Gadaffi your horse, and drink your milk

Can anyone tell me what we are still doing meddling in Libya?

Bin Laden Bin In?

Well said, Rowan Williams, for speaking out on Osama Bin Laden. No doubt you will receive reams of hate mail from the mad colonels in Gloucestershire who read the Daily Telegraph religiously over their cornflakes, but you were quite right.

Everybody seems to be missing the point that the issue here is about the principle of justice. What makes us the “good guys” or is supposed to, is that we believe in this ideal. In any case, I doubt personally that Bin Laden was any more “responsible” for the 9/11 attacks than the Lockerbie bomber was responsible for downing flight 103, but his convenient demise will prevent a lot of awkward questions for the US administration that might otherwise have emerged at any form of trial.

When you get to the stage (which I fear we have now reached) when international justice is whatever the current US President says it is, and is enforced at the point of a missile or bullet, by special forces who act as judge, jury and executioner, then any pretence we had to be more “civilised” than Bin Laden and his cronies vanishes in the wind. We are, as George Bush said (out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…) back in the days of the Wild West.

And if, as some have claimed, it was an act of war, legally I am afraid they are mistaken. Legally, you cannot have a war on a concept and anyway, if it was a state of war, then presumably the Geneva convention applies, and always applied, to Guantanamo Bay?

Gadaffi! Duck!

Colonel Gadaffi (is it Gadaffi or Gaddafi? It looks wrong both ways) may not be clinically insane, as some cohorts of our media wish to portray him, but I wouldn't be surprised if, at times, he didn't feel more than a tad schizophrenic, particularly on the subject of whether or not he is a legitimate target for the Western military air strikes that are currently pounding Libya. The answer seems to change day by day, and to depend on who it is you are talking to. Sometimes, it changes by the hour.

The UN resolution which is sort of "authorising" all of this activity, as I understand it, speaks merely of safeguarding innocent civilians and ensuring that the cease fire is enforced, things like that. Say what you will, but it can't be denied that, by giving air support to the anti-Gadaffi faction, the West is currently, if anything, prolonging he conflict, rather than seeking to curtail itand bring it to a swift conclusion. And presumably the argument which links regime change to the safeguarding of civilian lives rests on the rather shaky premise that, without a strong dictator at the helm, Libya won't degenerate into a completely shambolic, anarchic mess, post-conflict, with factions fighting proxy wars and Al Quaida using it as a training ground, in exactly the same way as Iraq did after the fall of Saddam Husseuin. We know very little about these people we are helping, but seeing one of them on the news miming the act of putting a pistol to Gadaffi's head doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that they will be rivalling the ancient Athenians as a paragon of democracy any time soon. In these types of circumstances, the lives of innocent civilians are probably just as much at risk, if not more, as they would be if Gadaffi stayed on. All that is different is which set of innocent civilians gets fed through the shredder.

Have we learnt absolutely nothing since 2002?

Doing a Dubya on Libya

So, we are bombing Libya. As I wake up on this cool, grey, Sunday morning in March, listening to the birds tweeting and some distant church bells pealing over rural England, British service personnel, some of whom probably have a P45 from the government waiting in the post for them at home, are putting their lives at risk once again in the cause of naked political horse-trading and the sort of selective American foreign policy we thought we’d seen the back of when Dubya finally donned his spurs and stetson and rode off into the sunset.

My first thought, on hearing we would be sending our warplanes was “what warplanes?” We’ve got rid of the Harriers and we’ve mothballed so many Tornados, we’ve watched the Nimrods being cut up on the ground, on prime-time TV, I wouldn’t be surprised if all we had left to send was a couple of Tiger Moths, dropping hand grenades on elastic so we could get the bits back to use again! Still, at least with the RAF involved, you know that the bombs, such as they are, will hit their targets, whereas the USAF counts it a success if they can just manage to hit Libya.

Actually, before proceeding to the rights and wrongs of this situation, it shows up once again the criminal folly of the scale of the defence cuts imposed by the Tories. No aircraft carrier, no Harrier jets, no Nimrods, and now that the Tornados from Leuchars are presumably based temporarily in Malta or Cyprus or Southern France somewhere, nobody guarding the back door here, unless they’ve managed to rustle up an old Shackleton or an Avro Anson to stooge up and down along the coast off Skegness and count in the “bogeys”.

