The Lincoln Plawg - the blog with footnotes |
|
|
Politics and law from a British perspective (hence Politics LAW BloG): ''People who like this sort of thing...'' as the Great Man said
NEW!!!
XML Feeds:
Search the Plawg:Archives
Email the Plawg at johnsmith0903
How Appealing 
|
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Why the strange hush over leaked DIA report on Chalabi?The fashionable leak story in Washington is the one concerning the (gloriously searchable) Valerie Plame - already, we had the leaker leaked against [1]; and now AP has the leak of a memo from White House counsel Alberto Gonzales telling White House staff not to shred stuff that might be of interest to the Department of Justice leak inquiry! Meanwhile, the leaked report of the Defense Intelligence Agency saying that most of the intelligence provided through Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress was complete garbage - seems to have made almost zero news impact: one piece in the New York Times (September 29), another in the London Independent (September 30), and that's about it. Which is, perhaps, a little surprising given that
The Times piece has the leakers [2] federal officials briefed on the arrangementsaying that The arrangement, paid for with taxpayer funds supplied to the exile group under the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, involved extensive debriefing of at least half a dozen defectors by defense intelligence agents in European capitals and at a base in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil in late 2002 and early 2003, the officials said. But a review early this year by the defense agency concluded that no more than one-third of the information was potentially useful, and efforts to explore those leads since have generally failed to pan out... DOD officials damn the INC intel with faint praise: A Defense Department official who defended the arrangement said that even most of the useful information provided by the defectors included "a lot of stuff that we already knew or thought we knew." But the official said that information had "improved our situational awareness" by "making us more confident about our assessments." The Independent piece includes a contribution from friend of the blog (from way back [3]) ex-CIA man Vincent Cannistraro on INC intel: ...Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defence Department what they want to hear... I never did get to find out what Cannistraro's deal was: I'm none the wiser now. The piece also mentions (that the Times piece does not) Grey Lady hack and WMD specialist [4] Judith Miller. It quotes (without further detail) an email of Miller's: [5] I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper. He has provided most of the front-page exclusives on WMD to our paper. Comment is surely superfluous...
UPDATE A piece in WTF Is It Now today (permalinks seem fried) leads on to further levels in the Plame Game that I'm content to leave to the better informed. UPDATE 2 On the CIA's Studies in Intelligence site - which looks to be a mine of fascinating information - I find a piece from the latest edition by James B Bruce, Vice Chairman of the DCI Foreign Denial and Deception Committee - though naturally writing on behalf of himself alone. (DCI is Director of Central Intelligence (ie, George Tenet).) Bruce's thesis is that a pandemic of intelligence leaks (not a recent invention!) is endangering US security; and that what is needed is stricter anti-leaking laws, and all laws rigorously enforced (he mentions the laws in force - including the one under which the putative Valerie Plame leaker might be liable to prosecution). (Apparently, the sole prosecution for an intelligence leak was Navy analyst Samuel Loring Morison in 1985. He was convicted, and his conviction upheld on appeal. It seems Morison got one of Clinton's confetti-pardons in 2001.) | Will Bustamante be sunk by Indian giving?I can't say I've followed the ins and outs. But it does seem that a little of that rare commodity in politics, justice, is being meted out to MEChA man Cruz Bustamante, the Dems' bright, occidental star now apparently slowly sinking in the West. According to the Sacramento Bee (September 27), a judge has ...ordered Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante...to prove that he tried in earnest to cancel television ad contracts and return money for the recall campaign that he collected in violation of the state's campaign finance laws. At issue, it seems, is the trifling sum of $3.8m most of it provided by Indian tribes in recognition of his sterling services as a sort of universal blood-brother [1]. The judge found the contributions were illegal, but Cruz said he'd spent the cash on TV spots. In what seems amazing forbearance, instead of being dispatched to Pelican Bay for an intensive course in gang rape (as prescribed by Dem buddy and champion of jailhouse justice, Bill Lockyer [2]), he's been allowed (in effect) to keep the money! But only so far as he shows he did his best to cancel the spots once the judge had ruled the Indian money was illegal. Meanwhile the polls (the CNN poll over the weekend, at least) are showing Cruz well beaten by Arnold Schwarzenegger, despite the fact the GOP vote is split - and the second GOP man, Tom McClintock not far from pushing the barrio boy into third place. I feel a remake of Mr Smith Goes To Washington coming on - but who could possibly play Arnie?
UPDATE (October 1) There's a nice little WaPo piece today on the Golden State Indians, and their fast-growing status as the Octopus of the 21st century: for the Southern Pacific, it was public lands, for the Indians, it's the casinos, of course. Just for the recall alone, they've given $11m out of $66m spent, it seems - chickenfeed compared to their (untaxed) casino cash flow of around $5bn. And - as the piece has it - Bustamante is the Indians' go-to guy in Sacramento When he sees dancing feathers approaching his office, Cruz assumes the position (he knows there'll be heap big heap of wampum in it for him) - but it's the patient California taxpayer who gets screwed! And guess who's on the tribes' casino payroll? None other than younger brother, Andrew Bustamante, who is the general manager of the casino near Fresno owned by the Big Sandy Rancheria of Mono Indians. | Hutton: Dingemans closing statement and the 45 minute claimNow that the torrent of Hutton stuff has at last dried up - all bar Sir Kevin Tebbit on cross, and the documentary evidence submitted late, which has yet to hit the Hutton site - welcome time for reflection. For one thing, over Inquiry Counsel James Dingemans QC's closing statement last Thursday (from 146:6). First impression is that, in emphasis, it appears rather more concerted with the treatment of Kelly question than the September dossier: it is topped and tailed with references to coronial matters; the production of the dossier takes from 149:12 to 155:12, when he picks up with the Gilligan/Kelly meeting of May 22 and its sequelae: BBC v Campbell, the FAC, Kelly's June 30 letter volunteering his name, and so forth - but all (and for good reason) from viewpoint looking directly down on Kelly. He rounds off, at 181:6, with a suitable caution on the need to stick to the terms of reference, and that's it. He prefaces his dossier passage with the following, rather oddly phrased statement: there are two phrases which have been Brian Jones, from memory, made quite a point about the (in his view) loose way that WMD was used. But Hutton's is scarcely a semantic inquiry. Dingemans skips through the dossier chronology touching only on a few elements. He frames the question, whether or not a case was being made by the dossier (ie, presumably, a case for war on behalf of HMG). He quotes John Scarlett (Chairman of the JIC) at 150:32: Mr Scarlett's evidence is that he Then continues: 25 Mr Campbell, in evidence earlier this week, when A compare and contrast there, one surmises. He cites [t]he e-mail of 11th September 2003 atand an e-mail of 10th September at CAB/3/21, in which And refers to complaints by DIS members, including Brian Jones, on the dossier. At 154:14, he makes reference to the the clear I'm not clear he is criticising the use of these silence procedures. For instance, he does not, so far as I can see, refer to Jonathan Powell's September 19 email (CAB/11/103), timed at 1545, 45 minutes after the supposed cut-off under these procedures, which suggested a passage on WMD be redrafted [1]. Then, at 155:1, he pursues his point: 1 Perhaps part of the problem, that a case was being (Scarlett, like PNJ, has a foot in two camps - in his case, as an ex-SIS (MI6) man and sitting in the Cabinet Office as Chairman of the JIC.) Dingemans completes his point on making a case: 9 Mr Sumption says it is constitutionally appropriate As I've said here more than once, the vital thing to recognise that, in demarcating the political/administrative from the intelligence, the JIC (and Scarlett) are at least half in the political sphere. The JIC is not the UKIC at prayer! Scarlett is the liaison man between the spooks and HMG, and the JIC is a liaison committee (why else does it have the main departments of state, and thus customers of UKIC's product, sitting on it?). (A comparison that some more expert than I am might wish to pursue is of Scarlett with the Government Chief Whip: he has, I think, a similar function, representing the views of backbench MPs to the prime minister, and disseminating the wishes - or instructions - of the PM to his troops.) Apart from any considerations of being Alastair Campbell's mate, Scarlett is tainted by politics - and not by accident or fault on his part: that's his job! Dingemans then picks up the point, at 155:19, that the misunderstanding of the press over the 45 minute claim - the wrong assumption that it applied to WMD delivered by ballistic missiles, rather than WMD used in battlefield weapons - had been allowed by HMG to remain uncorrected. He concludes the dossier passage of his speech: 7 It might be thought unfortunate that if Governmentand moves onto Kelly/Gilligan. Nothing there about the quality of the 45 minute intelligence; or the methods of analysis; or the peculiar UK system of providing HMG with a single view of intelligence, rather than the marketplace of ideas that rules in the US. His peroration contains something of a warning to those expecting too much: 15 The aim of the Inquiry is to urgently conduct an Now, since Dingemans acts hand in glove with Hutton, one can't really take this as his admonition to the judge! An assurance, perhaps, to Teflon Tone that, despite appearances to the contrary, his Lordship is going - as it were - to decide the case on the narrowest grounds available? (No Roger Taney he! The free-ranging Dred Scott Will Rogers putting the world to rights is - I infer from his interventions - no part of Lord Hutton's character or intentions.) There certainly seems to be some rowing back from the Fifteen Points in the statement Dingemans made at the start of the cross-examination phase of the enquiry [2]. The fact that no evidence has been led to get behind the 45 minute claim (was, as suspected, the immediate source one of Ahmed Chalabi's hacks? how could the inconsistencies in the expression of the 45 minute claim [3] arise if the ultimate source knew what he was talking about, and was accurately reported? Etc, etc...) or the reliability of UK intelligence analysis in general would tend to support the argument that Hutton will go narrow. We'll see.
| Monday, September 29, 2003
British forces carried to Iraq on ships unsafe at any speedIt's one thing that the UK Ministry of Defence is headed by a hulk [1]; quite another that, according to the Guardian today, the troops used to prosecute Saint Tony's crusade in the East should have been ferried there in a fleet of coffin-ships. The piece says that Of the 50 ships traced, almost a third had been detained [by coastguards as unfit to sail] and 47 had defects recorded by coastguards during recent inspections, suffering a total of 1,018 safety failures in all. And, appropriately enough, it seems that the MOD was turning a Nelson's eye towards the decrepitude of these old puffers [2]: for a start, The records...reveal that the majority of the 50 ships sailed under flags of convenience, even though the government's own advice warns that such vessels are often substandard and employ low paid and poorly trained crews. Hoon's boys clearly knew these were rust-buckets when they hired them. And, Most of the ships were not inspected by coastguards during the MoD charter period... Hoon's capacity to see no evil extends to more than the hounding of loquacious scientists, it seems. Joined-up government? Don't make me laugh: the Department of Transport website apparently says that Substandard ships, operating under flags of convenience, with low paid and generally poorly trained crews, benefit from the cost advantage of lax safety regulation. The history of the British soldier being treated like shit did not, of course, start with Tony Blair or Geoff Hoon. Around this time last year, in the context of controversies surround the Army's main personal weapon (rifle, to you or me), the SA-80 and the Challenger 2 tank, I mentioned the World War 2 boon of Lend-Lease, the Sherman (known as the Tommy-cooker to grateful members of the Wehrmacht) [3]. A couple of months ago, I saw on the TV an account (caveat spectator, natch [4]) of the way, in Normandy in 1944, the British with their Shermans were able to beat the Germans with their vastly superior (in firepower and armour) Tiger tank: we had ten times as many of our crappy machines as they had of their dream-machines. The technique was for Shermans to work four to a Tiger: three Shermans in turn would take on the Tiger in fruitless combat while the fourth snuck round the back of the Tiger and got in close enough to get a meaningful shot in against its weaker rear armour. It's the sort of trade of superiority of numbers for superiority of technology that one notes the Red Army for employing during WW2 (using men rather than flails to clear minefields, is the classic, or apocryphal, instance) - though the Red Army's T-34 was a pretty good machine (six hundred bucks for half an hour's test drive right here). Coming up to date, the London Daily Telegraph on January 16 reported that an MOD found that 55 per cent of soldiers and 42 per cent of officers said they found they needed to buy additional kit. Less than half of all soldiers polled expressed any confidence in Army equipment. It quotes a private supplier of military equipment as saying that American army issue desert boots were among the items most frequently bought by British troops. And the reaction from the mob that, according to MOD apparatchik Richard Hatfield, gave the late Dr David Kelly such outstandingtreatment: An Army spokesman said soldiers had been buying their own equipment "since time immemorial". Marie Antoinette could scarcely have put it better. This, of course, was the situation before hostilities began: coming up to six months in theatre and no sign of being able to reduce the size of deployments in the foreseeable future, the equipment situation can scarcely be getting any better. Anyone for Damascus?
