Failure to communicate

It's plus ca change in the blogosphere. Andrew Sullivan and Leon Wieseltier are feuding. The spark for the latest round was, apparently, a WH Auden quote from 1944. It's a remark about the difficulty of explaining the concept of the Holy Trinity to readers of the New Republic. If you're snowed in, you've time to read the whole dispute. But of course the Irish perspective (which given past practice Sullivan may invoke at some point) is to ask -- the Trinity: what's so difficult about understanding it?*


And yes, we know the shamrock thing is probably a myth. Image from Wikipedia

Carry On Apologizing

An interesting statement via the Saudi Press Agency from veteran Saudi politician Prince Turki Al-Faisal, currently the Chairman of King Faisal Center for Islamic Research and Studies, and once mistakenly reported by an incompetent blogger (this one) as possibly being dead.

Anyway, there's a chain of events that goes at least back to the Israeli invasion of the Gaza strip at the end of 2008. Whatever its military objectives, it has taken Israel a long time to come to the terms with the ensuing diplomatic disasters, not least the breakdown in its relationship with Turkey.

Fast forward now to the media stunt of a few weeks ago where Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon decided to humiliate the Turkish ambassador Ahmet Oguz Celikkol in front of the cameras in a row over a TV show that aired on Turkish television.

Now we're up to the weekend at the annual Munich Security Conference which seems to be a venue for a lot of Republican and quasi-Republican US Senators to feel self-important. Prince Turki takes us forward --

... Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon indirectly pointed to me saying, ' An envoy of a country possessing a lot of oil refused to sit with me in the same session', adding, 'Saudi Arabia with all its wealth has not given a penny to the Palestinian Authority'.

In reply, Prince Turki Al-Faisal said, 'I had objected to sit with him in the same session, not because he is the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel, but because of his rude behavior towards Turkish Ambassador to Israel Ahmet Oguz Celikkol. I had also rejected his claim on my country's support for the Palestinian Authority and reminded him that the Kingdom has provided more than $ 500 million in the last five years to the Palestinian Authority so that it can work. '

'Then Mr. Ayalon had asked me to come to the podium for shaking hands to show that there are no ill-feelings. I had pointed to him to come down from the podium to me. When we stood face to face, he had apologized for what he had said and I replied that I accepted his apology not only for me, but also for the Turkish ambassador,' Prince Turki Al-Faisal disclosed.

'Ayalon was with U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman in the session and at first he objected my refusal to sit down with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, but after hearing my words, he expressed his regret for misunderstanding what I had done and he commended my immediate clarification of the situation,' Prince Turki Al-Faisal said.

A couple of things to note. First, was Ayalon trying to replicate his constructed height advantage over the Turkish ambassador with his supposed conciliatory handshake with Prince Turki? By asking him to come down from the podium, the Prince may have suspected that was the case. And second, what business was the whole thing of Joe Lieberman's? By the end it's not clear who has apologized for what, but Prince Turki sounds like he has extracted an apology on behalf of Turkey and for a couple of incorrect statements by Ayalon -- so was Joe also a party to these apologies? Was Connecticut? Was the USA? [scroll down to the last picture to see Joe's seating arrangements]. There's a point at which having Senators run their own foreign policies might get to be a problem.

UPDATE: Marc Lynch has an unsourced photo of the handshake.

Bush Boom

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has done some significant revisions to its numbers for total non-farm employment (measured from employer payrolls). They provide a sobering bookend to the George Bush presidency.

Total non-farm employment in January 2001 (i.e. when his term began): 132.5 million. In January 2009: 133.5 million. 1 million more jobs in an economy of that size over 8 years is a pathetic performance.

In addition, the BLS has revised downwards the level of employment in March 2009 by 900,000 jobs (the numbers are updated for each March when fuller information comes in). The dominant reason for the revision is that the BLS was overestimating the number of jobs in new businesses during April 2008-March 2009. Thus even at the time that "small businesses!" were being used as an argument against everything from estate taxes to health care reform, their job creation ability had collapsed.

God is polyglot

A cheeky opening from Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero at the US National Prayer Breakfast [delivered in Spanish w/ English translation] --

Y permítanme que les hable en castellano, en la lengua en la que por primera vez se rezó al Dios del Evangelio en esta tierra.

