographers (hence the unappealing layout and the line-breaks at the end of each line!). Each day starts on a new 'page 1', and comes in two HTML files, roughly, morning and afternoon. Around 70,000 words a day, four days a week - until further notice. Enjoy!]
| Monday, August 11, 2003
Hutton Day 1: slow start, but a promising revelationThe transcript isn't yet up on the Hutton Inquiry site. But press reports - as this from the Guardian - suggest a glimmer of fresh information: Martin Howard, now deputy chairman of the MoD's defence intelligence service..., who at the time the dossier was drafted worked as the department's director general for communications, admitted two MoD insiders had expressed concern about the dossier shortly before it was published on September 24. Now, the main difficulty in all parts of the case is the lack of corroboration for allegations made - at least, a lack so far as we plebs are concerned: much juicy evidence may lie within the Fort Knox of national security, and we can have no realistic hope for much it is to be disclosed. So, any corroboration is more than usually welcome. Of course, Howard's statement is really only evidence to the extent it is made against interest. To back up the statement, there is a letter dated 19 September 2002 commenting on a revised draft of the dossier that had been prepared that day.Apparently, A copy of the letter was shown in evidence to the inquiry but the names of the sender and recipient were blanked out for security reasons. Will the writers be called (anonymously) to give evidence? We'll see. Meanwhile, a piece in the Guardian today on James Dingemans QC, senior counsel to the Hutton inquiry. Johnny Cochrane, he ain't (and thank the good Lord for that!) - at least, according to the piece. Quite right - there's no jury to rap to - showbiz is the last thing they need. Which may put Phoney Tony - Mr Showbiz himself - in some difficulty. The so-called hard interviewers on TV usually play up to his histrionics - and come off worse (he's so much better at it than they are!). Dourness from Dingemans might do the trick. (This may be one reason why Hutton kept the TV out - not to spare Blair & Co the embarrassment, but to stop his man being tempted to lose focus and be drawn by Blair into being an Ikette to some sort of Checker's speech.) Hopefully, the Day 1 transcript will be up tomorrow. Whereupon more here. | Sunday, August 10, 2003
Kelly Leak: was it the BBC whodunnit?A point that I had yet to register: the Observer is suggesting today that, amongst those suspected of being responsible for putting in the public domain the suggestion that Dr David Kelly was a (or the) source for the reports of the BBC's Andrew Gilligan on the September 2002 dossier, is - the BBC itself! According to the piece, a key part of the Number 10 spin operation for the naming of Kelly was the London Times - and its reporter Tom Baldwin, who, it says, was ...known to have a close relationship with Campbell... It identifies certain reports in the Times which, it suggests, corroborates this interpretation, and goes on: A stray clue to Kelly's identity - that the source was abroad at a crucial stage of the saga, when Kelly had been in Iraq - is thought to have been provided to the paper by a senior BBC executive enjoying lunch with the Times . The Baldwin-Campbell connection, and the suggestion that some synergy might have been at work in their attacks against the BBC, are not news. The Observer had a piece on July 27 which touched on the question. (The Times is, of course, a rag owned by Rupert Murdoch's organisation. Murdoch's loathing for the BBC - which competes with his Sky satellite and cable TV services finance by a poll tax on all those in the UK with a TV set - is legendary. Leading to an almost overwhelming temptation in this case to connect the dots.) But the possibility that, after all the fuss the Beeb made about protecting its sources, some BBC apparatchik, half-cut on Murdoch booze, dropped a broad hint about Kelly's identity - that, so far as I know, is new. I suspect that, at this rate, Lord Hutton's fellow Law Lords shouldn't count on his return to judicial duties much before Autumn 2004... | Kelly: Whatever happened to the MOD burn the evidence case?A week or so, the Kelly plat du jour was a story (originated, I think, in the Telegraph (August 2) (fuller MOD denial in the Observer August 3) to the effect that the MOD took steps to destroy three days after Kelly's death what is referred to as a media plan to deal with the Kelly case. The extraordinary feature of the story as told - one not picked up on in the media to date, that I can find - lies in the way the document in question was supposedly discovered. From the Observer piece: The MoD confirmed there had been a security breach on 20 July when guards discovered that a document referring to Kelly had been mistakenly placed in a 'burn