MORE In this connection, one has to admire the chutzpah of Teflon Tony's lovingly crafted desert paean of May 29 (from the pen of Alastair Campbell, no doubt, in the odd moment he could spare from fucking Gilligan) to the men who had made possible his exercise in compassionate carnage (if Blair's heart bleeds, others will surely follow): You have made this whole country, our country, hold its head up high, and I think that is a wonderful, wonderful achievement. It is your achievement and thank you. From the man who gave them substandard rifles and substandard boots. And a gem tucked away amidst the TV movie shlock sentimentality: I would like to think that maybe in a year or two years time it is going to be possible for some of you to come back here and see the changes in this country that have arisen from what you have done today. At the current rate of progress, that's not a possibility - that's a cast-iron certainty! | Sunday, September 28, 2003
NSA listening post in Algeria - an excess of kif or what?A strange little story from weeks ago that made me sit up and take notice. An AP report from September 7 takes me to a piece in the Quotidien d'Oran of the same date: ... le chef d'état-major de l'ANP, le général de corps d'armée, Mohamed Lamari reçoit, depuis hier, le général Charles F.Wald, commandant adjoint des forces américaines en Europe, à Alger. Une visite qui sera marquée par l'étude d'un projet d'installation d'une station d'écoute américaine dans le sud algérien indiquent des sources informées. For those with rightfully suspicious minds, I can confirm that General Wald is not only a real person, but, according to his USAF bio, has a chestful of medals and is a pretty important guy: Deputy Commander, Headquarters U.S. European Command, Stuttgart. Lamari is, from my present sketchy appreciation of Algerian politics, the important guy over there [1]. The piece says that Wald was coming ...avec un projet d'installation d'une station d'écoute, probablement de la National Security Agency (NSA), l'agence fédérale qui est chargée des interceptions des communications mondiales, qui serait basée dans la région de Tamanrasset. Une station qui viserait à intercepter puis analyser toutes les communications - par téléphone, Internet, réseaux informatiques ou radio...and was possibly going south to visit the local commander, Gen Saheb [2]. It suggests three reasons, apart from the GSPC activity [3], for US interest in such a project:
And points out that the moves come as part of generally buddying-up between Algerian and US forces - US training of Algerian officers, joint naval exercises, and so on. From one perspective, Algeria is potentially the Islamist dagger pointing at the belly of Europe - and therefore, its present government, however unsavoury, is naturally our son of a bitch material - as proof of its zeal in the matter, around 100,000 died in the civil war which has, for now, largely returned the Algerian Islamists to their box. A strange piece of historical reflux in the shape of one Senator John F Kennedy, who regaled the Senate on July 2 1957 with a speech more or less calling for USG to ditch the French and prepare for an FLN victory in the 1954-62 war [5]. The old and paradoxical American fatal attraction for supposedly revolutionary causes (the mountains of cash, rather than vomit, that landed in the NORAID buckets, for instance) which runs in tandem with the loathing of all things communistic. The successors to the FLN who now rule Algeria have long been cured of communism (to the extent they were ever ill with it) and, it seems, are ready to vindicate JFK's support of so long ago.
MORE A piece of Google detritus provides a modest sidebar - apparently, round about the same time as JKF's speech, WaPo icon Ben Bradlee had his own Algerian experience: Leaning left in those days, he thought it unfair that French views were well-covered but not the views of the Algerian FLN (after the war he had joined the left-wing quasi-Marxist American Veterans Committee), so he went to Algeria to interview the FLN. Trouble was, the fedayeen he met clandestinely were French counter-intelligence actors, and he was ordered to leave France. Ambassador Dillon got the expulsion order canceled. | Title IX - how Stalinist can you get?The US, at one level, is a puzzle set for the amusement of those of us doomed ever to suffer from a crick in the neck from gazing up to the City on a Hill. Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma is but one of a myriad of conundrums [1] offered to the discerning foreigner. Why, for instance, is it rank socialism and unAmerican (or is that Unamerican?) to finance health care from general taxation, but the most American thing in the world to do the same for education? I doubt that even the reddest of governments around in the continent of the Axis of Weasels believes these days in equality of outcomes: under the lash of competition from Uncle Sam, on the whole, a rather beneficial stimulant, equality of opportunity would tend to be the most on offer (and that in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.) But, if I understand it aright, that's what Title IX offers [2]. Forget Michigan and its shilly-shallying points system nudge nudge, wink wink methods: in practice, Title IX provides [3] the very crudest of quotas: in Spencer Tracy's immortal line from Pat and Mike, Five-oh, five-oh. I can't pretend to have traced it all through: the best starting point I've got is this DOJ page which links into the various regulations that fill out the detail. But the meat seems to be in para (c) of .450 of the main regulations on Title IX [3]: it says (in (c)(1)) that A recipient that operates or sponsors...athletics shall provide equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexesand goes on to enumerate various factors to be taken into account. And in (c)(2): For purposes of paragraph (c)(1) of this section, unequal aggregate expenditures for members of each sex or unequal expenditures for male and female teams if a recipient operates or sponsors separate teams will not constitute noncompliance with this section, but the designated agency official may consider the failure to provide necessary funds for teams for one sex in assessing equality of opportunity for members of each sex. A USA Today piece from last year talks about a three-part test applied by the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education [4] that addresses similar issues to the regulation, but in a different way. The upshot is, however, that equality rules: although both the regulations and the three-part test ostensibly allow for flexibility, a Gresham's Law of risk aversion makes college authorities prefer the draconian but safe solution of strict equality. And, things being what they are, that means levelling men's sports down to the level of female. And - what got me looking at Title IX just now - a WaPo piece (September 27) has the University of Maryland promoted part of its cheerleading squad to varsity status this year to create more scholarships and playing opportunities for female athletes on campus. Next, it'll be ballroom dancing and aerobics! Anything to make the Title IX quota without slashing the men's teams [5]. Surely a system more in tune with the values of Uncle Joe than Uncle Sam?
| Saturday, September 27, 2003
Kenya rape shakedown hits a snagA cautionary tale on the need for vigilance where truth and moral hazard are in play. A British lawyer called Martyn Day has been organising a lawsuit against the UK MOD (that is, Hapless Hoon's outfit) on behalf of a large number of Kenyan women who say they were raped by members of HM Forces in Kenya on manoeuvres. According to a piece in the Guardian today , the total sum he was seeking was around $15m. (Quite what his cut would be is not discussed.) However, rather than roll over, the MOD put in a forensic team to examine the police records; and found them all to be forgeries! Now, anyone paying the slightest attention to the evidence at the Hutton Inquiry would understand that the MOD's playing fast and loose with the truth would not be an altogether new experience. I'm rather thinking, though, that the information would not have been released unless the evidence of forgery was clearly able to stand up to judicial scrutiny. And the Kenyan record for bribery and corruption is legendary. The Kenya branch of Transparency International produced a report (c750KB PDF) in 2001 which (based on a survey) rated in a Bribery Index the incidence of corruption in various government institutions (p10a): the Kenya Police come top of the list with 68.7 out of a hundred [1]. A separate table on the same page shows a 90.4% incidence of bribery in the Kenya Police; that is (p11a) ...the likelihood of obtaining satisfactory service from [the Kenya Police] without paying a bribe is less than 10%... A further table (p11a) shows that 57.5% of those surveyed said they had paid bribes to the Kenya Police, or suffered from not paying such bribes. In a TI Corruption Perceptions Index (2002) Kenya ranked joint 96th out of 102 [2]. So, is the rape business a scam dreamt up by local chiselers to guilt Whitey into handing over moolah, with rakeoffs for the KP and the (no doubt) many other officials who had assisted in the project? According to the article, Martyn Day is no neophyte when it comes to suing the MOD on behalf of Kenyan claimants: Mr Day began documenting the rape allegations after concluding a successful compensation campaign on behalf of Kenyan farmers killed or maimed by ordnance left on two nearby British army firing ranges. The MoD paid £4.5m in an out-of-court settlement to injured and bereaved Samburu and Masai herders but did not admit responsibility for any ordnance left lying on the ranges, which it shares with the Kenyan army. However, Rumours have since circulated in northern Kenya that many of those claims were fraudulent with penniless herders awarded sums of up to £250,000 for injuries allegedly caused by wild animals and domestic accidents. The background is the period of colonial rule in general, and the Mau-Mau terror campaign in particular. Whilst the politics of Mau-Mau were complex and dynamic [3], the left-liberal perception is of some kind of colonial holocaust (a legend on a par with that of Winston Churchill having the army fire on striking miners in Tonypandy in 1910. [4]) Labour pin-up [5] turned battleaxe Barbara Castle and others made a fuss about some rough treatment of prisoners at Hola Camp in 1959, which has come to stand as the representative pink factoid for colonial Kenya [6], guaranteed to be in the crib-notes of at least one lefty talk-show caller whenever the subject of the British Empire can be shoehorned into the discussion [7]! Since the sums asked in the current Kenyan case are chicken-feed in relation to total UK government spending, and the asymmetry of means between plaintiffs and defendants makes for tough PR, one could not blame the MOD for rolling over. However, it seems the spirit of Rorke's Drift may not quite have disappeared...
| Friday, September 26, 2003
BBC bleaters out alreadyApart from the pretty execrable performance of Andrew Gilligan's mouthpiece [1], the BBC side did less badly than might have been expected on closing remarks day of the Hutton Inquiry yesterday. But a piece in the Guardian today by John Kampfner has the Corporation already done for, as a news organisation of independence and verve. Although... The truth seems to be that it never was. It may come as something of a surprise that, both on radio and then on TV, news came very late as a function. On radio, there was an unbelievable cringing attitude taken by the BBC towards the newspapers, who for some years from its formation (as the British Broadcasting Company) in 1922 succeeded in imposing embargoes on news items being broadcast, for fear that a speedy broadcast news service would hit circulation. Only with the invasion of Normandy in 1944 was there something like the sort of news operation (with full news bulletins and a cadre of correspondents) one might have expected of the British monopoly broadcaster. On TV, into the early 1950s, news used voice-overs with material from newsreels - when they'd finished with it! And, as far as independence from government is concerned, the occasional worm-turning success [2] does not really make up for a general tendency to self-restraint. Kampfner rightly points out that The BBC is, in reality, a risk-averse institution.It's a bureaucracy: it's prime objective is its own survival. The names of erstwhile BBC mavericks one might throw out - James Cameron (not that one!) and Ken Loach, say - stand out for being few and, well, erstwhile. He goes on to suggest that It hates accusations of bias. That's wrong. What it hates are surprises. For example, it is constantly being accused of bias in its coverage of the Israel/Palestine issue. But that's fine because it's constant - it's factored in, processes deal with it, no heart attacks for senior execs opening their morning paper and seeing one of Sharon's attack-dogs mouthing off. Similarly, those combative interviews of politicians by John Humphrys of Today and Jeremy Paxman of Newsnight will get the likes of Alastair Campbell effing and blinding down the phones - but, again, that's expected, discounted, planned for. Both the interviews and the off-air backchat are stylised, contentless - and have about as much to do with imparting information as the Japanese Tea Ceremony has with quenching thirst. It's the loose cannons like Gilligan - especially if they're firing at ungodly hours of the morning (in other times, the time of choice for raids by the secret police) - who give the BBC brass headaches. And managers like former Today editor Rod Liddle, who brought Gilligan in to man his present, now very provisional, post. An organisation like the BBC is not equipped, culturally or organisationally, to deal with guys who don't even themselves know what they're going to say or do next. (There is, perhaps, an analogy to be made with commercial and investment banking: when the operations are merged, there is a sort of Gresham's Law whereby the risk-hungry deal-makers on the investment banking side see the capital of the commercial banking operation as cash under the mattress for them to make sweat. It's such a highway to hell that the Americans have laws to keep the operations apart [3]!) Kampfner is a Liddle man too, apparently, so might be expected to have no sympathy for the organisation men (the BBC has 1960s levels of middle management, I gather) who aim for preservation of the organisation. He wants scoops - only better edited ones than Gilligan's infamous '6.07'. With the Charter coming up for renewal in 2006, an unceasing barrage from the Murdoch and Conrad Black press (Murdoch has an idea of the BBC with no licence fee and perhaps a couple of million subscription-paying viewers) and withering fire from Hutton a few weeks away, it would be common sense rather than cowardice or lack of vision for the organisation to give scoops a rest for a good long while. Surprising, perhaps, to see, in the middle of the Hutton process, BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies giving a lecture (September 10) on the history of the BBC and its relations with government. One par gives the tone: Kofi Annan has described the World Service as Britain's greatest gift to the world in the 20th Century. Anyone who grew up in the remote bush of central Africa - as I did - would agree with him. But, then, you can't go wrong with boosting the World Service [4]. It is the Geoffrey Boycott of broadcasting (or even the Trevor Bailey): it aims to occupy the crease, and does so. How many stories does it break in a year? A handful, at most, I'd guess. It knows that that's not what it's there for. If the Gilligan/Kelly saga does the Corporation any good, it will be to get it to reconcile its objectives as a news operation with its resources, organisation and culture. Raising absurd expectations about scoops do it no favours.
| The Congo perspectiveAs piece of unashamed news tourism, after several weeks obsessing about the minutiae underlying the death of one man [1], I thought I'd do a little nosing around the news about a war that's killed millions - and got a small fraction of the publicity. As a subject to interest even the news anorak, the war in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo [2] is a tough sell: it's hard, boring and in French (or worse!). (And there's the colour question, of course; but of course no one would mention that...) And, for the hacks, the working conditions are deeply unpleasant when they're not downright dangerous. Whether it's insurance costs or staff morale, the whole thing is... well, a disaster. A search on the Google news page will come up with stuff in most of which (to judge from the information on the search page) the war is either peripheral or irrelevant to the thrust of the story. A search on the French news page produces more local product on the war [3]. But, apart from considerations of quality (questions of bias and sheer competence), these stories assume a knowledge of the story so far which make them pretty hostile to the newbie. To obtain the all-important background (without which the news stories are incomprehensible), you have to descend into PDF hell (searching on a broad topic, but trying to exclude the dross, on the assumption that the good stuff tends to be PDF). Mr Google, unhelpfully, does not sort the results by origination date. There is, for example, what looks like 150 items of solid material on the DRC and neighbours dating back to the mid 90s; but several hours work involved in downloading, arranging and tasting the stuff, before one got onto reading it! More NGOs than you could shake a stick at have, it seems, produced at least one paper on the war (each, naturally enough, directed to its particular subject area of concern - children, women, particular diseases, international law, wildlife or whatever). One might get more joy with a shlep through individual NGO sites, but a trial run on the Human Rights Watch site produces some promising stuff, but distinctly not Congo War 101. As far as the think tanks, I couldn't see anything on the CSIS site - and Brookings offers a Michael O'Hanlon WaPo piece from July 23 2002! (For a listing of online Congo material, this from Columbia University seems the best on offer.) My suspicion is that there is a solid week's work required to get up to sufficient speed to get a decent familiarity with the history, issues, personalities and strategic situation. (No point in investing time in a particular story if you're not even going to be able afterwards to explain the basics on a side of A4!) Far be it from me to give the hacks a free pass: but I can well see why they should want to pass on the DRC, whatever the casualty levels [4]. [As a final chastener, a piece on the continuing war in Cabinda. Which has been going on, more or less since Gerald Ford was in the White House.]