Why are we bombing Libya? If you believe the likes of David Cameron, it’s to protect the lives of innocent civilians. These would, of course, be the same innocent civilians who were being killed last week when we couldn’t give a stuff and were busy sending black helicopters in the middle of the night carrying “diplomats” to help resolve the situation.

It’s not exactly bothered us before; when Saddam Hussein was also killing his own civilians (much more terribly and efficiently that Gadaffi) using weapons which we in the west and other opportunist nations had sold him, (like we did to Gadaffi) we turned a blind eye then, because he was our ally, as Gadaffi was, briefly, in between two periods of being our enemy. And Cameron’s justification that we had to wait until it was legal rings very hollow with me, considering it didn’t bother Blair and we had no compunction in the past in acting illegally, on a lot flimsier pretext when it came to saving innocent civilians, in Iraq. If the UN hadn’t voted to allow this action, would that have stopped us, with oil at stake? And if we are that bothered about saving the lives of innocent arabs, what about Bahrain, inviting in the forces of a neighbouring dictatorship to suppress its own revolt on the streets?

No, I am afraid what is happening in Libya is that old favourite dish, Realpolitik, on the menu again, served up this time with a stinking garnish of hypocrisy. We ignored (by we, I mean Europe and Obama) the uprising in Egypt, because it became obvious that the only “freedom” the protestors in Tahrir Square were gaining was the freedom to get rid of one dictator and be ruled by the army instead. So they were unlikely to do anything to destabilise the region, because they were not exactly Jihadists to start with. Plus, Egypt has lots of sand, camels, pyramids, tourists and potatoes, but not that much oil, in comparative terms. Plus, once the army was in charge, it opened up another sales opportunity for selling them weapons! Kerching! We ignored the rising in Bahrain, because the US Fleet is quartered there, and therefore, naturally, Obama would prefer the status quo. We ignored Saudi Arabia’s rumblings for the same sorts of reasons.

What it boils down to is that if you are an innocent citizen in a country ruled by a megalomaniac with no oil and no strategic importance to the USA, bad luck, old chap.

We actually ignored the Libyan situation for long enough, because we thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the rebels would do “our” job for us and get rid of our former enemy then ally now enemy again, Colonel Gadaffi. But the rebels couldn’t cut it, and they started to lose. Realising that Gadaffi wouldn’t then be that kindly disposed in future to those who supported the uprising against him, Europe and Obama, given the crucial importance of Libyan oil, have painted themselves into a corner, and have now no option but to step in and ensure the rebellion succeeds, having realised belatedly that they had backed the wrong horse and it was on a one-way trip to the glue factory. Still, at least they can dress it up with high flown rhetoric, bollocks and bluster, and try and disguise what it is that British service men and women will potentially die for, when the body bags start trundling through “Royal” Wootton Bassett.

I have no brief for Gadaffi, and I never expected David Cameron to be honest about anything, not even for a nano-second. I had slightly higher expectations of Obama, but it turns out he’s just like all the others, only slightly more inept. More fool me, for harbouring a vestige of political idealism and investing it in a cracked vessel.

But I do want to record that this morning, as our planes are in the air, I am sad, disappointed, and just a tad furious at the way in which once again we are not being told the real reasons behind our colonial adventurism, and exactly what it is our people are, potentially, being asked to die for.

Not in my name.

When is a secret not a secret?

There has been a spate recently of rich, famous, influential and politically powerful people being shown up as hypocrites and self-aggrandising idiots, by the likes of the undercover reporters of The Daily Telegraph, and Wikileaks.

The Telegraph upset Vince Cable, by pretending to be constituents and encouraging him to make grandstanding comments about being “at war” with Rupert Murdoch, which ultimately cost him a chunk of his job. And now he is bleating about complaining to the Press Complaints Commission. While I have absolutely no desire to see Rupert Murdoch's empire grow and prosper, the trick is, dear Vince, if you don’t want to be caught out saying one thing in private and something different in public, then don’t have a hypocritical two-faced stance where your beliefs and actions differ according to who it is you think you are talking to. Shimples, as any Meerkat would tell you.

Or to put it another way, if you are so embarrassed that your party is propping up the Tories as they continue in their revenge rape of the country, then don’t pretend apologetically to your constituents that you are at war with them – go to war with them, and vote with your feet. Pull out. As Si Kahn says, it’s not the fights you dreamed of, it’s those you really fought.

Wikileaks has done a similar thing to the Daily Telegraph, but on a much bigger scale of course. They have shown up almost every US diplomat as being a lying conniving two-faced shyster. Many of us already suspected this was the case, of course, but it’s good to have it confirmed at source.