bag' to be taken for incineration. The incident would normally have been dealt with internally, but the guards took the unusual step of alerting the Ministry of Defence Police. The key question is this: if the document was in the burn bag, how could the guards have known what it was? Only, surely, through having rummaged through the entire bag! I assume that MOD security guards have some kind of security clearance; but are they cleared for the sort of documents liable to find their way into such a bag? Would any sane system for dealing with sensitive waste paper incorporate a stage where the guards tip the bag onto a table and riffle through looking for items that should have been preserved [1]? Normally, an admission against interest like this (the MOD clearly looking like prats, at best) would tend to be believed on that account. In this case, the MOD's story is so bizarre that, however bad it makes the MOD look, it just doesn't ring true. Now, I don't flatter myself that I'm the only guy to whom all of this has occurred. So why haven't the media been making hay with this incident, combining as it does evidence of incompetence and suggestions of malice? A search on Google News comes up with nothing fresh in the last week. And, on the BBC site, not even the original story that was in the Telegraph! Very strange...
| Saturday, August 09, 2003
Lynn Frazier and the Non-Partisan LeagueFrazier, thanks to California's little local difficulty, is having another fifteen minutes of fame as the only Governor of a US state ejected using a recall mechanism. Pitifully little on Frazier online, that I could find. This is what he looked like; painfully short bios here and here; and that's more or less your lot. (For those bellyaching about blog results confounding Google searches, one might note that searches on LF are sludged up by namechecks (and no more) of the man by the (I laughingly say) grown up media filling out Davis pieces.) Be it noted that, even in these post-Jayson Blair days, no less a political powerhouse than The Hill was pleased to place Frazier as Governor of Nebraska - a Quaker State reader made the spot. There is slightly more on the Non-Partisan League: a chapter of a thesis (PDF), the text of a 1922 speech by NPL Governor Jacob AO Preus of Minnesota and this from something called the Free State Project. But not much. There is a short bio of William Langer who beat Frazier in the 1940 Republican (US Senate) primary, having seduced NPL support away from the incumbent. Langer seems an altogether more fascinating character than Frazier - twice Governor in the 30s, sentenced in Federal court to 18 months imprisonment for illegal campaign contributions and conspiracy [1]. In 1938, Langer went up against Gerald Nye - noted Son of the Wild Jackass and chairman of the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry which so assisted the proponents of Isolationism during the 1930s. Langer lost; but Nye went on, in 1944, to suffer the same ignominy as Frazier. He also lost in the primary. For a state so slight in population, Gunther has quite a section in Inside USA devoted to North Dakota (pp237-245): It is, in fact, to sum up, almost as socialized as Sweden. And a few pars on the NPL, founded in 1915 by AC Townley [2]. According to Gunther (p239), Somebody told him once, "You ought to read history." His reply was, "History? I don't care to read it. I make it" He also has a couple of pars on Langer - an extremely complicated personalityhe calls him. Apparently, the first governor to declare a moratorium on debt foreclosures; and, as senator, voted against the San Francisco Charter of the UN. Unlike isolationists like Nye, Henrik Shipstead (MN), Burton Wheeler (MT) and Robert LaFollette Jr (WI) - Joseph McCarthy's scalp, of course - Langer kept on getting reelected, until they carried him out of the Capitol feet first (metaphorically speaking!) in 1959. Southern senators modelled on Fred Allen's Beauregard Claghorn were not the only dinosaurs populating the US Senate in the 50s, it seems. The dichotomy between Insurgency and Regularity in US politics seems pretty peculiar to the outsider. And that a certain group of states - California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota amongst them - should have become institutionalised as insurgent (by the bag of tricks of which recall is one), and retain their peculiar institutions long after the institutions of regularity (the machines, the one-party South) have vanished is doubly so. Much more on this to come, I fancy. [A couple of promising online pieces on isolation worth noting in passing: a long piece on previous isolationist Senate Committee investigation, into William B Shearer and the 1927 Geneva Disarmament Conference (Shearer's role, as agent for US shipyards, was to ensure there wasn't any!); and a more general piece (PDF) on The Ideology of American Isolationism 1931-39.]
