British Iraqi interpreters targets in Basra
The scandal is that the Brits still haven’t yet reversed their decision to deny asylum to Iraqis who worked with them for years. Now these guys are being warned to leave or die. This one narrowly escaped when the “militia,” as the thugs call themselves, kidnapped his cousin instead of him. Realizing their mistake, they demanded that he turn himself in. The family lied and said he was already out of Iraq. So they settled for ransom money.
Ahmed handed over all the money that he had saved over three years. The family asked a tribal leader to give it to the kidnappers and bring back the cousin so that they would not be cheated. The cousin returned home with a message for Ahmed: “If we find you anywhere in Basra we will kill you, but if you come to us and give us information we will let you live.”
Ahmed has now sent his wife and one-year-old daughter to a relative’s house far from Basra and intends to stay on the al-Shaibah base. He said that if the Government did not grant him asylum in Britain he would have to seek refuge in another country.
“I’m very frightened,” he said. “The militias know all the interpreters in Basra. They waited for the British to leave so they could attack us . . . If the British don’t give me asylum I will have big problems because if I stay in Iraq I will be killed.”
It’s stories like this that leave me still relatively despondent about long term odds there. These people –here, the Shiites — are culturally so attuned to dying and dispensing death that there doesn’t seem to be sufficient breathing space for life.
Brits criticize US over Afghanistan
The Brits are a bit unhappy with US policy in Afghanistan, seeing it as too indulgent in some cases, and too rabid in others.
Disagreement between Britain and the US has surfaced already over the US military’s desire to spray opium poppy fields from the air with herbicide, as well as to continue its bombing strikes on Afghan villages, which Britain complains undermines its strategy of “winning hearts and minds”.
Other areas of contention include what Britain regards as Washington’s indulgent attitude towards Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, who is accused of tolerating, even conniving with, widespread corruption inside his government.
One source said: “The Americans see a bit of military success in Afghanistan and think it’s all fine. They are blinkered by Iraq and this is becoming symptomatic of a lack of serious engagement on policy across the piste.”
Their concerns seem to have some merit on the surface, at least regarding that venue, but an underlying concern seems to be Britain’s belief that Iraq is a distraction from the real war on terror. I’m not buying that one.
Add the UK to China’s hacking list
Germany, the US and now the UK have all indicated that China has been actively trying to hack their defense secrets:
The Whitehall sources confirmed that China was one of the countries most involved in electronic espionage against Britain. One source said: “China is engaged in hostile intelligence activities, and instead of using the old-fashioned methods, they are focusing on electronic means to hack into systems to discover Britain’s defence and foreign policy secrets, and they are technologically pretty advanced and adept at it.”
Asked to respond for the US side, Bush hemmed and hawed and made obvious and equivocal comments relating to our complex [re: trade] relationship with China. China is like the ill-behaved guest at the party who everyone puts up with because he brought the beer.
Applebaum on the waning of Diannamania
A very cogent little piece in WaPo on why you shouldn’t care. If you care to read it.
One could argue that Diana’s truest legacy is the screaming emotionalism of the British tabloids — except that it long predates Diana and actually helped create her in the first place. It is true that if the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express all throw their best headline writers into a story, it is possible to get Britons to tie yellow ribbons round an old oak tree or hound some pathetic adulterer out of office. But it always was so. This is, after all, the country that created Beatlemania. Howling mobs — Cromwell’s army, Luddites, football hooligans — have always been the flip side of the stiff upper lip.
A note of desperation in the UK
The UK is warning parents that if their kids are roaming the streets after they get thrown out of school, the parents will be fined £1,000:
The penalties - which come into force for the first time this week - are part of a new crackdown on soaring truancy rates and bad behaviour.
Parents of pupils suspended from school will also be hauled before headteachers for a “reintegration interview” before their child is allowed back into the classroom.
And here’s an understatement:
“Good discipline and strong leadership are vital for driving up standards in our schools,” he said. “But schools can only do so much in isolation. Parents have to be responsible for instilling right and wrong too.
It takes a village? It takes a family.