This is why the CIA are so keen to lean on Norway – and indeed to lean on our own legal system – to make it difficult for Julian Assange. Whether or not he is guilty of the crimes for which he is currently going through the legal system, you can bet your sweet palookah that the US would dearly love to see him extradited, wearing a hood and orange overalls, and chained to a latrine in Guantanamo. To them, and to the UK politicians who bleat on about the necessity of being able to keep certain things secret from us, the great unwashed, I have really only one thing to say.

It is the same thing that you said to us, every time a piece of anti-libertarian legislation chipped away yet another fragment of our precious civil liberties.

“If you have got nothing to hide, you have got nothing to fear”.

Hello, boot, may I introduce you to the other foot?

Foggy Compo, Clegg.

There has been a predictable outcry by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Conrad Blackshirts about the proposal to settle claims for compensation out of court with the victims of Guantanamo Bay.

What these people fail to grasp is that if someone is wrongly imprisoned, probably illegally, and tortured to boot, and our government is responsible, then it's only right that the injustice should be compensated. It's what makes us the good guys. Still. just.

If we were really interested in being the good guys of course, instead of sinking to the same level as Al Qaida in the first place, seizing people, sandbagging them, holding them against their will and applying mental and physical pain, we wouldn't have done it, but at that time we were wedged so far up George Bush's chuff we couldn't see daylight.

I wonder if there would be as much fuss if the people illegally detained and tortured were called "George", "Henry" and "Cyril" instead of Mohammed. I suspect not. Brown people getting compensation of any kind, even compensation to which they are legally entitled and which will presumably save the taxpayer money if it is an out-of-court settlement, always gets the bigots frothing.

People who argue against this proposal often link the issue of torturing detainees with the 7/7 bombings. Errr. Am I missing something here? What does 9/11 and 7/7 have to do with Guantanamo Bay, except that we colluded with the US in a like for like response that dragged us down to the same level as the bombers?

Are they claiming that in some way 7/7 was caused by Guantanamo detainees? I thought it was three guys from Leeds and one from Reading. I am not following the process by which they are linking the two. Or are they claiming that, if only someone had turned up the current a bit on someone's ghoulies out in Guantanamo, this would somehow have magically prevented 7/7 taking place?

Sadly, it is excrescences like Guantanamo that CAUSE radical idiots to get more and more radicalised, until they start strapping bombs to themselves, and by following George Bush down the primrose path to dalliance, we played right into their hands. We're lucky that we didn't have more than one 7/7. We may well yet have further cause to regret it.

Orwell, of course, in between wishing he could fly, way up in the sky, once famously said that all that keeps us free is that rough men stand ready in the night to do harm, and this is the crux of the question. There ARE people out to destroy our way of life. I would contend, however, that helping George Bush in his ill-starred "War on Terror", with things such as Guantanamo, has ADDED to their numbers, considerably, rather than deterred them.

Also, I question the worth of any of the intelligence gathered by means of torture. If you turn the current up far enough, your victim will tell you whatever you want to hear. It would be instructive to know really how many threats have been neutralised since 2001 by this method of intelligence alone.

I suspect the answer would be very few, because the agencies concerned probably rely on a patchwork of intelligence from different sources, of which torture is only one, which again leads me to question its worth, compared to the problems it causes us by giving radical idiots something to latch onto and radicalise other idiots.

The intelligence agencies are unlikely to tell us the truth, however, because their interest is in making it seem as if there are hundreds of plots every day, which are only averted by shipping people off to CIA deniable "black" prisons. That's how they keep us cowed, and get us to accept the loss of more and more of our own civil liberties to anti-terror legislation.

By the way, just because I am opposed to us lowering ourselves to the depths of torture, doesn't mean I am automatically against the use of lethal force against (for instance) an invading force in a declared, legal war. If Al Qaida were massing at Dunkerque in their invasion barges, I would be reporting for duty on the White Cliffs of Dover, but the War on Terror is a different matter: an undeclared dirty war on a concept.

People also argue that we are now at war against the whole Third World, and this requires desperate measures.