| Hutton: Closing statementsFrom an initial skim - focussing on the dossier rather than the treatment of Kelly question - one or two points emerge from the day of statements from counsel for the interested parties yesterday [1]. The breathtaking arrogance of the HMG case from Jonathan Sumption [2] reminded me of luckless ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont's Je ne regrette rienunwisely uttered following the UK's exit from the EU's Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday (September 16 1992). Whilst this was, perhaps, particularly notable in relation to the Kelly question (he had no difficulty in agreeing with Richard Hatfield's view that the MOD's treatment of him had been outstanding - 91:6), he thinks much the same of the intelligence underlying the 45 minute claim (31:12). The contrary view (taken here) was picked up by BBC counsel Andrew Caldecott, highlighting Kelly's own reasoned disbelief - passage from 110:14 - of its validity. Caldecott also picks up a point made here before - the lack of notes of (some) meetings at Number 10: it appears that in Is he alleging that the absence of records is deliberate? Or, perhaps, that such records exist but have not been produced to the Inquiry? As if grounds for doubting the good faith (to use a mild expression) of HMG aren't thick enough on the ground already, the bizarre appearance of dribs and drabs of late evidence from HMG is striking: the latest, I think, is an email that emerged only this Tuesday. The inquiry, of course, was set up without powers to subpoena documents or compel witnesses; each party would supply what he thought was relevant [3].... The statement (which came last in the day) of Inquiry counsel James Dingemans is noteworthy for the relaxed way in which, unlike his colleagues, he identifies the documentation he refers to by number (eg, BBC/6/13 or whatever) [4]. More substantially, for the fact that he does not address the quality of the 45 minute intelligence. But does hit the more general question of the politicisation of the intelligence in the dossier, quoting Dame Pauline Neville-Jones [5] as saying (154:6) that there He spends most of his time on the Gilligan, the BBC/Campbell war and the Kelly treatment issues. (No one, that I could see, had picked up the essential sleight of hand in the description of the JIC as representing the intelligence services, despite the fact that a substantial number of its members were not from those services. Nor the distinctly ambiguous position of the JIC Chairman - as having a foot in both camps, as much representing Number 10 to the agencies as vice versa.) The key question for Lord Hutton remains HMG's bad faith, both in relation to the dossier and its handling of Kelly. On the dossier question, though Gilligan perversely denies the point, the charge he made against HMG, as revised [6], is still an allegation of bad faith. Indeed, the only satisfactory outcome on the dossier question would be a finding that HMG drew it up in bad faith. But I doubt whether picking at the procedural niceties - the detailed to and fro of the drafting process - could ever be enough to satisfy Lord Hutton on the point: it needs the substance of the 45 minute claim to be undermined - and given the Messines Ridge treatment. Although it would certainly have been better if expert evidence had been led on the technical detail of the claim, it seems to me there is sufficient material in the evidence before the Inquiry to ground a finding that the 45 minute claim had indeed been inserted though known by HMG to be questionable, based on the information available at the time. The best thing would be for a leak of unvolunteered evidence. Yet another Number 10 email, for instance. Not necessarily a smoking gun, but something that makes it clear that HMG have been hiding stuff. (The dog that didn't bark all day was Teflon Tone himself. To judge from the closing statements, at least, Tony Blair appears to have slithered away from the crosshairs of all who might have taken pot-shots. And he wasn't recalled for cross-examination, either.) The risk is that Lord Hutton may be averse to giving credence to the substance of Gilligan's story, given his apparent idée fixe that an allegation by the BBC and the broadcast by the BBC of an allegation by a source should be equated; and the errors in the story which Gilligan has admitted. It may be (to judge from the areas his questioning has focussed on) he has in mind a balanced outcome, with one hit for each of HMG and the BBC: HMG's hit would be on the treatment of Kelly by the MOD, the BBC's on substance of the Gilligan story (rather than, say, the Governors' or management's handling of the affair). Of course, Hutton did warn against jumping to conclusions from his lines of questioning...
| Thursday, September 25, 2003
Scott and Hutton: a contrast in inquiries (net-wise)Two inquiries with but a single causa sine qua non - Saddam and his military ambition; and a single field of inquiry: the performance of HMG in the fields of intelligence and arms control. But, whereas Hutton has provided us plebs gratis with electronic access to the materials - documents and transcripts of oral evidence - for us to make up our own mind on the matters he looks at, online research into Scott is a complete no-hoper. There is no online copy of the report [1], still less transcripts of testimony or documentary evidence [2]. There is Hansard for the floor of the House of Commons going back to the 1988-9 session - amply far back to include the introduction of the Report to the House (February 15 1996) and the subsequent debate (on February 26) during which Robin Cook had his finest Parliamentary hour. There is not, it seems, even a decent online summary of the facts and conclusions of the Scott Report - just bits and pieces (sidebars brought forth by the establishment of the Hutton Inquiry, for instance) [3]. The main problem is that Scott was completed before Internet Year Zero - which varies from source to source, but for each source is a date documentation created before which is inaccessible. For instance, the Guardian/Observer archives go back to September 1 1998; the BBC News site's to around the middle of 1997 (exact date unstated) [4]. Whilst debates on the Commons floor go back to 1988, reports of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (an important supporting actor in the Kelly affair) go back online only to 1997/8. Similarly inconsistencies in Year Zero apply between and within institutions of UK government. (The FCO's online documentation is pathetically sketchy - to judge from the main page.) To use phrase du jour of the boss of the FCO, Jack Straw, the whole thing is a complete Horlicks. The money spent on the wretched Millennium Dome ($1bn+) should have gone to digitising the national archive and the best of the British Library. As it is, records created (roughly speaking) before Monica Lewinsky gulped her last in the Oval Office might as well be Babylonian cuneiform tablets at the bottom of a well in Saddam's back garden. Wherever that is right now...
| Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Cross-examination of head spook largely a bustAs I've mentioned before, Hutton is investigating two main areas: the treatment by HMG of Dr Kelly and whether HMG sexed up the September 24 2002 dossier. On the latter point, the evidence of John Scarlett, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who - HMG's case supposes - had entire command of the content of the dossier at all times is bound to be vital. Others - like Alastair Campbell - were (on HMG's case) peripheral to the construction of the dossier; or - like Brian Jones from the Defence Intelligence Assessment Staff (DIAS) - subordinate. If any progress was to be made on the sexing-up allegation, it would have to be with Scarlett. The transcript [1] of his second appearance [2] makes for a pretty depressing skim-through:a fine tooth-comb may uncover gold, but I doubt it!. The BBC's lawyer - whose client had most to gain from discrediting the intelligence content of the dossier in general, and the infamous 45 minute claim in particular, made what looks like a comprehensive Horlicks of the whole thing. Even on the evidence given to the Inquiry (which, even allowing for considerations of security, seems to have been on the scant side), the 45 minute claim was assailable on numerous points (some of which I attempted to pin down in my September 2 piece). All cross-examining counsel were time-limited, so might be expected to hit their best points hard and fast. The BBC's man wasted ages with a line of questioning (from around 113:24) that never achieved take-off speed on the difference between various formulations of the 45 minute claim in the dossier, and in the JIC assessments [3] on which the dossier was supposedly based: the difference between intelligence shows that...and intelligence indicates that... There is - one gathers - a genuine difference between the two formulations: both are terms of art as that expression would be understood by lawyers. But Caldecott could make nothing of it. (Even Lord Hutton seemed confused (123:13). And, perhaps, not a little bored, too. [4]) Where he does take on the detail of the intelligence, it goes nowhere; as at 128:16, when he puts to Scarlett some possiblein the 45 minute intel; starting with: Firstly,and moving on to You did not know from where or to where the munitions To both of these propositions, Scarlett assented. Now, those - utterly basic - details would be important in two ways:
Their absence surely cripples the Iraqi officer's story? But Caldecott insists on wrapping up these admissions of Scarlett's into his futile quest for a result in his indicates v shows line of (I laughingly call) argument. It sinks slowly into the sand, before vanishing without trace. There is further stuff on Campbell's role - which has zero shock-horror value, given what we already know. He returns to the battlefield munitions point [2], and asks (138:3) whether the distinction had been made clear to Blair. Whereupon Scarlett evidently remembers a point from his practice sessions, and launches into a whole barrage of technical detail on battlefield CBW (chemical and biological weapons) evidently designed to point up Caldecott's ignorance of the subject-matter. (Though Scarlett is, of course, vastly less of an expert on the subject than - oh, the late DK, say...) As fine a deployment of chaff (in the Andrew MacKinlay sense) as one might wish to see! [Another area ripe for investigation is the apparently highly selective recording of meetings and other communications at Number 10. But Caldecott chooses to raise that question with Scarlett, who had the easy out that it wasn't his business (147:17). Leaving Caldecott - yet again - one down (in the Stephen Potter sense) - and (by necessary implication) Scarlett, one up.) He makes something of a September 19 email from Blair's Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell [5] asking for a redraft of a passage in the dossier that suggested that a threatened invasion would be the one thing to make Saddam use his WMD (which was, rather, one of the points opponents of the War Party were making at the time!). He presses the argument (158:17) that [6] on can have sexing up by omission But then plunges back into the detail of discussions on the drafting of the dossier - points which simply have no traction. Then he moves onto questions of the evidence about the drafting of the dossier provided by HMG to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. (Thereby already moving one level away from the matter in hand.) The whole thing gets terminally mired in inconsequential tedium over a confusion over the identification of a particular document on the screen (from around 177:13). By 181:17, the hapless Caldecott decides not to ask any questions about the document after all - and this time resorts to football for his analogy: One nil to you, Mr Scarlett, I think on that Fortunately, he grinds to a complete halt shortly afterwards - to find Inquiry counsel James Dingemans (fuming, evidently, about having his time cut short) returning to the offending document, and uttering the immortal words: What I think you were The fact is that, of the QCs involved in the cross-examinations, only Dingemans has anything like a satisfactory mastery of his brief. (And no wonder, given the volume of evidence produced!) If effectiveness had been the aim, it would have been far better for Dingemans to have assumed in turn the role of counsel for the various interested parties, and cross-examined accordingly. (That, however, would certainly not have been cricket!) In short, the cross-examination sessions, long trailed in the media as the time when the gloves would come off has been a damp squib. The patient examination-in-chief of Dingemans - interspersed with courteous interventions of his Lordship whose vitriol was given away in a final Yes...-was, ironically, much more effective and less tedious than the efforts of the latter-day Marshall Halls and FE Smiths [7].
| Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Jacques Chirac, the New York Times - and 95% of what?The Quota Prince, Jayson Blair, and his claque may have gone, but the Grey Lady still struggles with the smallest details when it comes to quality control. Take the big interview yesterday with the Chief Weasel: one of those prestige projects that helps a newspaper of record puff out its chest with pride - I suspect it figured on page 1 (though, unlike the WaPo, its online articles don't include a note their position in the hard copy rag.) Bush v Chirac at the UN was always a good bet for a punch-up (each way rather, than on the nose - despite the involvement of a cheese-eater...), and a nice long interview has a sort of coffee-table book function for a rag, even if - as, I think, is true with the Chirac piece - it adds little of substance to the sum of human knowledge. But, either way, it's something that, unlike, say, an agency piece about the coup in Bongo-Bongo Land, you'd have thought the Times would have produced with some attention to detail. Wrong. For a start, in the sixth paragraph down, we get beleive. Is that just rank carelessness, or a Jaysonesque flipping of the bird? But then something truly bizarre: the interview mentions Chirac's Algerian experience - he served in Algeria during the 1954-62 war - and Chirac takes up the point: In Algeria we began with a sizeable army and huge resources and the fellaga [independence fighter] were only a handful of people, but they won. That's how it is. Then, he goes on: When the Germans invaded France, 95% of the French were… But there were people who said no. They came from different cultural and political backgrounds, from the extreme left wing, the left, the right, the extreme right, and they said no... What was Chirac about to say 95% of the French were? Patriots? Now, the interview, the piece says, was conducted in French [1]. The text of the original is not provided by the Times. But there is elsewhere a French text of the interview [2] which could well be the original (rather than a translation of the Times translation). The French text corresponding to the passage quoted is this: Quand les Allemands ont envahi la France, il y a eu des gens qui ont dit non. Ils étaient de différentes origines, culturelles, politiques. Il y en avait d'extrême gauche, de la gauche, de la droite, de l'extrême droite. Et ils ont dit non... No 95%, no incomplete sentence, no guessing game invited. What gives? I've drawn the attention of the Times corrections people to the point - let's see.
| Monday, September 22, 2003
Not quite the Big Lie, but...In the agonisingly slow progress towards enlightenment down at Court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand - home, for what seems an eternity and a half, for Lord Hutton's great inquest - a potential small leap forward on Thursday. In the witness box, was Richard Hatfield, Personnel Director at the Ministry of Defence, and intimately concerned with the limb of the inquiry dealing with the treatment of Dr Kelly by HMG. Hatfield took a notably combative approach, in the face of cross-examination from counsel for the Kelly family, Jeremy Gompertz, QC [1]. He was happy to stand behind the way the MOD behaved towards Kelly - in fact, suggested that it had erred in being excessively lenient [2]. On the question of the guessing game the MOD played with journos - the MOD had agreed it would identify Kelly if, and only if, his name was put to one of its press officers [3] - his comment appears typically bold and bullish (44:16, emphasis mine): 16 Q. Do you consider it was outstanding support by the MoD Now, I think that is the clearest statement we have had in evidence from HMG witnesses of what is, to judge from Hatfield's tone, supposed to be a killer argument to justify the guessing game. And I hypothesise that the statement is, in fact, a lie. (Or, at the least, a falsehood - despite his senior position in the MOD, one could not discount the possibility of ignorance on his part.) And that evidence might be adduced (should his Lordship be willing) to prove it to be a lie (or falsehood). One or two points on this:
The MOD was created in 1964; I would hypothesise that, on several occasions in its four decades of existence, MOD ministers or officials have done what Hatfield alleges they are not able to do. I can suggest a number of cases in which this may well have occurred - though absence of online records militates against being able to confirm the fact [4].