[And with your permission I am going to speak to you in Spanish, in the language that was first used to pray to the God Evangel on this land]

A simple factual claim that will probably have come as news to the Anglophone nativist tendency in the US.

Hamas -- Dubai

An interesting comment from the Dubai Police Chief on the mysterious Hamas operative death in the city --

"Whoever attempts to pass unseen behind our backs and gets involved in things that are considered by the law as crimes should protect their own backs."

"This goes for whoever enters the country, whether they are from Hamas, Mossad or any other intelligence service attempting to pass unseen behind our backs. Those should protect their backs," Tamim said in a call-in on Abu Dhabi TV channel.

The equation of Hamas and Mossad and the implication that Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh might himself have been up to no good in Dubai should be noted. This one is going to be messy.

Those weapons that they say don't have

An interesting geopolitical dance from neocon John Bolton --

“Providing additional equipment and capabilities will help protect the Arab states of the Gulf region against possible provocations or retaliation [from Iran], and also enhance the security of deployed American forces in the region.” The new equipment, he adds, “should, of course, be consistent with maintaining Israel’s qualitative edge in the region, which U.S. administrations have supported for decades on a bipartisan basis.”

i.e. the goal of proving weapons to the Gulf countries as a defence against Iran needs to be constrained by the need not to give them such good stuff that Israel's unmentionable stash wouldn't be as effective any more.

A nice illustration of the fact that a lot of the yelling and screaming about Iran is not really about Iran, per se. It's about a desire to maintain a particular distribution of power in the Middle East.

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose

As fitting an epilogue to the Celtic Tiger as any, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who ran the economy and the Northern Ireland peace process into the ground and collected all the plaudits in the world while doing it, being a good Irishman at his local Fagan's, one of just 9 pubs in Britain and Ireland to get the exclusive Sky 3D view of Arsenal vs Man Utd. Maybe Bertie could use the cool specs as a disguise when he moves out of the safe company of his Murdoch Inc. friends.

UPDATE: Nice choice of words from the Indo story --

The Drumcondra pub, along with eight other British bars

Indeed.

Photograph: Cyril Byrne, Irish Times.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

Ireland is the 5th most free economy in the world, and the freest outside the Asia-Pacific region.

So says the Heritage Foundation.

Apparently we're less free than last year due mainly to the budget deficit and the sorry state of the banking system. We're also free because of the low levels of corruption. In particular,

the police investigate allegations of corruption.

One wonders what all that Tribunal business is about then. But Heritage must know, right?

The latest conservative cause: French banks

As Josh Marshall points out, Barack Obama clearly hit a conservative nerve with his claim in last night's State of the Union speech that as a result of a recent Supreme Court decision, foreign corporations can spend unlimited amounts on US candidate elections. A furious amount of spinning has taken place on The Corner today (Bradley Smith, Shannen Coffin), with apparent citing of chapter & verse (how many lawyers work at that place?) arguing that it's just not true.

But when you wade through the arguments and citations, the counterarguments turn out to rest on a fiction that a furrin corporation with a US subsidiary would never ever allow its furrin management to have political conversations with the US managers of its subsidiary and would never transfer money to the US subsidiary with the expressed purpose of it being a political donation. No doubt as we speak there are hundreds of envelopes stuffed full of euros and marked "bring on next US trip for November election" being discarded.

So let's be concrete and posit the following scenario. Suppose that Tim Geithner resigns as US Treasury Secretary and decides to run for Senator from New York in November. Suppose that French bank Société Générale, eternally grateful for the massive backdoor bailout via AIG that came from the New York Fed when Geithner headed it, decides to spend millions of dollars on getting Geithner elected. Note: SocGen has US subsidiaries so all the support will be easily originated from US corporations managed by US residents.

Would this be allowed in the wake of the Supreme Court decision?

Yes it would.

Bad ratings

One striking thing about US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's Congressional testimony yesterday on the Goldman Sachs AIG bailout is the role it assigns to credit ratings in driving the various bailout decisions e.g. --

Once a company refuses to meet its full obligations to a customer, other customers will quickly find other places to do business. If we had sought to force counterparties to accept less than they were legally entitled to, market participants would have lost confidence in AIG and the ratings agencies would have downgraded AIG again. This could have led to the company's collapse, threatened our efforts to rebuild confidence in the financial system, and meant a deeper recession, more financial turmoil, and a much higher cost for American taxpayers.