I think that "the third world" as a whole is much more occupied with scrabbling for food in the dust and trying to prevent their children dying of malaria every 40 seconds than mounting a sustained attack on the west. What you are talking about is one convoluted strain of Islam, espoused by a radical bunch of beardyweirdies originally in Saudi Arabia, latterly living in caves in Tora Bora, that objected to the US bases in their Holy Land, and to US policy in Israel. I agree, though, that since 2001, the west in general and the US in particular, seem hell-bent on increasing the number of people who hate us as quickly as possible

And anyone who thinks torture (or collusion with torture) isn't still going on under a ConLibdimwit government is living in cloud cuckoo land.

Oh Say Does That Star Spangled Banner Still Rave

I have to admit, I may have been a chump for giving Obama the benefit of the doubt. I ought to have known that history teaches us that the appearance of a charismatic, young, new broom who promises to sweep clean and transmogrify everything for the better, is inevitably followed by disappointment. God knows, if we wanted an example of the syndrome in this country in recent years, we have only to look at Blair.

But I didn’t expect him to go quite so wrong, quite so early. I refer of course to the totally hypocritical hissy-fit which the US administration has thrown over the release of the Lockerbie suspect.

Personally, I think it’s very decent of the Libyans to let us have an innocent guy to lock up and save people having to ask awkward questions about who really dunnit, but then no doubt all sorts of side deals went down at the time and they were richly recompensed, one way or another.

Anyway, Obama knows much better than I do, because presumably he can toddle along to the CIA and look at the files any time it takes his fancy to do so, that Al-Megrahi is innocent. Just for the avoidance of any doubt though, here’s an interesting point from a chap called Robbie the Pict, from the Lockerbie justice group based on the Isle of Skye, examining the key point on which the Crown’s case against Megrahi rests.

A Sensible Person’s Guide to Semtex
(and why it was not present on Pan Am 103) Semtex is the trade name of a composite high explosive which combines two chemical substances, PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) and RDX (Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine). The American and English equivalents are ‘C4’ and ‘PE-4’ respectively.High Explosive is a substance which explodes at more than 1000 meters per second (mps). Semtex explodes at about 8000 mps, over 5 miles per second.Heat of Explosion is the amount of chemical explosive energy contained within the explosive mixture, measured in joules per gram(J/g).

The term is more from chemistry than physics.Temperature of Explosion is the maximum temperature possible if no heat is lost to the surroundings. It can be thought of as the starting temperature on detonation. The exploding temperature of Semtex is given by the manufacturer as 3,800 degrees Centigrade. This is physics.Detonation is a chemical process involving spontaneous decomposition of explosives molecules, the breaking and forming of trillions of bonds. It is supersonic combustion in which a shockwave through the explosive material compresses, heats and ignites it.

The ignited material further propagates the shock.Deflagration is subsonic combustion (i.e. burning) that propagates through the explosive material by thermal conduction. Semtex burns at approximately 3,800 degrees centigrade or 6,832 degrees Fahrenheit. That is the estimated temperature of a sunspot. Carbon itself melts at 3,720 degrees Centigrade. This is roughly ten times the auto-ignition or self-kindling point of paper. Plastics, solder, shellac (circuit board material) and cloth shirts have auto-ignition points much closer to paper than to carbon.

All these items would be rendered into white hot gas at 3,800 degrees C.Zone of Uniform Velocity is the distance in all directions not obstructed through which the blast from an explosion continues without losing speed. This factor has been determined in laboratory conditions as being as high as a 4/25 ratio where 4 represents the diameter of the charge (explosive) and 25 the distance the blast reaches without losing momentum.

However, explosive engineers prefer the 2/5 ratio as a practical guide. Explosive Effect is therefore that a charge of Semtex the size of a pound packet of butter will render everything in a sphere the size of a basket-ball an invisible, white-hot gas measuring 6,800 degrees F expanding at over 5 miles per second in all available directions. That calculation is based upon approximately 300 grams, the figure first announced by ‘investigators’.Since then commentators with dubious agendas have more than doubled that figure to as much as 650 grams.

That would mean a charge the size of two and a half pounds of butter and, using only the 2/5 ratio, would result in a sphere of combustion the size of a child’s Space Hopper, expanding at about 20,000 miles per hour in all directions at the temperature of a sunspot, 6,800 degrees F.The Crown conspiracy theory asks the public to join the Judges in believing that a page from a Toshiba instruction manual made of paper, a shellac circuit board, soldering, a piece of shirt cloth and some other combustibles survived the explosion experience. Very funny, — and very stupid.