Very far from an exhaustive list, I'm sure; but illustrative of the rich seams to be mined for facts to contradict Hatfield's statement. Would Lord Hutton allow counsel to lead evidence of this sort? Time is certainly against it. As well as the natural disinclination of all judges to bar fishing expeditions or diversionary tactics. On the other hand, the question bears directly on a matter Lord Hutton evidently views as important: whether the MOD should have striven to resist Kelly's name becoming public, whether or not such efforts were likely to succeed. If it could be shown that the MOD had more than once denied (or avoided confirming) what it knew to be true, then no such rule as alleged by Hatfield could be adduced for its failure to do so to protect Dr Kelly.
| Sunday, September 21, 2003
Whatever happened to the UK anti-war movement?Back in the prehistory that is the back-end of last year, I was doing my best, as the expression goes, to dampen expectations of the likely effectiveness of street protest against the war. On October 29 2002 [1], point out the lack of seriousness inherent in the Stop the War Coalition's loud call that ...we are backing Tony Benn's call for civil disobedience. (I was equally sceptical about suggestions that the march to war could be stopped by the weight of a silent majority (January 27).) The numbers mobilised onto the streets came as something of a surprise, I confess: a million in London alone on February 15 (Observer February 16). But Blair made it clear he was taking not a blind bit of notice! Both the demos and the polls had zero traction (or close to it) on the course of the pre-war. Now, we have the Hutton Inquiry, and, for all that quagmire talk is vastly premature, USG is hurting sufficiently in Iraq for it to think worth while enduring the humiliation of going cap in hand to that dive of cheese-eaters, the UN Security Council. Jacques, the Chief Weasel, naturally has his middle digit locked in the upright position [2]. We are long due a recrudescence in street activism to attempt to exploit these little local difficulties. But, according to a piece in the Observer today, the groupuscules of the movement are becoming ever more groupuscular. For example, ...a coup at CND with Carol Naughton, the longstanding chair defeated by one vote by Kate Hudson at the annual general meeting, amidst dark talk of tactical infiltration by the leftist group Socialist Action together who, with elements of the Socialist Workers Party, have effectively taken over. (The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is one of the oldest organisations in the movement - the famous Aldermaston Marches of the early 60s were theirs. One might have hoped they'd have been wise to such tactics.) The Stop the War Coalition is apparently equally fissiparous: even a long-time lefty like Bruce Kent (ex-Catholic priest, ex-CND chairman) is furious about the happenings at CND and refusing to share anti war platforms with SWC people. An SWC demo is planned, it seems, for next weekend (just before the Labour Party Conference). The Observer piece warns darkly that In media terms anything less that the millions who turned out in February is going to be viewed as failure. Good luck with that! But even if a million do show up, the same lack of traction will enable Blair to ignore them. Only Hutton is in a position right now to do Blair any serious damage. And, while it's a possibility, no one should be holding their breath that it's going to happen.
| Saturday, September 20, 2003
Journalistic ethics and the reported sourceOne of the proverbial oxymora [1], like military intelligence - but a phrase which has been exercising the public prints lately, what with the Grey Lady's Quota Prince Jayson Blair and now the BBC's hapless hack Andrew Gilligan (who, more and more, is showing himself to be every bit as stupid as he looks). One point of principle that I'm puzzling over is the responsibility of a media outlet in reporting allegations. Now, in English and American libel law, it seems that a paper that quotes an allegation is deemed to have made the allegation itself - neither the accuracy of the quotation nor the credibility of the person quoted is a defence. If, therefore, Alastair Campbell had sued the Mail on Sunday for the allegation that he had been responsible for inserting the 45 minute claim into the September dossier, the case would have proceeded as if it were the newspaper that had made the allegation without reference to any source [2]. But what of the ethical position? The stance of objective journalism [3] was that the statement of a prominent person was news per se. However demonstrably false the content, the speech of a US president or senator merited respectful coverage - and not fact-checking! Even a more balanced approach must comprehend the fact that conflicting - and often thoroughly tendentious - statements from politicians are flying around the ether; allegations are often made which are not mere empty invective but qualify as falsifiable [4]: disputes over the quality of statistics, say; or alleged quotations which can be checked with the record. Are media outlets to be required to publish annotations with every such report? Or to refrain from reproducing such statements altogether? Neither constraint is the least bit practical. There is a limited analogy in the role of stock markets: investors understand that, whilst the market authorities will take steps (not universally efficacious!) to exclude known con-men and South Sea Bubble-style propositions, the market is not responsible for the quality of the stocks traded [5]. The marketplace of ideas is, at least in the US, one of those tags of easy boosterism that spring to the lips when the glories of free speech are in question. No market can function when the market organisation is required to stand guarantor for everything that's sold in it. The marketplace analogy assumes that, pretty much, all ideas will find their place on one stall or another - and that competition will find out the best idea [6]. Back at the Hutton Inquiry, his Lordship's questioning has suggested that he disagrees with any such notion. The distinction between the BBC making an allegation, and reporting the allegation of a source, does not, it seem, appeal. He would have the analogy from libel law on his side in rejecting that distinction. But would he actually conclude that media outlets should only publish statements (from whatever source) they themselves have checked and are prepared to stand behind? With all those pols rubbed out of the schedule (who knows what allegations they might make!), it would certainly make the Today programme, for one, a whole lot shorter!
| Friday, September 19, 2003
The (unwritten) British constitution - Article 94: the Chatham House rulesOne of the elements of the Kelly farrago to which I've paid least attention is the conditions on which the good doctor was authorised to speak to the media, and how, precisely, he breached those conditions. But general mooching about in that neck of the woods has revealed a novel (if only to me) concept: Chatham House rules. Chatham House is the epithet (toponym?) of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the doyen of UK international relations think tanks - formed around the same time as the League of Nations, and having the sort of semi-official status (much like Whitaker's Almanack and the erstwhile British Board of Film Censors) not uncommon in British institutions. The rules are, in fact, a single rule (a certain element of quaint Britishness there, I suspect): When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed; nor may it be mentioned that the information was received at a meeting of the Institute. Apparently, the rule is regularly applied in all sorts of rendezvous of the Great and the Good around the world. Not that I would know.... | Thursday, September 18, 2003
Continuing education on the McCarthyism Big Lie - #94: the Truman Loyalty Oath was abolished WHEN?Perhaps the guys at Fox, smarting from their loss against that titan of American journalism, Al Franken - recall that, according to the complaint they filed against the flabby funster, Murdoch's minions mistook his sitcom for a straight political show! - should sponsor a tome on the great Liberal Lie: that McCarthyism was an invention of Tail Gunner Joe, rather than Woodrow Wilson, Attorney-General A Mitchell Palmer, the Democrat Congressional majorities who voted for the Smith Act and the McCarran Act - and the humble haberdasher from Independence, MO who, in 1947, instituted by Executive Order 9835 the Loyalty Oath for Federal employees [1]. That the Federal judiciary were not sparklingly independent in the late 40s and early 50s is news to no one: as Chief of the Supremes, Fred Vinson was a border state man after Truman's heart [2]. But it surprised me (at least) to learn that a decision striking down the Oath programme (as violating the Fifth Amendment) had to wait until 1969 [3]! All through the years of maximal liberal sanctimony in the White House (Carter excluded - and not for the first time...) the so-called McCarthyite witch hunt continued, in somewhat abated form. Leaving that ultimate liberal foe, Richard Nixon, to call it a day!
| Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Sexing up by omission - the key caveat that got lost...The phrase is one used by one Michael Mates [1], a member of the UK Intelligence and Security Committee, at the press briefing on the issuing last week of its report on Iraqi WMD intelligence (discussed here on September 11) to ridicule complaints about the the drafting of the September dossier. Mates sounded very pleased with his mot - but, as the Observer (September 14) suggested, this was indeed what happened. Take, for instance, a passage that remained in successive drafts of Tony Blair's foreword to the September dossier, but suddenly disappeared whence it came, never to reappear. The words seem to appear for the first time in a draft attached to an email from the afternoon of September 16 (CAB/11/38) [2]: The case I make is not that Saddam could launch a nuclear attack on London or another part of the UK (He could not). This passage remained [3] until it suddenly disappears from the draft attached to an email from the afternoon of September 17 (CAB/11/56) [4]. Having the checked with a certain degree of thoroughness the evidence given by the main players interviewed on the subject [5], I can't see that any of them volunteered, or were asked to supply, an explanation for the omission. That the reason for the omission was some kind of glorified typo is inconceivable. Someone (at whatever pay grade) must have made a decision that the caveat pooped the party, and decided to take it out. Presumably, this did not without notice by the rest of those concerned in the drafting process. They must all either have agreed, acquiesced or been overruled. The lawyer's Latin tag is suppressio veri, suggestio falsi: one makes a false representation by a failure to state a relevant fact. The passage struck out of the foreword was an inference of fact - an inference that HMG was peculiarly well placed to make. The whole document trumpeted the fact that it was based on the best intelligence - it was an expert report. (I believe that, in ascertaining the legal consequence of a misrepresentation, such an asymmetry of knowledge places a particular onus on an expert party dealing with a layman [6]. ) [I have seen no suggestion that the passage was in any way factually incorrect, even viewed with the perspective of mid-September 2002. Clearly, if it were factually suspect, that would have been an excellent reason to remove it.] The information contained in the omitted passage was certainly serious and directly relevant to the issue in hand: what to do about Saddam's WMD. No one would suppose that such a statement was just political window-dressing - what the lawyers call a puff. Nothing there of the knockabout bear-garden familiar to the world as Prime Minister's Question Time! Moreover, the language of the passage is clear and unambiguous: no one would suppose that a lay reader, seeing it in the published dossier, could misconstrue what HMG was telling him by it. Journos could have been expected to flag it up in their reports. The only inference to draw from the sparse information we have on the omitted passage is that it was deliberately removed by those in HMG responsible for drafting the dossier with the intention that its omission would enhance the chances of public acceptance of HMG's Iraq strategy. In other words, the dossier was thereby sexed up by omission.
| More enlightenment from the Hutton emails...Just a couple of examples, neither of which seem to have been picked up by the (I laughingly call) grownup media. The first from Joanna Nadin - a Number 10 Special Adviser [1] - making contributions effectively above [her] pay grade I suspect: From : Joanna Nadin Sent : 18 September 2002 14 42 Did Alastair take the time to explain things to her? Or was this one of those emails sifted into the bin? Is it sincere in identifying the Emperor's lack of attire? Or is she taking the piss? Answers on a postcard... The second from Prime Minister's Official Spokesman (PMOS) Tom Kelly (the guy who likened Dr Kelly to James Thurber's Walter Mitty) on Blair's presentation of the dossier to the House of Commons on September 24 2002: Instead [2] TB can carry the big message 'this is a man who will do anything he can not just to hang on to power, but to impose his will'. It is, indeed, not entirely in the Land of Wishful Thinking that, because he succeeded in the latter endeavour, he will eventually fail in the former. Not entirely... [Just realised the Danny Kaye connection: freaky!]
| Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Alastair Campbell and the Three Spooks - still a puzzleIf Lord Hutton sticks to his timetable [1], the witness sessions will be over by the end of next week - and yet one has the sense that vast swathes of oral and documentary evidence remain poorly, or not at all, digested. As an example, take former Blair spinmeister Alastair Campbell's evidence (starting at 18:25) on a meeting he said took place on September 9 2002 attended by himself, John Scarlett [2] and
Now, using the (in my experience) unreliable XP Find on the file of transcripts on my machine - and checking (no single-source merchant I!) with Google - I cannot find any reference to this meeting elsewhere in the oral evidence to the Inquiry. Which is surely remarkable. That three MI6 officers - exactly what their functions might be is not made clear - should be in AC's presence and identified as such must be fairly unusual; that they should request, and be granted, a meeting to complain of press coverage seems to demand much greater scrutiny than it received. (Lord Hutton, who one might have expected would query the basis of the meeting, doesn't.) I smell a rat. The whole case of HMG on the preparation of the dossier, and the use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is that the pols in Number 10 deferred to the JIC in those matters: the pols proposed, the JIC disposed [3], or so we're meant to believe. But here we have the chain of command rudely bypassed - not only the JIC, but SIS/MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove - by assorted spooks. And not so as to confer on substantive intelligence matters, but to bellyache like minor celebs about their press coverage! Why? Clearly, at that stage, whilst the invasion was very much envisioned, a judicial inquiry was not. The meeting could, on this basis, scarcely have been intended as some sort of pre-emptive (!) action with such an inquiry in mind. And I doubt whether AC was going to go on the record about the spooks' concerns - perhaps he passed them to a tame journo on background. If so, one suspects that the MI6 guys may well have been put up to it by AC. Alternatively, it might have been some part of internecine warfare on the spooks' side. For instance, we have MI6 officers purporting, according to AC, to speak for other agencies:: 7 Q. What was the gist of their comments to you about whether Whereas, it's not clear to me that such a group even had the authority to speak for SIS: such authority, one presumes, could only have come from Richard Dearlove. (I cannot see that Dearlove was questioned on this meeting when he appeared before the Inquiry - my piece yesterday.) Fruitless to speculate further. It's far from the most obviously important information brought to light by the Inquiry. But the fact is that the meeting with the three MI6 guys remains unexplained. Yet what must be such an unusual event cannot remotely have occurred by chance: the guys did not just drop in to Number 10 as they might have picked up the phone to whinge on a talk radio show! The meeting clearly had a purpose - and of that purpose, in the time-honoured phrase, I think we should be told....