The dude doth protest too much, methinks
Russian foreign minister has pulled out a woefully obscure Hamlet quote to explain why the British are nuts to object to political assassinations on their soil:
“Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me,” Mr Lavrov said, quoting Hamlet’s address to Guildenstern in Act 3 Scene 2 of the play.
Addressing students at Moscow’s elite Foreign Relations Institute, he said that Britain had become involved in political intrigues against Russia by sheltering “certain odious individuals” such as the billionaire businessman Boris Berezovsky.
So, gents, if you don’t want us to assassinate people, don’t host them, OK? Geez. Not that they did it. They didn’t, but as OJ said, if they had done it, you’d have been asking for it, right?
“It expected in earnest to get the right to press buttons in Russia’s domestic politics. In the end, willingly or unwillingly, London became a party to intrigues and provocations against Russia,” Mr Lavrov said.
So when Russia sends someone to poison a Russian expat on the streets of London, it’s Russian domestic politics? Reminds me of Thurber’s fable of the Rabbits who caused all the trouble: “The wolves replied that the rabbits had all been eaten, and because they had been eaten, it was purely an internal matter.”
It takes a village to steal your child
When Tom Cruise filed his Minority Report, it was science fiction. Now, it’s news.
This is unbelievable. Flag it and fear it, because it’s possible anywhere the aggressive nanny state is [see book by Hillary Clinton]. England is suffering from a rash of preemptive child removals where no harm occurred and there is no indication any will. Seizures are being made on the basis on vague assessments by doctors who never met the mother or child.
In the case cited here, the mother was raped when she was sixteen and suffered emotional trauma from that for a few years. [Duh.] Now she is an adult and pregnant, and she shows no signs of being a risk to herself or anyone else. But some pompous pediatrician has announced, purely the basis of her past history, that she presents a risk of “Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy,” where a parent harms a child to fake an illness and get attention. So the state is poised to seize the child from her at birth.
The horror, in part, is that it mimics the attitudes in extreme Islam, where a rape victim is treated as polluted and can never be whole–as if the crime against here were her own fault. Now England is doing this to rape victims too, under the guise of protecting children?
The case adds to growing concern, highlighted in a series of articles in The Sunday Telegraph, over a huge rise in the number of babies under a year old being taken from parents. The figure was 2,000 last year, three times the number 10 years ago.
Critics say councils are taking more babies from parents to help them meet adoption “targets”.
John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the Justice for Families campaign group, said the case showed “exactly what is wrong with public family law”.
He added: “There is absolutely no evidence that Fran would harm her child. However, a vague letter from a paediatrician who has never met her has been used in a decision to remove her baby at birth, while evidence from professionals treating her, that she would have no problems has been ignored.”
And some people wonder why libertarians [that’s libertarians, not librarians] fear and loathe government.
Witness intimidation
It’s a thin line between a decent society and anarchy. Every society has creeps who would destroy it if they could, and the key is to (1) limit their numbers, (2) make sure decent citizens are willing to stand up.
In places like Iraq and Pakistan we see that it doesn’t take many creeps to destabilize a society. A small number can do it if they instill fear in enough of the rest.
Are we close to such a a tipping point in the West? In addition to being awash in gang violence, the Brits are having a hard time getting witnesses to come forward in the Rhys Jones case. They have nine (9!) arrests, but the news reports today are full of plaintive appeals for witnesses:
“I understand people are concerned about giving information to the police, that is natural,” Supt Armitt said.
“But they have got to stand up and be counted. We have ways to protect members of the public who come forward, we can protect their identities if they go before a court.”
Speaking about those who might know the identity of the BMX gunman who shot Rhys in the back of the neck, Mr Armitt added: “They must look to themselves and examine their conscience and if something else happens think ‘If I hadn’t given that information as quickly as possible can I live with myself?’.”
Witness intimidation is a U.S. problem as well, illustrated in this case where an accused gang murderer was apparently acquitted by silencing witnesses.
When the criminals are so brazen that they can manage this, the wall between ourselves and chaos grows dangerously thin.
Thirst you say? I could go for a pint
Watching Britain deal with guns kind of reminds me of watching the West deal with Iran: you know nothing you do is going to work, but admitting as much is too horrible, so you just keep trying–whatever.