Well, Robbie the Pict puts it a lot better than I could. But given that Megrahi was almost certainly innocent, and given that all sorts of deals have probaly gone down once again, this time over his release, in a grotesque mirror image of those which went down over his conviction, it ill behoves the White House to be lecturing us on justice, and it ill behoves the American public to be boycotting Scotland, when the US is determined to exercise its rights under the criminally one-sided extradition treaty between the US and the USA, and prosecute Gary McKinnon in the US courts.

Gary McKinnon is the archetypal nerd. In fact, he is the nerd’s nerd. He hacked the computer system at the Pentagon, looking for evidence of UFOs. I don’t know if he found any, but he certainly pissed off the pointyheads who are in charge of security over there. Instead of congratulating him for showing up the loopholes in their pathetic firewall and offering him a job, they want to extradite him to the US and prosecute him to make an example of him. Sadly, our government doesn’t seem to have the balls to tell them that – since he committed the crime on UK soil – Gary McKinnon should stand trial in the UK. And they should go suck a zube.

It’s all part of a depressing pattern, which follows on from the previous instance of the US forces refusing to allow the evidence of their gun cameras to be played to the jury in the inquest on the sad death of Corporal of Horse Matty Hull, in a friendly fire incident. But then, the Americans probably think that Her Majesty’s Coroner for the County of Oxford is an extra in a chorus by Gilbert and Sullivan.

I didn’t expect much of George W Bush, a man whose concepts of justice probably involved nooses, white hoods and fiery crosses. But I did expect much, much better of Barack Obama.

Troublesome Justice

The office of coroner is an ancient one, going back to Elizabethan times. Unfortunately for this government, some coroners take their duties to inquire into the truth seriously. This would include Her Majesty's Coroner for the County of Oxford, which by virtue of the location of Brize Norton airbase, is where inquests on British personnel killed on active service in Iraq and Afghanistan are held.

There have been a numberof high profile examples of the Coroner saying things that the government does not like, things that point out the woeful inadequacy of British army equipment, or, in the case of Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull, the woeful inadequacy of our so called "allies" in theatre to tell friend from foe.

So it comes as no surprise, therefore, that Jack Straw is now pushing out proposals to hold inquests where the out come "might affect matters of national security" to be held in camera. No jury, no press, no coroner. What's the betting that these inquests that affect matters of national security turn out to be JUST those types of inquest that ask awkward questions about British army equipment or friendly fire incidents. Mark my words. National security covers a multitude of sins.

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

I come from Old Obama, with a banjo on my knee

Well, I am still gathering together the Bolshy Manifesto, so in the meantime, a quick welcome to Barack Obama. (I keep wanting to type Burt Bacharach Obama, but that is probably a different guy).

Welcome ba(ra)ck, America. We've missed you. We didn't like you much in those years when you traded the fiddle for the drum. You look a bit more like your old self this week.

Now get it sorted, and keep away from grassy knolls and school book depositories for the next four years.

One of the funniest things (apart from Paxo interviewing Dizzee Rascal - "Mr Rascal, do you consider yourself to be British?") this week has been the reaction of our home-grown politicians to the American presidential election. Forgetting that "this is no time for a novice!" Broon immediately welcomed Obama.

As for Cameron, you could almost see the little light bulb come on over his head. It can only be a matter of time before he starts wearing bling and rapping at Prime Ministers' Question Time. I am sure he's already sent Osborne round to the shops for a tin of Cherry Blossom, a stripey blazer, and banjo.

Much has been written in a short time about Obama's race. I think I stand with Martin Luther King on this, and that equality will only truly have been achieved when the colour of the President's skin is just not an issue.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character"

Well - Personally, I hope he is everything they say and more, but it's early days yet, and fine words butter no parsnips. I see Hazel Blears has been bleating on about political blogging making everyone cynical and apathetic about politicians. I am actually quite sick of being labelled cynical and apathetic by the very politicians who made me cynical and apathetic.Show me a cause and I'll be there with you at the barricades. Self serving perpetuation or crass opportunism (the two options available to us in the UK at the moment) are not causes as I understand the word.

But yes, let's hope when Obama's finished handing out puppies, he gets the job done. Should be an interesting meeting when the people who funded his campaign attempt to cash in their chips and he says no. I'd love to be a fly on the wall*




*figuratively, obv. If I was a /real/ fly on the wall, I'd have six hairy legs and have to vomit on my food before hoovering it up my nose. But on the upside, I would be able to do a flick roll and land upside down on the ceiling, something I can only perform at present while listening to Question Time...