| Monday, September 15, 2003
Hutton: initial thoughts on C's evidenceThe head man at MI6 (more properly, the Special Intelligence Service, or SIS) oughtn't to be one to give much away: and, at the Hutton Inquiry today, Sir Richard Dearlove in his evidence didn't. At first read, at least. The focus on the intelligence side is still very much the 45 minute claim (Dearlove (85:3) was affronted by the slight on his source - and thus, on his Service - implied by the word claim - or perhaps he was play-acting in an attempt to put Inquiry counsel James Dingemans QC off his stroke...). None of the senior men in the various arms of intelligence - JIC, DIS, SIS - that the Inquiry has heard from will hear a word said against the product - though, as Dearlove did, some criticise, under cover of the benefit of hindsight, the way it was presented. Some of the problems with the 45 minute claim I addressed in a piece on September 2. Part of the problem is a contradiction in what is said in its favour:
The credibility is also compromised by what seems to be the fact that the ultimate source, the Iraqi officer, seems to have provided no corroborative detail - such that UK intelligence were reduced to inferring that the claim referred to delivery of WMD via battlefield weapons, and not ballistic missiles. (It is, of course, possible that such detail was provided, but is being withheld for security reasons. But would such reasons prevent the likes of Dearlove stating the fact that the officer had provided details without actually divulging them?) I get the impression on a first read-through that Inquiry counsel was deliberately laying off Dearlove - a Guardian piece today refers to the fact that he was not questioned on meetings he may have had with Today presenter John Humphrys and BBC executives (Observer July 6). He is not on the list of those to be cross-examined over the next fortnight in Stage 2 of the Inquiry evidence sessions. There is also an inconsistency that needs teasing out on the question of single-source intelligence. Officials from the DIS - such as Tony Cragg and Air Marshal Sir Joe French - seem to accept in principle that the fact that a piece of intelligence has only one source is problematic - for instance, French, in reply to a question (66:25) about the complaint from former DIS man Dr Brian Jones on the single-sourcing of the 45 minute claim, seems comprehend the possibility that such a complaint might have been valid - though, on the facts of this particular case, he clearly thought the intelligence stood up despite it's being single-sourced. Whereas Dearlove (97:19) pours scorn on the very notion that intelligence should be suspect merely because it's single-sourced: I have to say I am rather bemused by the Is that broadside intended to give cover to a perceived weakness in HMG's case? Or does it indicate a doctrinal difference between SIS and DIS? [One angle which has not been pursued so far is the input from the US agencies. We know from the Intelligence and Security Committee report (my piece September 11) that the CIA - which has a representative regularly sitting in on JIC meetings - saw and commented on the WMD section of the September 10 draft of the dossier (para 74, p29a). And that (my piece September 9) the CIA have distanced themselves from the 45 minute claim. (It does not appear in the CIA's own dossier of October 2002).] The schedule of witnesses - and the 15 points Dingemans suggested for Lord Hutton's attention in his opening statement on the resumption of hearings this morning (starting at 4:4) - are a curate's egg: Blair himself is not slated to be recalled for cross-examination (though one naturally hopes that Stage 2 evidence will bring him back, one way or another); on the other hand, the scope of the Inquiry discernible from the 15 points, whilst sticking to the terms of reference, does seem to leave ample room for a substantive inquiry into the quality of the intelligence supporting the 45 minute claim. Although there is other questionable material in the dossier - the hoary old Niger uranium business, for instance - it was the 45 minute claim that Kelly supposedly mentioned to Andrew Gilligan, and formed the heart of his May 29 broadcasts, which started the train of events leading to Kelly's death (which is the focus of the Inquiry, after all). Especially given the tight timetable and relatively narrow remit, the 45 minute claim will, I think, prove to be the decisive point for Lord Hutton [1]: without fatally undermining that claim (with the benefit only of information available in September 2002, of course), it's hard to see much damage being done to Blair by Hutton's findings on the handling of the dossier. (The handling of Kelly himself is a different matter, of course.) I have a sense that the claim can be undermined, but not yet that Hutton and Dingemans are prepared to take on the job. Next Tuesday week, JIC Chairman John Scarlett returns for cross-examination, the only senior spook slated for a reappearance. His is undoubtedly the critical session on the substance of the claim - so we've not long to wait!
| Sunday, September 14, 2003
UK Intelligence Machinery - some interesting linksFirst, a lengthy summary (400K of HTML) - with historical detail - from the Information Clearing House (Part 1 and Part 2) - I've barely scanned it, but what I've seen gives reason to hope - caveat maxime lector as ever! Second, on the official side, the 2003 report (PDF) of the Cabinet Office - a sort of extension to Number 10 whose functions include that of intelligence coordination. The Joint Intelligence Committee (chaired by friend of the blog Sir (?) John Scarlett) comes under its aegis [1]. (At the back - p43a - is a table showing that the total spend on the UK security and intelligence agencies comes to around $1.5bn a year. Value for money or what?)
| Emily Roebling - an inconvenient heroineI'd never heard of the woman until catching the last half of a docco on the BBC last week. But she seems to be the epitome of what the wimmin would loathe in a role model: all that study, determination, chutzpah all devoted to a cause simply because it was her husband's. Merely to think of Emily devoting herself to saving the bridge to save his life must surely cause any right-thinking feminist to vomit! She certainly seems to be an orphan of Academe: Amazon lists only one book about her [1] - and that was published in 1984, and is currently out of print! Not that's she's been edited out of history, exactly. But 339 items (none of them substantial, that I can see) from Mr Google (such an eminently searchable name too!) scarcely seems adequate recognition. And, so far as I can see, no Hollywood treatment either, even in pre-feminist days. Part of the problem may have been that the woman, to judge from the photos I've seen (this, for instance) was nothing if not excessively plain - though not quite thirty when called upon to step up to the plate on her husband's behalf. One of the tantalisingly informative timelines [2] - relating to a Ken Burns docco on the Bridge from the early 80s - says that none other than Boss Tweed (William Marcy Tweed in the indictments) was a trustee of the bridge company (until justice caught up with him). Tweed got sent to the slammer, of course: but one can't help feeling that a couple of hours with Emily Roebling telling him exactly what she thought of him would have been a more appropriate - if certainly cruel and unusual - punishment for the political trailblazer. (I was surprised to learn, after leaving Washington Roebling at the end of the docco in 1883 still in bad shape from the sequelae of caisson disease, that, whilst the ever-loyal Emily dropped off the twig at the tolerably early age of 60 in 1903, Washington remarried and survived to the age of 89!) (By chance, the period over which the Brooklyn Bridge was built falls neatly into the run of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle which is available on the Brooklyn Library site. One needs dates as well as years to use the resource effectively - the timelines available online are disappointingly short of precise dates - but the edition of opening day - May 24 1883 - devotes the whole of its front page to the Bridge.)
| Saturday, September 13, 2003
The Indian mega-shakedown in CA - the Gilded Age puts on the warpaint!It's a scam with the simplicity of a Crédit Mobilier, and potentially pretty much as rewarding. Sitting Bull gets his revenge with a platinum Waterman... Whilst those in the cheap seats are being diverted by the Arnie v Cruz (or should that be, KKKruz?) pantomime, the contribution whores up at Sacramento are testing their consciences - some contest that! - with a bill [1] that gifts a veto over development of Traditional Tribal Cultural Sites to a Commission (the Native American Heritage Commission) representing Golden State Indians. The racket proposed seems to involve sundry Indians delving into their folk memory and persuading the Commission that a particular - no doubt, one that that just so happens to be the subject of a large-scale proposed development! - was sacred to some tribe or other back in the happy days before the white man arrived. Rather than allow the Commission to stand in the way of Progress by vetoing the development, the legislation magnanimously allows the tribe concerned to agree to suffer the insult to their ancestors - soothed by the balm of a heap big heap of wampum. I've just skimmed the bill; but it seems to open up the possibility of further Geronimo-style legislative raids forcing a logical extension: if these sites are sacred, surely the Indians should be let onto them to practice their mumbo-jumbo, even though they're on private land. And what about hunting and fishing rights? (In §16 of the bill - substituting a new §5097.94 of the Public Resources Code - it includes as one of the Commission's powers in §5097.94(k) (emphasis mine) To assist Native American tribes in obtaining appropriate access to and protection for sites listed in the TTCS Register that are located on public or private lands for ceremonial or spiritual activities. I don't think that gives it the right to force private landowners to let the Indians onto their property - but I could well be reading it wrong.) A naive observer might ask: You beat these guys to a bloody pulp over a hundred years ago - why the freebies today? Naturally, because the beneficiaries of this latter-day robber baronage will show their gratitude in the usual way: campaign contributions. (I'm aware that the casino business has already done the guys in Sacramento much good in that way.) But, could it be that the monstrosity of the gouge has been too much even for their sensitive souls? A piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today reports that the Assembly (lower house, I'm thinking) had voted down the bill. (Actually, it seems that it's all just pre-adjournment hi-jinks between Assembly GOP men and the Senate - no principle involved at all. Situation normal...) While my visit to the topic will, I fear, be a fleeting one, there is evidently a deal of red meat in the Indians-pols relationship. For instance, the very shallowest digging reveals that what looks like a pretty similar bill (Senate Bill 1828) actually passed the Legislature last year - but was vetoed by Davis [2]. This year, Davis needs all the support he can get, so he's right behind the current bill - the piece says it's a weaker bill than the 2002 model. (Though surely there are more voters with land rights potentially liable to confiscation by the land-grab bill than he could ever win with the contributions he might snaffle from grateful Indians.) But, amongst those concerned in the recall election, it's mechista Bustamante who seems to be the Indian's favourite. (Quick question: when Bustamante's MEChA friends succeed in ejecting the gringos from Aztlan, what happens to the Miwoks and Pomos - are they part of the raza or - in a kind of Miguel Estrada way - are they not Indian enough?) What is with the US and its Indians? I see they're a historically badly done by demo. But instead of the sort of socio-economic assistance that regular, grown-up governments might afford (the cheese-eating, socialist European tendency, for instance. Or am I thinking New Deal?), the American polity decides to open up the casino racket. Which, appropriately, spreads its dollars amongst the Indians on a wholly random basis: this AP piece from 2000 has the tiny Mashantucket Pequot tribe of Connecticut making $300m in five months based purely on location. Apparently, two-thirds of Indians were from tribes with no casinos at all. And all because casinos mean cash, and cash means campaign contributions. (Of course, the New Deal was in part a scam - through the WPA, in particular - to buy FDR votes. But New Deal goodies were distributed with a little more rhyme and reason than casino bunce, surely?) And the intellectual Trail of Tears that is NAGPRA and the Kennewick Man saga - much worse, in a way, than the casinos, since it has no political payoff - completely beats me. (The Kennewick case, I see from the Chronicle (September 10) stumbled forward another step last week with oral arguments before the Ninth Circuit hearing an appeal from the decision of Judge Jelderks. Only slight consolation: by the time it reaches the Supremes, Justice (Ha!) O'Connor will no longer be available to Grut it.)
UPDATE (September 14) The shakedown failed - for this year: SB-18 fell on the adjournment, seemingly without a further vote being taken in the Assembly. The piece gives some more detail on the politicking behind the 38-14 vote against: apparently, the abstention of moderate Democrats was essential to the success of the opposition to the bill - presumably, those who don't rely on casino wampum for their reelection! It seems that the tribes are threatening another raiding party next year; Governor Cruz, with a mule-train of wampum already banked, would, one suspect, sign whatever bill got passed. But Governor Arnie? According to this, Schwarzenegger, though he's refused wampum, has made nice with some of the tribes. | Friday, September 12, 2003
Argentina's great experiment - a little backgroundI mentioned on August 30 the decision of Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner to have the amnesties for junta-era crimes revoked by the Congress. I know nowhere near enough about the guy to be definite: but I get a strong whiff of Tony Blair - whose classic was the Kosovo war, for which (unlike Iraq) he was, as I recall, the prime mover, chivvying along a reluctant Clinton. He wanted to get rid of the bad man. But, by extending the range of circumstances in which aggression is deemed legitimate [1], he sets himself up for blowback - not to mention the rest of us. Primum non nocere finds no place in Dr Blair's Casebook when he sees a cancer to cut - the more heroic the surgery, the better! When I looked for the earlier piece, I could find no evidence that Kirchner had made ripping up the amnesties part of his platform, or even mentioned to voters that he was planning to do so. Not that Argentinians haven't approved the move: the psychology of their reaction is certainly well worth considering. And, as I believe, the armed forces are neither ready, willing nor able to place on the government the sort of pressures that, for instance, the Turkish military wield over their (nominal) political masters. Don't expect to see The Return of the Junta any time soon. It just seems like a piece of pure political onanism, at a time when, socio-economically, Argentina - a hundred years ago, one of the richest countries in the world, in terms of per capita GDP - needs a lot of work, to put it mildly. It's the sort of hubris that so often brings a richly rewarded nemesis. Obviously, a lot of work required to go beyond generalities - and the topic is unlikely to get the time while Hutton is in full swing. Meanwhile, there is a useful piece in Los Andes detailing for those of us playing catch-up the history of the various amnesties in question [2] - the sort of detail which is annoyingly assumed in news stories. And, though the Spanish extradition request came to nothing (August 30 piece), the Argentinian authorities are apparently seeking the arrest of Alfredo Astiz in connection with an extradition request from France - the case of the murder of French nuns Alice Domon and Leonie Duquet. A story well worth keeping half an eye on that's not coming to a head any time soon, I fancy. (Famous last words...)