This suggests that another option for saving AIG was available -- to declare the link to credit ratings in any of its contracts null and void while otherwise committing to honouring its contracts in full. It was bizarre that the same agencies who rated any old shite AAA during the bubble still had such weight as the crash unfolded. And there's another issue. As the Wall Street Journal points out, it's a tad bizarre that the ratings agencies were downgrading AIG at this stage -- since AIG was already 80% owned by the US government as a result of the initial bailout. So why wasn't it rated like the US government i.e. AAA?

So it just doesn't add up. We're not yet at Dubai levels, where the government decides to tell one particular ratings agency to F*CK OFF. But in September 2008, it might not have been a bad idea.

Tabloid in "made-up story" shock

Statement from the Government of Dubai --

The Government of Dubai Media Office has denied a British newspaper's claim that Sheikh Mohammed had made an offer to the designer Victoria Beckham to help design a luxury hotel in Dubai.

The Office said the report carried by the 'The Daily Mirror' yesterday, claiming that Sheikh Mohammed personally wrote to ask Beckham on to the project was baseless.

The Managing Director of the media Office Ahmed Abdullah Al Sheikh, urged the media to validate and ensure accuracy of news before publishing and to avoid untrue and misleading stories in order not to face legal action.

Hope springs eternal.

The Heathrow liquid bomb plot, again

Marc Thiessen, from his Waterboarding Works book --

In one of these reports, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [KSM] describes in detail the revisions he made to his failed 1994–1995 plan known as the “Bojinka plot”— formulated with his nephew Ramzi Yousef—to blow up a dozen airplanes carrying some 4,000 passengers over the Pacific Ocean. Years later, an observant CIA officer notices that the activities of a cell being followed by British authorities appears to match KSM’s description of his plans for a Bojinka-style attack. He shares this information with British authorities. At first they are skeptical, but soon they acknowledge that this is in fact what the cell is planning. Intelligence from terrorists at Guantanamo Bay provides further insight into the cell’s plans for the use of liquid explosives.

In an operation that involves unprecedented intelligence cooperation between our countries, British officials proceed to unravel the plot. On the night of August 9, 2006—just over a month before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—they launch a series of raids in a northeast London suburb that lead to the arrest of two dozen al Qaeda terrorist suspects.

This is a very different chain of events from the conventional narrative for the plot, in which the suspect group was under surveillance for some time but the actual breakup of the plot occurred in a rush in August 2006, with multiple news accounts indicating that it was Dick Cheney's demand for an early arrest in Pakistan which was the precipitating factor, not the imminence of any plot. And two people are not mentioned in Thiessen's account -- Richard Reid, who was doing on-board bomb making in December 2001 and yet sailed past the Bush-era enemy combatant system, and Rashid Rauf, the supposed mastermind of the Heathrow plot who, to this day, has never been found.

Thiessen's book, Courting Disaster, is going to need intensive triangulation against other sources, because as of now its claim is essentially that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, post-waterboarding, can be linked to every plot. Except Richard Reid.

Previous Boston upsets on which history's verdict is different

Scott Brown -- the 2004 Manny Ramirez of our time?

For an intelligent take on how the Democrats are still living with the consequences of being too clever by half in 2004, Shannen Coffin has the goods. Here's the background.

Insert joke here

Emergency water distribution in Ireland.

Photo: Matt Kavanagh/Irish Times

Globalization at exp(x)

Gregg Easterbrook in his book Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed --

Even taking into account the post-2008 slowdown, worldwide economic production has risen at a pace that is difficult to believe. In the last thirty years, China's gross domestic product rose from around $500 billion to $2.7 trillion-that is to say, five times as much new economic production in the last thirty years as all forms of economic production just a generation ago. China is not some spectacular exception to a rule; rather, it is the leading indicator of an extraordinary economic surge across most, although of course not all, of the globe. Costa Rica, for example, increased its economic production from $8 billion in 1977 to $30 billion in 2008-more than three times as much new economic activity in the last three decades as total economic activity a generation ago.

Interesting fact:

GDP of Sweden, 1900 -- 2.245 billion Kroner
GDP of Sweden, 1930 -- 9.271 billion Kroner

In other words, by 1930, Swedish GDP had changed by more than 3 times as much as its initial level. Good times!