First, let’s define the problem:
This month, an inquest heard how Jessie James, 15, was killed on Sept 9 2006 in Moss Side, Manchester, because he refused to join a gang. In London there have been a spate of shootings involving youngsters.
Scotland Yard recently compiled a list of more than 170 gangs in London alone, some of them up to 100-strong. It means on any given night, several thousand gang members are roaming the capital, many of them thirsting for violence.
So we have rampant gang banging–is rampant a strong enough word?–and a pervasive thirst for violence. Thirst, you say?
On Monday, Merseyside’s Chief Constable, Bernard Hogan-Howe, called for the reduction in the number of off-licences [liquor stores] and legislation to prevent under-21s buying drink at “grog shops”.
Uh, that was a thirst for violence, guys.
Another gun tragedy in Britain
Altogether now: When guns are outlawed …
In Britain, the outlaws are certainly having no difficulty getting hold of them. Now an 11 year old boy returning from a soccer match is gunned down randomly. Here’s a sample from the news report:
Many residents on the estate spoke about living increasingly in the shadow of gun crime and the Merseyside police gun crime unit, Matrix, was set up two years ago to tackle the problem.
One woman said: “Matrix are always here raiding houses and making seizures, but no matter how many times they come they can’t seem to keep track of all the guns. [Duh]
“The kids pass the guns around each other as if they were football collector cards.
“There is no mystique about guns, there’s no fear, they are just a status symbol. [Uh, status symbol = mystique. Wrong word?] And now it seems anyone who wants one can get hold of one.” [Duh]
The shooting comes amid a recent surge of gun crime throughout Britain.
Obviously, we’re dealing with some pervasive social pathologies. But it seems painfully clear that gun bans are doing nothing. My philosophy in such a setting is this: if you can’t protect me, get out the way and let me protect myself.
[More on thoughts British gun laws at Captain’s Quarters.]
Topless Putin threatens British airspace
Russia threatened British airspace with one of its little bomber jaunts, and the Brits scrambled two fighter jets to warn it off. And then this:
Last week President Putin said he was ending a 15-year suspension of bomber flights, and announced that 14 strategic aircraft had taken to the air from seven airfields across Russia. The tough new stance was illustrated somewhat graphically by pictures of Mr Putin fishing topless that had been released during the week.
Please, Vlad, put your shirt on. We’ll do anything you ask.
With friends like these
Britain is trying out a new
civics curriculum in moderate Muslim mosques to try to combat radicalism. Among the puzzlers the children are asked to wrestle with are these:
In one example, the students were to be asked what they would do if a friend bought a large quantity of fertilizer and announced he planned to build a bomb with it. The question was based on the evidence in a recent trial in London in which five Muslim men were found guilty of buying fertilizer, storing it and planning to use it for a terrorist attack.
Another question involved a character, “Ahmad,” whose friends were hatching a plot to attack a supermarket in retaliation for the war in Iraq. “Is it right for Ahmad to harm innocent Britons just because their government invaded a Muslim country?” was the proposed question in one of Hussain’s lesson plans.
Gee, this could lead to some really stimulating classroom dialogue. Reminds me of the values clarification exercises we used to do in grade school in the 1970s, but they weren’t quite as interesting. Which, in turn, reminds me of that classic line from R. A. Lafferty,
“When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively. In a way, the next move is up to him.”
Brits’ backdown in Basra a disaster
The American military is not at all amused that the Brits have quit trying in Basra in anticipation of leaving in November. The consequences are already dire, as Shia militias have taken over the streets, and they are a critical portent of what would happen if the U.S. followed that path. Read the whole thing.
A senior US officer familiar with Gen Petraeus’s thinking said: “The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it. Britain is in a difficult spot because of the lack of political support at home, but for a long time - more than a year - they have not been engaged in Basra and have tried to avoid casualties.
“They did not have enough troops there even before they started cutting back. The situation is beyond their control.
“Quite frankly what they’re doing right now is not any value-added. They’re just sitting there. They’re not involved. The situation there gets worse by the day. Americans are disappointed because, in their minds, this thing is still winnable. They don’t intend to cut and run.”