| Thursday, September 11, 2003
Latest report on Blair's Iraq dossier: not guilty verdict on damning evidenceBlair benefits from as nifty a piece of nullification as you could wish to see: the Intelligence and Security Committee [1] has today issued its report (PDF) on British intelligence on Iraqi WMD - including the infamous September dossier. Its conclusions are pretty uniformly helpful to HMG: sufficiently critical on some points of detail to escape being characterised as an complete whitewash, while exonerating HMG on the essentials - in particular, the charge that it sexed up the dossier. On first reading, at least, the evidence scarcely supports the conclusions. In an earlier piece (September 2), I suggested that there was a critical inconsistency between the various formulations used for the 45 minute claim in successive drafts of the JIC assessment - which came to be used to support the information given in the published dossier. The ISC report picks this point up in para 55 (emphasis mine): We noted that the time taken to deploy the munitions was also altered between the draft and final assessments. The Iraqi officer had reported that the average time was 20 minutes, with a maximum of 45 minutes. Therefore the time range was not the 20-45 minutes stated in the JIC Assessment because munitions could have been deployed in less than 20 minutes. Whereas the draft JIC Assessment had followed the precise terms of the intelligence report, the issued JIC Assessment did not. We were told that the difference between the times would not have been significant for the readers of strategic JIC Assessments and that the DIS would have briefed field commanders on the actual details of the intelligence report. Apparently, there was no need to get the numbers right in the assessment because they were not significant for those who read the assessment, and the users at the sharp end would be briefed by other means entirely! And, in para 56, it continues: ...the reference to the 20-45 minutes in the JIC Assessment added nothing fundamentally new to the UK's assessment of the Iraqi battlefield capability.(Though (para 50) it was supposedly important and valuable intelligence; and (para 52) the only piece of evidence on WMD deployment or use with definite times.) All in all, the way in which this intelligence was handled by the JIC seems alarmingly casual. Another matter I raised in my September 2 piece was the question whether - as Dr Kelly seems to have assumed - the 45 minute claim referred to WMD delivered by ballistic missiles or to its use on the battlefield. The JIC concluded in general that Saddam's WMD threat was most likely limited to battlefield weapons (para 48): The JIC assessed that the Iraqis might use chemical and biological weapons against neighbouring states or concentrations of Western forces. We were told that the weapons systems most likely to be used to deliver chemical and biological munitions against Western forces were artillery and rockets. These are battlefield weapons, which can be used tactically to great effect, but they are not strategic weapons. As to the 45 minute claim, the report says (para 52) The Assessments Staff stated that they, and the people they had consulted, did not know what munitions the Iraqi officer [2] was referring to or their status. Nor did they know from where and to where munitions might be moved.However, They assessed that the Iraqi officer was referring to the time needed to move the biological and chemical battlefield munitions from where they were held by Iraqi Security units in forward-deployed storage sites to pre-designated military units. Why the need to guess? How was it that the source who reported the Iraqi officer's information didn't pursue such basic details? Was their contact so brief as not to permit the source to ask the officer one damned thing about his claim? Naturally, what one would be looking for in such further particulars would not just be extra intelligence but corroboration of the basic claim. It is quite perplexing that the JIC should be satisfied with a claim about which they were evidently so hazy. In particular, this evidence contradicts the statement, heard more than once from witnesses at the Hutton Inquiry, that, in the sphere of intelligence, the wordsmithing was vital. [Important to note that all of these extracts from the report so far relate to the JIC assessments, as distinct from the dossier which was based on them. The theory on which Blair seems to be basing his Hutton strategy is that the JIC's independence can be assumed - not only was the JIC proof against blandishments from No 10 to alter the text of the dossier, but also, failures within the JIC - such as those in relation to the 45 minute claim - cannot be imputed to Blair. However, the JIC membership is not confined to agencies of the UKIC: as the report points out (para 29), it also includes representatives from customers like the FCO, the Home Office and the Treasury. The scope for political interference is obvious. Yet the assumption is repeatedly made - as in para 8 of the ISC report - that the JIC represents the UKIC.] On the wordsmithing question, there is a further odd comment of the Chief of Defence Intelligence in post in September 2002, Air Marshal Sir Joe French, in the context of dissent within the DIS on the use of the 45 minute claim in the dossier (para 98): …for each paper I would have the range of specialists who had been involved in them, obviously splitting hairs on particular words. But ultimately, putting 45 minutes in a military context when this was going through, I had to make a corporate decision on which draft we would actually live with. Doesn't sound as if the guy was entirely tuned in to the culture of the organisation he headed! Almost as an afterthought, the ISC adds, in relation to the rejection of dissident views amongst DIS members on the wording of the dossier (para 101): We were told that there was further intelligence of a nature so sensitive that it was only released on a very restricted basis. We have seen that intelligence and understand the basis on which the CDI and the JIC took the view they did. This is the first I've heard that there was something beyond the intel originating from the Iraqi officer and reported by the SIS on August 30. Has Lord Hutton seen this further intelligence? Or was it deemed too sensitive for his eyes? On the sexing up point more generally, the report says (para 83) Saddam was not considered a current or imminent threat to mainland UK, nor did the dossier say so. The first draft of the Prime Minister's foreword contained the following sentence: "The case I make is not that Saddam could launch a nuclear attack on London or another part of the UK (He could not)." …It was unfortunate that this point was removed from the published version of the foreword and not highlighted elsewhere. How was the removal of this major caveat from the dossier not sexing up? And, on the deference supposedly shown by HMG to the impartial wisdom of the JIC on intelligence matters, the revelation (para 127) that The JIC assessed that any collapse of the Iraqi regime would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of terrorists And, in the next paragraph, it gives us Blair on why he junked this particular piece of advice: One of the most difficult aspects of this is that there was obviously a danger that in attacking Iraq you ended up provoking the very thing you were trying to avoid. On the other hand I think you had to ask the question, 'Could you really, as a result of that fear, leave the possibility that in time this developed into a nexus between terrorism and WMD in [any] event? '. This is where you've just got to make your judgement about this. But this is my judgement and it remains my judgement and I suppose time will tell whether it's true or it's not true. He hides behind the JIC where convenient, and brushes them aside when they get in the way of his invasion. More to come from a more extensive perusal, I suspect.
| Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Iraq intel: can systemic failures justify a bad faith charge?The whole sorry saga under investigation by Lord Hutton started with the allegation in the infamous Today broadcast by Andrew Gilligan at 0607 on May 29 that HMG knew that 45 minute claim was probably...wrongeven when they put it in the dossier. By his 0732 broadcast, wrong had changed to questionable. And, though the Inquiry has dealt at some length with the minutiae of the process by which the dossier was drawn up, the only finding worth having from Hutton on the dossier question will be one of bad faith imputable to Tony Blair. Looking at the claim in isolation, it may well be that Hutton will conclude the charge against Blair unproven: that his delegating the drafting of the dossier to JIC Chairman John Scarlett is sufficient to pass the buck, whatever the volume of suggestions from Alastair Campbell and others from the No 10 machine. But that does not exhaust the possibilities. Testimony of Anthony Cordesman to the House Intelligence Committee [1] suggests an alternative approach. Cordesman is scathing about the quality of the intelligence about Iraq available to USG and HMG before and during the war. But, for our purposes, hindsight needs to be excluded. On page 20, he identifies a number of features that seriously compromised the pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD - and, so far as I can see, those features would all have been apparent to Blair and his men at the time the dossier was created in September 2002. They relate to organisation of intelligence evaluation, as, for example: Security compartmentation within each major aspect of collection and analysis severely limits the flow of data to working analysts. The expansion of analytic staffs has sharply increased the barriers to the flow of data, and has brought large number of junior analysts into the process that can do little more than update past analyses and judgments. Far too little analysis is subjected to technical review by those who have actually worked on weapons development....or artefacts of the process: Analysis tends to focus on technical capability and not on the problems in management and systems integration that often are the real world limiting factors in proliferation. This tends to push analysis towards exaggerating the probable level of proliferation, particularly because technical capability is often assumed if collection cannot provide all the necessary information. Cordesman is talking primarily about the way the US agencies operate: perhaps their UK counterparts don't suffer from the same failings. But he also points out that ...the users of intelligence are at best intolerant of analysis that consists of a wide of qualifications and uncertainties even at the best of times, and the best of times do not exist when urgent policy and warfighting decisions need to be made. Users inevitably either force the intelligence process to reach something approach a definitive set of conclusions, or make such estimates themselves. He concludes (p22) that In practical terms, any political effort to try to communicate the true level of uncertainty and probable outcomes inherent in most estimates of proliferation seems almost certain to make it difficult or impossible to gain a political consensus for timely and effective domestic or international action. Communicating uncertainty may be a good way of arguing against action but only because its impact is to create nearly endless discussion and debate and block agreement on any policy that requires broad political agreement on a single course of action or the use of military force. In practical terms, the US and its allies may again have to act on the basis of something approaching "worst case" assumptions, and this is a risk that proliferating nations and extremist movements may have to learn they take when they proliferate. Cordesman, who, from memory, was a supporter of the invasion, doesn't exactly seem outraged by the prospect that future preemptive wars will be sold on the basis of deliberately skewed intelligence! I suspect that the straight Scots-Irishman with Blair's fate in his hands may not take quite so sophisticated a view. The idea of the deception of the public for its own good is reminiscent of the appalling frankness speech of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin on November 12 1936, in which (very roughly) he said he not made a call for rearmament before the then recent general election (despite intending to rearm) because he knew he would never have been re-elected if he had done so! Cordesman offers a further nugget on the dossier: Moreover, a detailed comparisons (sic) of the British and CIA reports shows that the British document often implied that intelligence had more certainty than the US document, although both governments shared virtually the same intelligence. It is clear from the investigation by the British parliament that this was partly because the British report had a much heavier degree of editing by the Prime Minister's office. Clearly, he fails to appreciate the subtleties of the HMG organisation chart. Or perhaps he's unconvinced by the repeated protestations of John Scarlett's utter and total independence...
| Tuesday, September 09, 2003
The 45 minute claim and the Americans - againIn my piece yesterday, I pondered what the USIC had made of the infamous claim as the dossier was in course of preparation. I uttered those famous last words A cursory search produces nothing on the point. This time, my search has been a little less cursory; but the product is scarcely satisfying. (I'm strictly following my nose here: this will be ancient history for many, no doubt.) For a start, I'd been trusting to Google News to pick up the start of the trail. But that only goes back a month - which, it seems, is not far enough. WaPo on July 20 says The White House, in the run-up to war in Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say. Bush used the 45 minute claim, for instance, in his radio broadcast of September 28 2002: The Iraqi regime ...., according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. The piece refers to Ari Fleischer's briefing on September 24 in which he waxes lyrical on the dossier: In the case of this report, we are aware, of course, what the United Kingdom was working on in the report. But make no mistake, this is their effort, this is their work, this is their product. We were aware of it, and we agree with their findings. When asked whether the White House had reviewed the dossier, he replies I don't know. I'd have to take a look and ask a number of people who work here to see at what stage they saw it. Obviously, we were aware of it prior to its coming out. But I don't know the answer specifically on what day somebody here may have actually taken a look at it. And when challenged on its novelty, says Well, I think there was new information in there, particularly about the 45-minute threshold by which Saddam Hussein has got his biological and chemical weapons triggered to be launched. There was new information in there about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium from African nations. That was new information. As long as he believed it... Having checked with the rest of the September White House briefings, the dossier doesn't seem to come up again. So we get no enlightenment on the question of when it was reviewed. (Pursuing quite why Bush should have sought at that stage to exculpate the CIA - not always the Administration's favourite organisation - from this particular allegation, I'll leave for another day.) Set against this a piece in the Guardian dated July 31, which kicks off thus: The CIA objected to claims in the British government's September dossier on Iraq's banned weapons programme...It appears that among the CIA's objections was the much-trumpeted claim that Iraqi forces could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so. The information was apparently provided on July 30 to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee by the FCO in a written reply to questions submitted: ....the CIA was given a draft of the government's dossier on September 11 last year...... Unfortunately, the FCO reply does not specify that the CIA's objections extended to the 45 minute claim, merely saying that The CIA made a number of comments...The JIC chairman incorporated or rejected them as he judged fit. Now, the CIA is, amongst the US intelligence agencies, the organisation that regularly sits in on JIC meetings; nothing more natural that it should receive and comment on a draft of the dossier. Presumably, it communicated the dossier and its comments thereon to the White House. (The possibility that Blair and Bush had a back channel going, whereby Bush was briefed directly by HMG on the dossier is scarcely credible. Is it?) The page listing the written evidence supporting the July 7 FAC report does not include this correspondence - coming, as it does, after the report was completed: I can't find it anywhere on the site. No doubt, when the FAC does a follow-up report, it will be included. Nor does it appear to be in the FAC's evidence submitted to the Hutton Inquiry - the FAC, unlike other sources, does not seem to have provided any extra documentary evidence after the start of the hearings. Still not making much sense: more research needed... | Monday, September 08, 2003
More on the Joint Intelligence Committee - and the US connectionIn general, the amateurish quality of the oral evidence sessions of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee is shown up by the Hutton sessions covering much the same ground. (The interventions of that failed would-be parliamentary Max Miller, Andrew 'Chaff' Mackinlay impart a sort of Brighton Rock seediness to proceedings, ably complemented by Chairman Donald Anderson - a good Mayor of Swansea in a bad year.) But the session with Dame Pauline Neville-Jones (ex-Foreign and Commonwealth Office [1], and currently a BBC Governor) is not without interest. PNJ, as she may or may not be called for short, was also for a time Chairman of the JIC (1993-4), and fills in some blanks on how it operates - or, at least, how it used to. She's distinctly sniffy about the lack of regular meetings of the relevant Cabinet committee [2] under the present government - which she would expect to have some kind of oversight of the work commissioned from the JIC: I think, I will put it this way, there is the danger that you do not get properly recorded decisions and properly analysed decisions. That is a problem. There is also the question of accountability. She also mentions the question of US-UK intelligence cooperation; ...there is independent assessment [of intelligence]. I think that is important to both sides. It is better for both sides to have each tested it and, of course, those assessments are compared. We do have knowledge of each other's assessment but they stand independently of each other, it is not the other side's lot that goes to your ministers, it is your assessment that goes to your ministers. Which raises the question, What did US agencies make of the 45 minute claim? A cursory search produces nothing on the point. But surely, so important a piece of intelligence would have been passed to the USIC for assessment, and that assessment would have been shared with UK ministers. (By contrast UK/US cooperation - if that's the word - on the Niger uranium business has been written about ad nauseam.) Is there any information that could be prised out of USIC on the 45? If not the assessment itself, then at least confirmation that a US assessment was made, when, by whom, when communicated to the JIC (or whomever else in HMG). | Objective journalism - still alive after all these years...As discussed here more than once, this peculiarly American conceit was what allowed the risible claims of Sen Joseph McCarthy in his infamous Wheeling, WV speech in February 1950 to gain national coverage [1]. The Columbia Journalism Review has a piece inspired by Uraniumgate - the apparently fictional efforts of Saddam to buy the stuff in Africa - on the doctrine in action in 2003. It does little to drag the reputation of the hack off the floor: As part of its reverence for objectivity, journalism esteems balance. A reporter can demonstrate objectivity by quoting two opposing sides of an issue equally. In America's two-party system, the Republican and Democratic positions conveniently serve to demarcate those sides. Democratic claims receive every bit as much credence as Republican claims, and vice versa, and for a reporter to suggest otherwise is seen as joining the partisan fray. Just like giving science and creationism equal airtime in school classrooms. So, it seems, one's choice of journalism lies between the relentless partisanship of the old American press (William Randolph Hearst, Colonel Robert McCormick and their like) - and its present-day British heirs - and the variety that prizes accurate measurement of equidistance above all things....