And note: we didn't pick Sweden because for being exceptional. It's a rich country today so of course it's exceptional. But it's had good data for a long time, which is what one needs to discuss any claim relying on the current period being exceptional for some new group of countries.

Source: Historical National Accounts of Sweden, series GDP by expenditure at purchasers prices

As things got messy

Alistair Campbell didn't concede a whole lot in his Iraq War Inquiry testimony today. But there were a few interesting points of historical perspective nonetheless. The committee members were taking him through the deteriorating conviction that WMDs would be found in Iraq and the related topic of UK-US tensions on how the Iraq war strategy should be communicated.

Campbell mentioned in particular a row behind the scenes at the Hillsborough (County Down) summit between George Bush and Tony Blair on April 7-8 2003 (in which Bertie Ahern was an occasional participant). Condi Rice, seen here with Jack Straw and (we think) James Hamilton, the 1st Governor of Northern Ireland: It became clear to the UK side that Condi was pushing an agenda of marginalizing the role of the UN in post-Saddam Iraq, whereas the UK side was keen for both legal and practical reasons that they should be involved. Campbell claimed that Blair intervened to get the UN role upgraded to "vital" but the assembled hacks smelled a rat and repeatedly pressed what exactly this meant --

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes, I mean, when we say vital role for the United Nations, we mean vital role for the United Nations in all aspects of the issue -- whether it be humanitarian aid, or whether it be helping to stand up an interim authority. The Iraqi people will decide who's on the Iraqi -- the interim authority. The interim authority is a transition quasi-government until the real government shows up; until the conditions are right for the people to elect their own leadership. And the United Nations will have a vital role.

When we say vital role, that's precisely what we mean -- that they will be involved, along with the coalition, in helping to stand up an interim authority. But the Iraqi people are responsible for who's on that authority. And Tony can describe what's happening in Basra. He might describe some of the meetings that are taking place as leadership begins to emerge.

It is a -- it is a cynical world that says it's impossible for the Iraqis to run themselves. It is a cynical world which condemns Iraq to failure. We refuse to accept that. We believe that the Iraqi people are capable, talented, and will be successful in running their own government.

This of course set the stage for the disastrous decision-making that was soon to follow -- the failure to maintain law and order (a legal obligation of the occupying powers of which Blair was clearly aware), the disbandment of the Iraqi army, and the breezy assurances that the emerging Mehdi army would be easily seen off.

George also rallied the Irish peace process --

There is such hope here in Northern Ireland that the past can be broken. And the Prime Minister is right when he says that when the peace process is successful here, it will send a really important signal to other parts of the world. It will confirm the fact that people who have a vision for peace can see that vision become a reality.

Unfortunately, for all of this era's obsessions with "signals", recent events in Northern Ireland show how any signal is highly likely to be obscured by local noise. Hopefully no one abroad is looking to Ireland for good signals at the moment.

King Billy wanted low taxes and less regulation

Reporting on events in Ulster (sic), from the New York Times --

But when Mr. Paisley resigned after a year at the age of 81 and handed his job to Mr. Robinson, the mood deteriorated, with Mr. Robinson increasingly beleaguered by right-wingers within the loyalist movement who see the power-sharing deal as a betrayal, and Mr. McGuinness under pressure from the rising threat of dissident republicans.

One of these things is not like the other

Charles Krauthammer on Fox News, on U.S. intervention in Afghanistan --

It is not a place we want to go and invade. ... It is a wild place. ... It's never had a strong central government. It's got secessionist in the north, Tajiks in the west who are Iranians clients. It is so complicated it's almost incomprehensible.

All we can do is have our weaponry in place, like the Predators, gather intelligence, give intelligence, and work with the unreliable central government. It is not a place where you want to start a war.

But remember, the Saudis and Pakistanis are in that area and they are on our side. I would rather have the locals involved in the war than [have] the direct involvement of the United States.

We cheated. It's Krauthammer on US intervention in Yemen, arguing for a minimal approach. We've changed some of the location references but not the spirit of his argument.

But then the question is why does he not apply the same logic to Afghanistan. Of course this itself suggests a counterargument in that he is describing the 1980s-90s approach to Afghanistan -- get the Saudis and Pakistanis to manage the fighting and stay on the side watching.

That worked out real well.

So there is no easy solution to Yemen. But the above suggests that making policy pronouncements based on talking point descriptions of countries -- which is all he appears to have for Yemen -- is not very helpful, since the talking points will be too sparse to distinguish cases from each other.