| Hutton Inquiry - poker visors on!For Tony Blair, the return leg of the Iraq fixture kicks off on Monday with the first witnesses to give testimony to Lord Hutton. The official site supplies a list of witnesses for next week. As well as various civil servants from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Ministry of Defence (MOD), the three BBC journos who (are known to have) had interviews with Dr David Kelly are due to testify [1]. Regrettably, Hutton has decided to exclude both TV and radio broadcasters - though a CCTV link to an overflow room is to be provided: are such things hackable? I only asked... So the only unfiltered rendering of the evidence will be the transcripts supplied on the official site. (I had expected that the TV networks - Channel 4, rather than the BBC, in the circs! - would be clearing the schedules for reenactments of the proceedings. No sign yet, though there's still plenty of time.) As for Hutton himself, I've yet to track down an online bio - save, of course, the pitiful effort on the official site, and this offering from the Guardian of July 31. Perhaps it's not a bad thing - the temptation to use a bio as a form book is best avoided. Not even the course of proceedings is a sure guide to the outcome: the Scott Inquiry [2] gave its witnesses a hard time, but its report (brief summary of conclusions) was underwhelming. So as long as one approaches Hutton with the 9th Beatitude [3] clearly in mind, I suspect we may have entertainment, if not enlightenment, in store.
| Friday, August 08, 2003
From Saint Hiram to the Governator - Part the FirstI had thought that mounting political careers on the back of prosecutions of organised crime was a peculiarly Empire State phenomenon. There was Franklin Roosevelt - who, as befits a member of the gentry, didn't exactly rampage against the politico-criminal nexus. But, as Governor, found the Seabury Committee [1] tailor made for cleansing him of the taint of Mayor Jimmy Walker and Tammany just in time to snaffle the national ticket in 1932 [2]. Fiorello LaGuardia, Congressman then Mayor of New York City [3] before his campaign started [4]. (He thought he would go further - FDR consigned him to the dumpster, together with Ed Flynn, Tom Pendergast and others I can't remember right now, once his usefulness to FDR had evaporated [5].) Thomas Dewey became US District Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1933 (the year LaGuardia was elected) and spent the rest of the decade (in various capacities) prosecuting organised crime [6], and set himself up nicely for Albany and a run at FDR. Rudolph Giuliani was USDA for the same district as Dewey, and exploited his position in much the same way. Hiram Johnson was there first, in the first decade of the twentieth century. His first entrance onto the public stage was as prosecutor of San Francisco boss Abraham Ruef - replacing one Francis Heney, a prosecutor (apparently appointed by Theodore Roosevelt to fight SF corruption) who was so unfortunate as to get himself shot in open court! Johnson secured his conviction - and a fourteen year sentence. Little wonder, perhaps, that Johnson should have been inspired to a political career by such spectacular events. There's a ragbag of online materials with potential [7] on this colourful period of the city's past that I've yet to do more than skim. Also worth looking at is Samuel P Orth's 1919 The Boss and the Machine, which traces the history of machine politics from start of the Republic. My dead tree collection has a snippet or two on Johnson. For example, John Gunther in Inside USA (p13) points out that he was the ...son of a father - Grove L Johnson - who was Southern Pacific's own chief lobbyist!...Grove had once served a penitentiary sentence, and for many years he and Hiram, stubborn men both, never spoke. Once they campaigned against one another, and Grove told his audience that Hiram and another son might be found addressing a rival crowd down the street. "And who are those men?" Grove bellowed. "One is full of booze - the other of conceit! Who are they? My sons!" The Southern Pacific (which, as the Central Pacific, was responsible for the western portion of the track that met at Promontory Point, UT on May 10 1869) bossed the Golden State for several decades before Johnson became Governor. But, as the shilling shockers say, we anticipate....