| Blair and his new spinner - the Ecclestone million pound donation reunion party...Following the departure of Alastair Campbell, the distinctly shop-soiled Teflon Tone appointed in his place as Director of Communications veteran Labour hack David Hill (Dave Hill to his friends), who has latterly been plying his trade in the private sector. Connoisseurs of the Blair Lie Machine will recall that master and servant figured largely in the affair that established the Dear Leader's ability to beat any rap however strong the evidence against him: the 1997 case of Bernie Ecclestone's Million [1]. Hill's contribution, in his capacity as top Labour Party [2] spinmeister on duty over the weekend the story starting rolling, was to stonewall journalists, and, by every ruse short of actual lying, to dissuade them from running the story (even warning that Ecclestone was litigious (Jones p111)). And then, on the Monday (November 10), to announce to journos that Ecclestone had made a donation to the Labour Party over £5,000 (p113). It was left to the sports hacks to get out of Ecclestone that the sum concerned was actually £1 million (p115)! After that, things got pretty ugly. And Blair decided to go on TV to do a Checker's speech - or get as close as modern media conditions permitted. So he volunteered for an interview with John Humphrys on his Sunday lunchtime TV show On The Record the following Sunday (November 16) [3]. The performance is remembered for his Jolsonesque appeal for the voters to trust him: I hope that people know me well enough and realise the type of person I am, to realise that I would never do anything either to harm the country or anything improper. I never have. I think most people who have dealt with me, think I'm a pretty straight sort of guy and I am. But it also includes a flat-out lie. Now, however they distort the truth, skilled operators like Blair are usually pretty careful to lie by omission, by juxtaposition, by spurious statistics and the like. Not here. At issue was a letter (apparently dated November 8) sent by the Labour Party's then General Secretary Tom Sawyer to Sir Patrick Neill, Chairman of the Commission on Standards in Public Life (Rawnsley p96) asking for advice in relation to the proprieties of accepting a donation from Ecclestone. Blair, in the interview, referred to it: the question then arose which was the question which was uppermost in my mind, what about the original donation? We decided to seek the advice of Sir Patrick Neill. The text of the letter (as extracted) leaves no doubt that Blair was lying: the advice sought was about a possible additional donation: the donation already made was mentioned merely as background information [4]. In the state of Tonymania then gripping the nation (in post-People's Princess mood), the lying did him no harm whatever. Coming up to date, it naturally crosses one's mind whether Blair lied (as opposed to obfuscated and dissembled) to the Hutton Inquiry. Answer comes there none, for the moment...
| Sunday, September 07, 2003
Hutton: the dossier draft mystery mystery...Running through the evidence of Dr Brian Jones [1], I'm struck by a passage (starting at 119:21) from which it is clear that there was room for confusion as to which draft of the September dossier was under discussion. Lord Hutton asks Do you remember, Dr Jones, the draft of the After some umming and awing, Jones volunteers that 13 A. I was surprised when I refreshed my memory last week at This isn't the first time that the evidence has suggested confusion as to which version of the dossier was under discussion in a particular email or at a particular meeting. Is it credible? Surely, an organisation (the Civil Service) whose only direct product is documents of one sort or another would have a system which would automatically identify the iteration (which was Susan Watt's expression, from memory) concerned. Like numbering each version, and putting the version number in a temporary footer on each page. We've been told that the wordsmithing is important in intelligence matters. But not in such matters alone. Disputes over wording must be commonplace in Whitehall. Suppose an official objects strongly to a particular sentence in a White Paper; research is commissioned to justify his position, a lengthy minute drafted and circulated - only for him to find that that sentence had already been deleted in a later version of the Paper - the loss of face would surely not bear thinking about (they don't call these chaps mandarins for nothing!). So, if a document like the dossier does not carry version numbers, the implication is that is through a deliberate desire for creative ambiguity. In anticipation not of a public inquiry, but, I suppose, interdepartmental conflict. To achieve a degree of plausible deniability for when the manure hit the air-conditioning. For now, just an annoying loose end, I think. | Saturday, September 06, 2003
Operation Rockingham still in single source hellI'm no stock market expert. But I do know that there are a bunch of guys called chartists who claim to be able to predict the future performance of a particular stock by reading patterns in a plot of its price. One can, I suspect, do something similar for news stories, based on search results. The Operation Rockingham story is a classic copied singleton - appearing once in the original (Glasgow Sunday Herald June 8) and copied by dozens of indymedia sites, blogs and the like. Apparently, no other grown-up media site has taken it up - not even the wires. For the moment, I've filed it under too good to be true: Operation Rockingham, established by the Defence Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defence in 1991, was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD programme and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down. Which is not to suggest that there hasn't been manipulation of intelligence on Iraqi WMD: but the codename sounds too Bond and the date feels early. Strangely, I am underwhelmed to learn that The existence of Operation Rockingham has been confirmed by Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, and a US military intelligence officer.Even when he says He knew members of the Operation Rockingham team and described the unit as 'dangerous'... I would like to believe that Operation Rockingham and MI6 [are] supplying skewed information to the [JIC]and in the validity of Ritter's comparison of the JIC with the Pentagon's suspect Office of Special Plans (OSP) [1]. (After all, the JIC in general, and its Chairman John Scarlett in particular, are Tony Blair's main defence against the charge of having sexed up the September dossier.) But not on the present evidence. Not without interest, perhaps, that, despite the fact that, according to the piece, The rebel Labour MP and Father of the House, Tam Dalyell, said he would raise the Sunday Herald's investigation into Operation Rockingham in the Commons on Thursday and demand an explanation from the government about selective intelligence...I can find no trace that he did so. Caveat maxime lector, as ever.
| CIA @ JIC - why not mentioned to Hutton?Red herring or genuine clue? Recapping, a key element in the affair of the notorious September dossier is the UK Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC, pronounced jic), of which (Sir?) John Scarlett is Chairman. In his own words in evidence to the Inquiry (29:21) The Joint Intelligence Committee is a real What he does not point out is that it is apparently usual for the CIA head of station to attend JIC meetings. I say apparently since the evidence available online is not exactly copper-bottomed. In the official guide to UK intelligence machinery I mentioned in my piece yesterday, there is similarly no mention of CIA involvement in the JIC. But there is more than the dreaded single source: of slight worth this and this. More promising is a piece describing the operation of the JIC by Dr. Philip H.J. Davies, whose Ph D was a history of MI6 (aka SIS) [1]. Its short description differs from that to be gleaned from Scarlett's evidence in various ways - it refers, for instance, to the existence of an A Committee and a B Committee, which Scarlett does not mention - but, in particular, it says, in relation to what it calls the A Committee that Also in attendance are the CIA station commander, a Canadian representative from the Privy Council Security and Intelligence Committee and the Australian National Assessments Staff. Why so cagey about the presence of the Americans? US-UK intelligence sharing goes back, after all, to 1940, an arrangement formalised in the BRUSA Agreement of May 17 1943, and of which the ECHELON surveillance system is, perhaps, the most namechecked product [2]. What more natural than that the CIA should be represented at the heart of the UK intelligence assessment mechanism? Well, in relation to Iraq, the US-UK intelligence relationship has been brought into question more than once - most spectacularly, perhaps, in relation to the Niger uranium documents that turned out to be forged (my piece of March 8 - the IAEA's Mohamed El-Baradei's finest hour against poor old Colin Powell). And it does rather dent the keystone argument of Tony Blair that the JIC was the personification of the UKIC. But, surely, for Scarlett not to have mentioned the fact (if it is one) that the CIA is regularly part of the JIC team only tends to excite suspicion when that fact is recognised. Two final points: first, I'm not quite happy that CIA participation in the JIC is properly stood up yet. And, second, even if it is, it doesn't represent evidence that the CIA participated in JIC discussions on the dossier - though, interestingly, Blair, at the start of his evidence (2:5) refers to a phone conversation with Bush as the trigger for putting out an Iraq dossier: why should the American involvement have stopped there?
| Friday, September 05, 2003
Is Scarlett Blair's weakest link?Not waving but drowning beneath the half million or so words of oral evidence given during Stage 1 of the Hutton Inquiry (and many more in the documentary files), not to mention the wall-to-wall punditry. One desperately wants time to get round to reading the stuff - but Hutton seems intent, for the moment at least, on his snappy timetable which would see him hearing his last witness on September 25, after only eight days of cross-examination in all. Fatuous indeed to suppose this is a case that can be cracked by some brilliant Sherlockian jeu d'esprit or tour de force. But equally wrong, surely, to view the inquiry as an exercise in management consultancy, designed to identify systems flaws for which only institutions can be held responsible: the equivalent of Peter Simple's Dr Heinz Kiosk's We are all guilty. The guessing game whereby Kelly's name became public was always a favourite for Hutton's opprobrium, and his interventions with MOD witnesses certainly gave some indication of his concerns on the point. It is not too fanciful, I think, to attribute to him as a Scots-Irishman a David Trimble-like loathing for smartarse Sassenach prestidigitation. Blame for the guessing game falls primarily on the MOD (officials and politicians) - though Geoff Hoon's highly successful interpretation of the Boneless Wonder, assuming whatever pose into which Number 10 manhandled him, leaves Blair exposed. (Blair's attempt in his oral evidence to claim something along the lines of Sir Kevin Tebbit's responsibility without culpability may well fall into the smartarse Sassenach category.) It's also an issue that the tabloids and TV can readily explain to their readers and viewers which is not something that can be said about the allegations in relation to sexing up the September dossier. On which, I suspect, the Blair defence may turn out to be most suspect at its keystone: the Uncertain Knight [1], John Scarlett. In Blair's extraordinary session (it's not testimony, of course) - to which I shall hopefully return, he hits the point hard and early (12:12): ...I think the important thing The notion is that Scarlett, who is ex-SIS (aka MI6), and who chairs the Joint Intelligence Committee, represents the pure and politically unsullied UKIC (as opposed to the waggonload of monkeys in No 10 making contributions above their pay grade [2]). This despite the fact that he is, apparently, a mate of Campbell's. Now, the role of the JIC is summarised [3] thus: It is responsible for providing Ministers and senior officials with regular intelligence assessments on a range of issues of immediate and long-term importance to national interests, primarily in the fields of security, defence and foreign affairs. Considerable efforts have been made in evidence to Hutton to identify Scarlett with the JIC, and the JIC with the UKIC as a whole. The conclusion Blair and Co want to have Hutton draw is that the dossier was a UKIC production. Comments by the Number 10 people were just that: UKIC could choose to accept or reject, in their absolute discretion. My hypothesis is that this is pure bologna. That, first of all, UKIC is riven with tribal dissension - between MI6 and the DIS, for instance - which informs treatment of intelligence, and which the JIC has to deal with. Second, that the JIC process is not (even in its regular work) divorced from political influence, but is designed specifically to integrate political concerns in its product [4]. Thirdly, that the unprecedented nature of the dossier led to a short-circuiting of the regular JIC procedure [5], such that not all UKIC queries were fully aired and dealt with. Fourthly, that Scarlett's role as the link between Number 10 and the JIC inevitably meant that the independence of the intelligence assessments supporting the dossier were compromised by political considerations. There seems to be a particular problem with MI6 - its head, Sir Richard Dearlove, is to retire early (Observer August 3) allegedly through unhappiness with the treatment of Iraq intelligence (though this was, naturally, denied). And, at that stage, it seemed to be thought that John Scarlett was being lined up by Blair to take over [6]. (I use the word hypothesis advisedly: having yet to read a good deal of the evidence even for the first time, I'm very far from jumping to conclusions.) Now, we have the belated production of minutes of a meeting [7] on September 18, the first item of which reads Ownership of the dossier More amazing, in a way, is the covering letter from the Treasury Solicitor dated August 29 enclosing the minutes; it refers to our continuing review of disclosure in the light of the evidence the inquiry has heard -a sign of a the smaller and the later, the better approach to disclosure - and, on this basis, had not been disclosed because No 10 thought it irrelevant, since the meeting was concerned purely with the mechanics of publication of the Dossier, public handling and briefing. The Treasury Solicitor, in the form of Susanna J McGibbon, took it upon themselves to obtain ad hoc preemptive (!) testimony from Scarlett on the ownership point: He has confirmed that he had ownership of the Dossier until the approved text was handed to No 10 on 20 September. It was really scarcely worth Lord Hutton's while going to the trouble of hearing witnesses when Ms MsGibbon could clearly have done a bang-up job in his place.... The sorry Kelly saga has already fingered a number of flakes among the more flamboyant characters - Gilligan, first amongst them; whilst other players - grey men like top MOD civil servant Sir Kevin Tebbit (the PUS - no pun intended) - have emerged so far as retaining a patina of modest, if short-sighted, competence. Early days, but I'm wondering whether Scarlett may be a little too flamboyant for his own good. Which would be serious news for Teflon Tone....