UPDATE: More from Matthew Yglesias, although to be fair, his apparent prescription of leaving these trouble spots to their fate didn't work out so well in post-Soviet Afghanistan either.

God (R-Heaven)

It used to be that the religious cudgels used against non-Republican Catholics in elected office in the USA were fairly clear. They had to be demonstrably against abortion and various types of contraception. But did you know that they have to be in favour of waterboarding? That's what former George Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen says --

It is also worth noting that a terrorist like KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] — who has killed thousands and has set in motion plans to kill thousands more — remains an unjust aggressor even while in custody. By withholding information about imminent attacks, he holds the power to kill. According to the Catholic Catechism, those in power have a moral obligation to render an unjust aggressor unable to cause harm.

It's really remarkable the number of universal principles that can be hitched to KSM's confession to 31 different plots. And there's no practical limiting logic. Conventional techniques could have gotten the suspect to admit to so many plots, but there could always be another one. Time to take it up a notch. And the Vatican says it's OK. Or at least someone who worked for George Bush says they do.

Incidentally, since the future KSM plots to which Thiessen refers must include the West Coast plot, he needs to explain why it was not a sin for the Bushies not to have waterboarded Richard Reid, who had apparent connections to this plot nearly 2 years before it was broken up.

The shoe bomber and the undies bomber

Josh Marshall has been working on the interesting contrast between the legal and political handling of Richard Reid and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (Marshall vs Thiessen). Both are being treated identically from a legal perspective (in regular criminal proceedings), but Republicans are now demanding enemy combatant status for the latter. Here's some more opinion of the Reid case when the Bushies were still in charge. First, then press secretary Ari Fleischer in February 2003 --

Q Ari, with the threat level now at orange, what does that mean for us ordinary citizens? How are we to be protected or how can we protect ourselves against chemical, biological attacks?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, I think Secretary Ridge addressed this in his remarks, and General Ashcroft did, as well. I provided you the information about what this means to the government, what the government would be doing. As you've heard, everybody in our society can play a role in being vigilant and that's what has been called for.

Now, I recognize that it can sometimes be a nebulous phrase, but nevertheless, everybody -- Richard Reid is the perfect example of where vigilance stopped an attack that could have been a devastating one.

And the job of the average citizen is to continue to be vigilant, while knowing that the agencies of the government that the taxpayers pay for, at the federal level, the state level and the local level, will be kicking it into higher gear to provide greater protections, based on the new warning.

If the hapless Janet Napolitano had just used the "vigilance" line inside of the infamous words about the system working, she'd be on more solid ground.

More substantively, here's Bush's counterterror czar and now omnipresent terror pundit Fran Townsend in February 2006 explaining the so-called Library Tower/"West Coast" plot --

Khalid Shaykh Muhammad was the individual who led this effort. He initiated the planning for the West Coast plot after September 11th, in October of 2001. KSM, working with Hambali in Asia, recruited the members of the cell. There was a total of four members of the cell. When they -- KSM, himself, trained the leader of the cell in late 2001 or early 2002 in the shoe bomb technique. You all will recall that there was the arrest of the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, in December of 2001, and he was instructing the cell leader on the use of the same technique.

After the cell -- the additional members of the cell, in addition to the leader, were recruited, they all went -- the cell leader and the three other operatives went to Afghanistan where they met with bin Laden and swore biat -- that is an oath of loyalty to him -- before returning to Asia, where they continued to work under Hambali.

The cell leader was arrested in February of 2002, and as we begin -- at that point, the other members of the cell believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward. You'll recall that KSM was then arrested in April of 2003 -- or was it March -- I'm sorry, March of 2003.

So Richard Reid, she says, used a shoe bomb technique that was developed by KSM in late 2001 (it's item 4 in his 31 admitted plots), was almost immediately in US custody, but KSM wasn't tracked down till 2003? What were they doing with Reid in the intervening period?

Townsend was asked about the Reid connection --

Q Is there any connection between Richard Reid and this plot, or did they get the idea from Richard Reid? What came first?

MS. TOWNSEND: It's not clear what came first. It was clearly the same technique that they were intending to use, the shoe bomb. More than that, we don't have the intelligence to tell us whether the cells -- that is, Richard Reid and this cell -- knew each other or had contact with one another. We just don't know that.