BBC hit by friendly fire
In continuing its ongoing spat with the UK, over the UK’s peculiar insistence that assassinating a political refugee in London is bad form, Russia has kicked the BBC world service off the airwaves in Moscow.
In explaining the decision,
Spokesman Igor Ermachenkov insisted management had taken the decision to remove BBC programming without outside interference.
“It’s no secret the BBC was established as a broadcaster of foreign propaganda,” he said.
Indeed it is not a secret. Many of us have felt this way for years. I felt this just the other day with the Padilla conviction, when the whole BBC story consisted of interviewing some barely coherent spokesperson from an obscure human rights group. The Queen of England felt that way when the BBC fabricated a media hit on her.
The BBC has long been an ideologically slanted thorn in the side of Western governments, particularly the UK and the US. All the more irritating because it is unaccountably funded by British tax dollars.
The puzzle is why the Russians would object. If there is an anti-Atlantic alliance story to be told, the BBC is usually in the forefront in telling it. Memo to Putin: The BBC may be SOBs, but they are not our SOBs.
Queen fiasco at BBC echoes TNR stunt
Editors around the world seem perfectly happy with the “fake but accurate” excuse of 60 Minutes, as long no one fights back. The BBC continues to squirm over its manipulation of footage of the queen for their troubled documentary:
The BBC apologised to the Queen last month after admitting that a trailer had been manipulated to make it appear as if Her Majesty had angrily walked out of a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, the celebrity photographer.
The reality was that the footage showed the Queen striding purposefully through the corridors of Buckingham Palace as she arrived for the shoot.
And this:
The dispute has already had major repercussions for the BBC because it triggered a crisis over “faked” programmes.
But surely the queen has stormed out of a photo shoot, or stormed out of something? And surely U.S. soldiers have sometimes killed dogs or laughed at skulls or made fun of injured women? And surely Israelis do sometimes massacre Palestinians, even if the film footage here is artfully manipulated?
Who guards the Guardian?
Al Qaeda operatives are instructed to allege torture [and to engage in it]. One just dictated what the Guardian calls a “dossier,” with detailed abuses offered by one prisoner, including murder and you name it. The “details” go on and on. They would horrify anyone who believed them. The Guardian passes them on without any hint of skepticism, and doubtless thousands of Brits today are absorbing them as fact:
His brother, Abubaker Deghayes, 39, said: “I cannot believe how the Americans can do this to him, and astonished how he could survive this.”
His mom adds:
“He is being tortured. I read his diary. When he gets out I fear he will not be normal Omar. I’m sure he will have changed.”
Set this against an earlier analysis from the Telegraph, where the writer goes into great detail on the false claims made by detainees and the thorough refutations:
The men’s claim that they were tortured at Guantanamo should also be set in the context of the al-Qa’eda training manual discovered during a raid in Manchester a couple of years ago. Lesson 18 of that manual, whose authenticity has not been questioned, emphatically states, under the heading “Prison and Detention Centres”, that, when arrested, members of al-Qa’eda “must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security investigators. [They must] complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison”. That is not, of course, proof that the Britons were not tortured in Guantanamo. But it ought to encourage some doubts about uncritically accepting that they were – which seems to be the attitude adopted by most of the media.
TNR and the Guardian have this in common: they are so anxious to smear American soldiers and validate the enemy that they glibly bypass the standards of journalistic skepticism.
Summer of love at Heathrow
If global warming didn’t exist, it would have to be invented. An entire generation of misfits who in earlier years would have gotten naked to protest the Vietnam war or nuclear weapons while enjoying sex, psychedelic drugs, and breaking things have now seized on global warming. For awhile, globalization itself was the substitute, with really cool outings at the WTO meetings of Rio or Seattle.
Now they are converging from across Europe on London’s Heathrow airport, where they will chain themselves to fences and vehicles:
Visitors can expect a semi-utopian gathering, with the site divided into neighbourhoods, and several large marquees. The camp will be powered by wind and solar energy, and everyone will cook and eat communally. The idea, say the campers, is to demonstrate that people can live together without emitting much carbon.
[Unless they have ample outhouses, I don’t think carbon is going to be the emission that matters.]
The aim is to practise a different form of democracy, said one organiser. “We will have open meetings. In our meetings we don’t vote, because that may leave out a minority. Everyone must come to an agreement. It’s a different way of working.”