| Wednesday, September 03, 2003
New email addressThe spammers have hit the old address (the Nigerian scammers I could deal with: but, in the last few days, they've all been piling in...). Finally, I've got round to cutting it adrift, and getting that nice Bill Gates to make me a new one (marvel at the individual craftsmanship!) as detailed in the left-hand column. | Iraq v Vietnam: the analogists are at it again!Another example of the art of the creative historical analogist brings me back to the topic. In the CSM of August 27 we are given a very helpful checklist showing how Iraq is not Vietnam. (Naturally, that comparison is so odious that any war supporter would strive officiously to distinguish them.) Amongst the telltales suggested are The Vietnam war was fought in rice paddies and difficult jungle terrain. The continuing conflict in Iraq is confined mainly to the urban areas.and In Vietnam, the US fielded a valiant, but conscript Army. In Iraq, the volunteer US forces are better trained and experienced, with a new generation of wonder weapons. Wonder weapons, huh... Now, fighting the temptation to be picky about factual accuracy - I'd always thought the technology gap in Vietnam was pretty large - one can identify at least a couple of problems straight off the bat:
The assumption seems to be that it takes Vietnam numbers to produce the dreaded quagmire - and, the reasoning goes, since we don't seem in any danger of approaching Vietnam numbers any time soon, the quagmire threat can be dismissed as Weasels' Wishful-thinking. Not to deny that there is a good deal of that about. But, I suspect, rather more on the side of the war-backers. As, for instance, in the CSM piece, which gives its recipe for quagmire avoidance: First, support at home for the US effort in Iraq must not weaken... Get this guy some ruby slippers, stat! Now, not all historical analogies are bunk - provided one accepts that they function not as the pier of a bridge but as water-tension, capable of supporting only the lightest and nimblest water boatmen (that's an analogy that needs work...). An analogy that purports to illuminate with the brilliance of a searchlight the whole field (or its main part) of a subject is likely to be a crude and embarrassing oversimplification, necessitating distortion of the facts of both the principal subject and that to which it is purportedly analagous. An analogy which purports to shed a pale and indirect light on a tangential element is, I would suggest, more likely to be of genuine help. Try this one on for size: currently, the BBC are dribbling out their excellent 1964 Great War series; and, it seems to me, one of the key lessons one can draw from that war is the fact that any situation can become normal, however far removed from the previous state. Even by Christmas 1914, the numbers mobilised and casualties suffered were, I'd suggest, at levels that were never contemplated a year before by the populations engaged. Looking back, the losses suffered in the war are now as inconceivable to us - from memory, around 750,000 British dead, 1.4m French dead. And yet the war machines in the main combatant countries (except Russia, of course) held together till the end despite the monstrous casualties; and, perhaps even more amazing, the political institutions in the democracies of France and the UK held together too. (Recall that, in Britain in 1914, there had been the fairly imminent prospect of civil war over Irish Home Rule - thanks to Edward Carson and his Scots-Irish friends, as well as unrest over women's suffrage and bitter labour disputes. One word from the Kaiser, however, and these factions united to turn their ire towards him [1]. Some sort of message there for PNAC boys, perhaps?) Neither pro-war nor anti-war folks can be assured that the current givens - acquis is the EU-speak term - will hold: on current evidence, US voters have a low acceptability threshold for US casualties - had the Najaf bomb casualties been US troops, one wonders whether the calls for withdrawal would already have started. But, with the increasing investment of US cash and prestige into the country, with the Sunk Cost Fallacy swinging into operation, we may find that threshold rising to accommodate the numbers of casualties being suffered. As the song says, you never can tell....
| Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Geoghan: Hate crime law bites homosexual lobby in the ass?I wouldn't have touched on the case, except for having read the suggestion that John Geoghan's murder might qualify as a hate crime; and, further, that some homosexual groups are not overly gladdened by the prospect. There's a cliché about fascism and communism getting so extreme, they meet each other round the back. It seems to me that the notion of hate crimes is the result of a similar conjunction between the diversity divas and the custodomaniacs. (South Park offers sanity on the subject - in the episode, the judge tells Cartman, who has thrown a rock at the sole less-than-lily-white member of the 'cast', I am making an example of you, to send a message out to people everywhere! That if you want to hurt another human being, you better make damned sure they're the same colour as you are!) Even more bizarre, of course, is how Geoghan came to be locked up with a guy doing life for murdering a homosexual. Too bizarre even for South Park, that one, I suspect... [Whilst on the subject, there is another neat pairing: State Representative Demetrius Atsalis (copy/pasted, just in case...) of Barnstable, MA, has, it seems, been exercising his nether orifice on the subject: Not to sound cold here, but growing up, you hear about jailhouse justice and this might be a case of that. Those who prey on children aren't seen in the same light as other convicts. Is it shocking? I don't think so. His crime was against children and convicts know that - they don't like it. It's just like Bill Lockyer - who found gagging about prison rape went down a storm with CA voters (that's male rape, of course: a case where the NOW harpies would scarcely approve equal treament) - only taken to the next level. The hack is shocked - Renault again! - by the fact that the Boston Globe from which the quote came omitted these further words of wisdom: "But Atsalis called Geoghan's death 'distressing,' and said 'it's troubling when anybody's in custody of the Commonwealth and they die in prison. They become a ward of the state, and there is some responsibility with the state to make sure they are safe. Obviously, there may have been a lapse. Who knows?'" And that, of course, really takes the sting away. Pols and hacks, dontcha love 'em...] | Perhaps Blair's not so safe on the 45 minute claimWe're not even finished with Stage 1 of the Hutton Inquiry, and already the esteemed and venerable Economist (August 28 - outside subscription laager) has called the game for Blair: A mistake, then. But nothing like bad enough to threaten Mr Blair's survival. I suspect they may be celebrating a little too early. The two key elements to the charge against HMG are:
Received wisdom seems to be that, of the two elements, it's more vulnerable on the second. On the first, the impeccably straight bat of John Scarlett [2] is supposed to be his feste Burg. To date, the questions the Inquiry has looked at on the 45 minute claim have been collateral ones: in relation to the handling (in particular, the extent to which No 10 influenced its use in the dossier). The quality of the intelligence itself has not been directly addressed. Now, HMG failures in dealing with second order issues of procedure on the 45 would scarcely stick to Teflon Tony. The basic Gilligan claim was that Blair had taken us to war on a false prospectus - if the Inquiry merely criticised his paperwork, no one would be impressed. In order for any damage to be done to Blair on the 45 charge, the substantive intelligence must itself be damaged. Now, it's axiomatic that Hutton will be limited by security considerations in dealing with the intelligence [3]. Operatives, sources and methods should not be compromised. But that doesn't, surely, mean that he must take as unchallengeable the interpretations of the JIC, as communicated by Scarlett. What do we know about the intelligence? (For the avoidance of doubt, what follows is questions, not analysis: I get flummoxed by John Le Carré...) Reporting From Scarlett's evidence [4] (48:10) It was an So, pausing there, the information is, at least, secondhand: the original source (OS) getting it from the Iraqi source (IS). But the words established and reliable line of reporting suggest that the OS may not be a single individual; that a chain of intermediaries may have been instrumental in passing the intel up the line. We're also told (45:25) that, as a matter entirely separate from drafting of the September dossier, there was underway work on a classified JIC assessment, And that (46:14) That The circumstances - in particular, the timing - of this commission is not made clear; in particular, the relationship with the report of the 45 intel on August 30 (48:1) [5]. Content The 45 Number - or range? The 45 intel eventually appeared in the final JIC assessment of September 9 (CAB/17/3) Intelligence also indicates that chemical and biological munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within 20-45 minutes".Now, hold on one minute! Where did the 20 minutes come from? This, it seems, is where the onion start to unpeel a little. Part of the May 29 allegation against the 45 was that it was single source. Scarlett takes this head on (48:17): the distinction between single and double represents a misunderstanding of the assessment And, the 45 ...was consistent with established In other words, Gilligan and his source were ignorant of the basics and could scarcely be trusted on anything relating to intelligence. Yet Kelly, though not in UKIC, was nevertheless sufficiently knowledgeable not to make what seems such an elementary blunder. If, that is, it is a blunder. It should be possible to obtain corroboration on the point. And, if the single/double source question actually is generally deemed a valid one in intelligence circles, Scarlett would stand somewhat discredited [6]. (It's worth remarking that Kelly himself, in his conversations with Susan Watts, picked up on the figure of 45 (transcript 177:21): We talked a bit about why such a precise timing Evident suspicion of spurious accuracy. It seems that the 45 intel wasn't precise at all. Watts goes on He said He also talks about Scuds in their May 30 phone conversation - the one she recorded.) The only reference in the documentary evidence to 20 minutes that I am aware of is CAB/17/4, an email from the BW branch of the DIS, which comments on a previous draft of the assessment: Para 3 final bullet last line The intelligence refers to a maximum time of 45 minutes, the average was 20 minutes This could have important implications in the event of a conflict Scarlett refers to this point in his evidence (45:16). Several points here: Firstly, the passage quoted from the September 9 assessment does not tally with the comment in the email: if the average deployment time was 20 minutes, and the maximum 45, that implies that the minimum was less than 20 minutes: either the email or the assessment must, as a matter of mathematics, be wrong. (We are often told that the wordsmithing is vital in intelligence reports: Scarlett, even though he says he does not recognise the term, agrees with the principle (79:3): ..it is a concept On this vital point, it would seem a rather shoddy job of it was done.) Secondly, the intel in the assessment implies reference to one or more particular weapon systems, by model or type or whatever. The range could only be credible if one knew to what weapons it refers:
Even though such details might not appear in a document like a JIC assessment which has (I get the impression) a fairly widely circulation, as intelligence documents go, those performing the assessment should know. (And is there any reason now why we can't be told something of the raw intelligence and the steps taken to verify it?) For example, a wide range in deployment times might imply several types of system, or a variation in the distance between storage locations and the units deploying the weapons (and no doubt many other possibilities I can't imagine). Or it might indicate a shot in the dark from an officer only peripherally involved with CW/BW, and doing favours for US/UK in anticipation of an invasion. Without the detail, I suspect the JIC couldn't tell. [If the 45 minute maximum, 20 minute average numbers are right (implying some WMD was immediately deployable), it makes it all the stranger that no WMD have been found...] There is what seems something of a bootstrap operation involved, according the Scarlett: talking about the 45 intel, he says that (49:6) It brought an additional detail Now, of course, it doesn't give a particular time - it gives a range. And Scarlett is implying that the timing detail is new to UKIC. That seems, first of all, a good reason for as much corroborative detail as possible before this nugget is added to the store of accepted wisdom. And, secondly, makes one ask what precision the JIC were working with before the 45 intel came along. Thirdly, suggests that the novelty of the intel was in some way taken to be a recommendation in itself: that the merit of precision was a virtue in itself, whether or not the information was in fact correct. Missiles or mortars? The minor bombshell of Scarlett's evidence, according to the UK media, was his revelation that, contrary to the assumption of the average onlooker, the WMD that to which the 45 intel referred was battlefield munitions, not missiles (my piece of August 27). There is a wordsmithing point that had eluded me at the time: Scarlett says that the report (emphasis mine) related to munitions, This, if read literally, would seem to imply that the JIC had to apply interpretation because the intel did not specify which weapons were involved. So, instead of using its store of knowledge to test the 45 claim, the JIC was actually using its knowledge to fill in the blanks to fit the claim! Was the word munitions the only description of the weapons that the IS gave? Wasn't he asked by OS, Is that missiles or mortars? No doubt, I'm showing my ignorance of the intelligence world by even raising such questions. So be it. Timing, motive, etc It's HMG's case that the decision to produce the dossier sprang from genuine external factors (Blair at 1:20) bringing matters to a head. Such factors would not have escaped the notice of senior members of the UKIC nor of well-placed Iraqis. One does not need to suppose some Le Carré-style operation to suggest that such factors might have affected the appearance of the 45 intel and the way in which it was dealt with. After all, we are not talking about intel like, say, the death of Saddam - which is either true or false. In the case of the 45 claim, not only the interpretation, but the information being interpreted, would necessarily be approximate and to a large extent a matter of judgement. Blair is evidently - even more than other prime ministers - dominant in HMG: there would, I suspect, be a tendency amongst civil servants to anticipate his requirements that, after five years in power, would have almost become a reflex. Ownership and the envelope An attempt is made in HMG evidence generally to conflate two principles on which the dossier was drawn up:
It's vital to recognise that they are fundamentally different. Even with intel on the death of Saddam (a yes-no question), there will be a margin of interpretation. With the 45 claim, all the more so. Under Principle I, the JIC could legitimately pitch its conclusions anywhere within the margin: under Principle II, it's obliged to go hard against strong side of the margin. The fact that this difference does not appear to be appreciated (or, more likely, is being deliberately skated over) is even more worrying than the confusion over the 20-45 minutes in the JIC assessment mentioned above. As I said, all I have at the moment are questions. And there is certainly an element of wishful thinking on my part that there should be a fatal flaw in the HMG on the 45. But, the more I look at the thing, the more I wonder, might not wishful thinking have been at work at the JIC, too?
| Monday, September 01, 2003
Hutton's private visit to Cabinet Office: not BBC censorship, surely?A genuine puzzle here. Having at the back of my mind the notion that Lord Hutton had visited government offices to view secret papers that would not be placed in evidence with the Inquiry, I both sought and found, via Google News, in a BBC piece: The papers also reveal Lord Hutton went in person to the Cabinet Office to read secret Joint Intelligence Committee documents on 15 August... Going to the piece (August 30), the par was nowhere to be seen. An error by Mr Google? No: the cache of the same URL produces the same piece (this time dated August 29) - but with the par as promised. Conspiracy, cock-up or what? The BBC piece is, so far as I can see, the only online source for the August 15 visit. I have yet to go through the new material on the site, so can't identify which of the papers might have revealed the visit. It surely can't be that Hutton's visit was supposed itself to be a secret? Or is the BBC admitting it misinterpreted the papers in the first place? UPDATE That the visit on August 15 took place is attested by one of the pieces of evidence that arrived between August 21 and 26: a note from Julian Miller, John Scarlett's deputy and Head of Assessment at the JIC (45:3). | free website counter 
|