Yet earlier she had said that the shoe bomb technique came from KSM. She seems pretty relaxed about a huge potential lead via Reid to KSM having being let go cold. And the breaking up of the West Coast plot via enhanced interrogation techniques and not a Richard Reid connection is critical to Marc Thiessen's defence of the Bush administration, soon to be collected in his forthcoming book.

Was Reid ever asked anything?

It must be the cannon

Although some defenders of the securocrats are claiming that the case of the Detroit plane bomber indicates that the problem is too much information, we now know that in addition to the critical information that the US government had on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and failed to piece together, there was one detail that should have clinched it --

As for off-campus activities, Mr. Rafiq said he liked to meet Mr. Abdulmutallab for Friday evening prayers at the Islamic Society’s campus prayer room, then walk to a nearby chicken-and-chips shop where they would eat and talk about their common enthusiasm for the Arsenal soccer club as well as Islamic Society business.

Who else was an Arsenal fan? Osama bin Laden. Case closed.

Arabia Felix

Frances Fragos Townsend appears frequently on CNN as a terrorism expert and has recently written in the Washington Post of the need for the US to issue an ultimatum to Yemen that sounded like very much like a threat of an invasion. Since the Detroit bomber trail leads to Yemen, the issue of how terrorism in Yemen got energized is going to be much discussed.

The fact that the backbone of al-Qaeda in Yemen comes from Guantanamo detainees released to Saudi Arabia under George Bush -- for whom she worked as counter-terrorism coordinator -- will certainly be relevant and is something that can be brought up when she is discussing terrorism and Yemen now.

But there's another issue. On 26 May 2009, she met with Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh, as shown above. For a foreign private citizen to get a meeting with the King is not easy. One hopes that she is not pulling punches or tailoring messages so as not to interfere with any ongoing relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Terrorism's black swans

Matthew Yglesias thinks the problem revealed by the Detroit plane bomber is Too Much Information --

Out of the six billion people on the planet only a numerically insignificant fraction are actually dangerous terrorists. Even if you want to restrict your view to one billion Muslims, the math is the same. Consequently, tips, leads and the like are overwhelmingly going to be pointing to innocent people. You end up with a system that’s overwhelmed and paralyzed. If there were hundreds of thousands of al-Qaeda operatives trying to board planes every year, we’d catch lots of them. But we’re essentially looking for needles in haystacks.

OK, but of the 6 billion people on the planet, how many were 23 year old single men who paid for their ticket in cash, had no checked bags, had gotten a call to a US Embassy saying that they were bad news, had recently been denied a visa to the UK, and as a result of the Embassy tip, were already in one of the government's surveillance databases? And that's before we see all the recent passport stamps.

That's a pretty big needle in a pretty small haystack. The securocrats had the right amount of information. They didn't use it.

UPDATE: His visa for Yemen was apparently in the same passport as his US visa. Who looked at his passport when his journey to Detroit began?

FINAL UPDATE: The "too much information" talking point is buried -- by Barack Obama --

We've achieved much since 9/11 in terms of collecting information that relates to terrorists and potential terrorist attacks. But it's becoming clear that the system that has been in place for years now is not sufficiently up to date to take full advantage of the information we collect and the knowledge we have.

The dots are global

Among the things highlighted by the Nigerian underpants bomber case is that the bits of information that could have been collated to construct a red flag were in different countries, and he complicated it further through his route to the USA. For example, the fact of his UK visa refusal apparently never entered into the calculation about whether he could get on a plane to Detroit. And we still don't know what Saudi Arabia and Yemen know about his recent travels or who else they told. But is the world ready for the sharing of such administrative information on a large scale? With the alternative being an increasingly absurd system on checks for all passengers which will quitely build support for profiling, it will have to be considered.

UPDATE: And we reinstate our campaign to apply the term securocrats to the people in charge who believe that we are just one more restriction on passenger behaviour away from complete airline security.

Thou rod of George's stem

It must be what passes for wit on the right on these days, but the headline on George Bush loyalist William McGurn's anti-healthcare op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, which is ostensibly about Barack Obama and the politics of it all, is "O Come O Come, Emanuel" -- and thus an Advent hymn aimed at Obama's Jewish chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. You go to war with the digs that you have, not the ones that you'd want, apparently.