[What’s hilarious is they think they invented this tripe.]
Peace, brotha.
Brits poised to abandon their interpreters
Ouch. Unlike the Danes and Americans, the Brits are refusing to make special asylum provisions for interpreters who have worked closely with them now for years in Iraq. the result is that 91 interpreters and their families face a high likelihood of being murdered by death squads as the British withdraw.
But Britain has so far refused to make an exception. The Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said yesterday that Iraqi employees would receive no special help in applying for asylum.
“Anyone who is seeking to apply for refugee status must do so from within the United Kingdom. There is no exception to that,” said a Home Office spokesman. “Their cases will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis against the criteria of the 1951 Refugee Convention.”
The British intransigence on this point is frankly incomprehensible and should be reversed.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire
Powerline directs our attention to a riveting and freakish account by Mark Steyn regarding how Cambridge University Press came to publish a book entitled Alms for Jihad, only to decide subsequently that everything the book wrote about a particular Saudi sheikh’s funding of radical Islam is “entirely and manifestly false.”
The request to yank the book off library shelves comes with this obsequious letter which sounds oddly like the robotic phrasing of a terror hostage on one of those creepy Al Qaeda films:
“Throughout the book there are serious and defamatory allegations about yourself and your family, alleging support for terrorism through your businesses, family and charities, and directly.
“As a result of what we now know, we accept and acknowledge that all of those allegations about you and your family, businesses and charities are entirely and manifestly false.”
So you have your choice: accept either (1) that one of the toughest academic publishers in the world was criminally negligent in fact checking and peer review before coming to its senses, or (2) that some kind of extraordinary pressure was brought on the press to stifle the book, not because it was “entirely and manifestly false” but because it was all too disturbingly true.
I can’t be certain yet, but my money’s on (2). I’ll be looking for the book to appear online soon in PDF, and I’ll be all over it when it does. And I’ll be looking for more informed critical assessment of its assertions. Thanks to Mark Steyn, and to Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, without whose extraordinary efforts we would likely never have known about this book.
There’s nothing like the smell of a burning book to draw a crowd.
Update: Big time updates and mindblowers here. Having looked over the story in more detail, there is little ambiguity here: archaic British libel laws allow this creep to intimidate and extort Brits. This isn’t the first time.
Americans are protected by U.S. courts, thank goodness. From the time I was a kid I remember hearing the mantra, “the truth is an ironclad defense.” Here is an American published book that they tried to squelch in Britain, but U.S. courts backed the writer up.
Sympathy for the Devil
I’m sorry, but that smile creeps me out.
I keep returning to this case of the Indian doctor in Australia who lent his cell phone SIM card to the UK doctor conspirators because there is something profoundly disturbing there. In this war in the shadows against murder and mayhem, there is too much space for knowers and sympathizers.
Even though the Aussies could not, according to Western standards, charge the man, Australian police insist that they have evidence of complicity. And it is disturbing:
“Importantly, there was a computer room conversation, a chatroom conversation, with Dr Haneef’s brother in India on the afternoon before his attempted hasty departure from Australia,” he said. “In it, the brother of Haneef says ‘nothing has been found out about you‘ and asked when Dr Haneef would be getting out, to which Haneef replied ‘today‘.
“The brother asked whether he had permission to take leave and what he told the hospital. Dr Haneef said he told them his baby was born in an emergency caesarean. The brother told him to ‘tell them that you have to as you have a daughter born, do not tell them anything else‘. [what else?]
“The brother then said not to delay his departure and not to let anyone else use his number in Australia, nor to give it to anyone.”
Maybe the aussies didn’t have enough evidence to charge this man with a crime. But an intuitive test is this: would you board a plane if you knew close associates of this man were on it?
As I’ve noted before, innocence is not binary. If you consort with those who kill and you fail to communicate suspicions, you are ethically complicit in their murders. In this case, it seems pretty clear that the complicity goes well beyond passive acceptance.
[On a side note, the civil libertarians who want to prevent any targeted surveillance of likely mass murderers should be asked to answer whether they approve of the Aussies digging into and uncovering that email exchange.]