| ADL opposes spouse residency law - noted for future referenceWhilst Edgar Bronfman of the World Jewish Congress is getting grief for the letter he and Lawrence Eagleburger sent to Bush in opposition to the Wall (aka Fence), Forward reports that the Anti-Defamation League has criticised the new law recently passed by the Knesset which denies residency rights in Israel proper to Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens who themselves are not citizens [1]. A statement from its director, Abraham Foxman, included the following sentence: We hope the Knesset will review this law when it expires in a year and explore other methods to ensure Israel's security needs. No evidence that I've seen of Foxman suffering the same kind of vituperation as Bronfman [2]. And I certainly wouldn't presume to draw any conclusions. Interesting, though, in the light, inter alia, of the case of the Old Dominion's Rep James Moran earlier this year - which I looked at but, with the war supervening, never explored to any degree of satisfaction.
| How many cheers for Hiram?The Californicated Election does for Progressivism what Trent Lott and his mot on the Dixiecrats of '48 did for the South and the Jim Crow era. Redeemer of the People [1] Hiram Johnson, onlie begetter of the rule which makes the current pantomime possible, is, I strongly suspect, due for something of a kicking. But...knowledge first, kicking afterwards. (Not to forget Lynn Frazier of North Dakota - only governor to suffer recall, in 1921 - and the Non-Partisan League, and other goodies yet to come properly within my ken.) Initial searches suggest the online resources for Johnson and his Crusade against Evil - there was his slaying of the Octopus, of course, before he became Governor and had Utopia enacted into law - are thin on the ground. That may well, however, be an impression born of ignorance....
| Thursday, August 07, 2003
The Californicated Election and Hispanic precedentThe motto of Arkansas is, notoriously, Thank God for Mississippi. Now, pols in 49 states are saying the same about the Golden one. With an eye, as ever, to the tangential and historical, I'm struck by this piece from AP, on the announcement of Gray Davis's Lieutenant-Governor (though, according to The Note [1], they're scarcely best buds) Cruz Bustamante that he's going to run, The point that got my interest and goat at the same time is a throwaway reference to the effect that Bustamante is the first Hispanic to hold statewide office in California in more than a century. The grown-up media never seem to figure that readers might actually be interested in the factoids they insert [2]. The man's name, it seems, is Romualdo Pacheco. He was elected in 1870 as Lieutenant-Governor to Newton Booth [3], and succeeded Booth as Governor following his election to the US Senate in 1874, (I take it from Booth's Congressional Biography that he was elected in the November general election. The 43rd Congress was adjourned on March 3 1875, which presumably was the date on which the incumbent senator, John Sharpenstein Hager, vacated. Strangely, Booth's Congressional Bio says he ceased to be Governor in 1874, yet Pacheco's official California bio - and everything else I've seen - has his gubernatorial service starting in 1875!) Whether there were other Hispanic statewide office-holders before Pacheco is not clear - his CA bio refers to him as The first California-born governor- which leaves open other possibilities. The only time I had previously had cognizance of Bustamante was a couple of years ago following the notorious incident (another fine example of Democratic comradeliness!) when he got tongue-tied in his second language during some kind of celebration of activism past, and, in render a roll of honour of various trade unions with Negro in the title, was heard - in circumstances more suspicious than an off.the-record briefing from a Number 10 spin-doctor - to utter the dread word nigger. The usual suspects were shocked - in the Captain Renault sense - and voluble conniptions had by folk who were, naturally, paying no heed to the mounting Hispanic demo that threatened, in time, to deprive them of their cushy billets in the Party of Treason. (Comparisons were later made with Lott/Thurmond, of course.) An endless vista of entertainment, it seems, courtesy of the Fun Factory....
| Tuesday, August 05, 2003
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