They haven't forgotten their project

John Hannah, who ran Dick Cheney's national security operation --

With a very real prospect in the not-too-distant future of rivaling Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, Iraq has the potential to one day emerge as the economic and military powerhouse of the Arab Middle East — and, if we play our cards right, a central pillar in America’s strategy to fight and win the long war against violent Islamist extremism. In short, this is a relationship very much worth investing in — even as America’s combat presence declines.

It sounds so simple. What could possibly go wrong? It's not like this is an ambitious venture like expanding healthcare access, after all.

An Army of Dawoods

Inevitably, the Wall Street Journal story about Iraqi insurgents intercepting the video feed from Predator drones has attracted much attention. One quibble. Many have followed the WSJ's line that it was done with "$26 off-the-shelf software" i.e. Skygrabber. It's not that simple. The Predator sends its feed to a satellite which then transmits it to a ground station. So you also need a dish, the satellite positioning, and frequency. It's a bit more complicated than just downloading Skygrabber and watching it all on TV.

But anyway, Max Boot of the Center for Foreign Relations blogs for Commentary about it --

This is part of a historical process that I analyzed in my book, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today:

"It is a truism that new technology, if it proves effective, tends to disseminate quickly…. The process of technological dissemination and nullification has speeded up since the rise in the mid-nineteenth century of such major arms manufacturers as Krupp, Winchester, and Armstrong, which were happy to sell to just about anyone…. Pervasive today are firms that sell dual-use devices such as computers, night-vision goggles, and GPS trackers which can have both military and civil applications. Thanks to their success, may of America’s key Information Age advantages are rapidly passing into the hands of friends and foes alike."

The U.S. has certainly sprinted to a lead in utilizing Information Age technology for military (as well as civil) purposes. But there is no room for complacency. Every new weapons system or surveillance platform we introduce only heightens our reliance on digital networks that are in turn very vulnerable to disruption. Wars of the future will have an important cyber aspect and it will be a major challenge for the Industrial Age bureaucracy known as the Department of Defense to adjust. The latest news about the hacking of the Predator feeds shows just how urgent is our need to stay ahead of our foes on these virtual battlefields.

Is that what his book actually said? His own description of it 3 years ago is a tad different --

Because creativity is so unpredictable, no country can count on making all, or even most, major scientific and technological breakthroughs.

Moreover, few if any technologies, much less scientific concepts, will remain the property of one country for long. France matched the Prussian needle gun less than four years after the 1866 Battle of Königgrätz; Germany matched the British Dreadnought three years after its unveiling in 1906; the USSR matched the U.S. atomic bomb four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a truism that new technology, if it proves effective, tends to disseminate quickly. Today, key American inventions such as computers, night-vision goggles, and GPS trackers are rapidly passing into the hands of friends and foes alike.

The way to gain a military advantage, therefore, is not necessarily to be the first to produce a new tool or weapon. It is to figure out better than anyone else how to utilize a widely available tool or weapon.

That's much more about the futility of believing that there's some way of "staying ahead" of the bad guys -- a recipe for huge defence spending -- and concentrating on getting the basics of existing systems right. Incidentally, Boot doesn't intend it this way, but his description of the decentralized and unpredictable nature of the innovative process and how governments aren't good at it is an oblique tribute to these insurgents. What they did was a tad clever. Which raises the more general point that just as the world's slickest technology might have its limitations against them, so might the world's most brilliant Powerpoint war strategy.

"I've seen worse in Belfast on a Friday night"

Truly classic live TV news as Phelim McAleer (husband of Ann McElhinney) in a polar bear suit in Copenhagen is interviewed by Fox News Neil Cavuto and the hecklers get more hostile.

The talking point bust

It's the claim that keeps popping up in English newspapers and keeps being recycled by US conservatives. Here's the Telegraph's Con Coughlin in today's Wall Street Journal --

Soon after his [Obama's] inauguration, he sent back to the U.K. a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been loaned to President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. The sculpture had enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office.

Above, George W. Bush accepting the bust on July 16, 2001. Perhaps the spirit of Winston was trying to warn about an imminent attack but was being ignored.

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars

One of the mysteries with these politicians-on-the-front visits, as with Gordon Brown in Afghanistan, is why they insist on wearing the armour with a suit.

But the Little Heathrow thing is funny. One assumes that by virtue of having fewer terminals, the transfers are easier than at its namesake.

AP Photo/Matt Cardy, Pool