July 29, 2004

Sudan

Today, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs committee reported that:   “The security situation has deteriorated further in the six months since our last Report, with an alarming increase in the number of attacks in the approach to the handover of sovereignty. Although the handover was brought forward in an effort to forestall the threat of terrorist violence, no immediate cessation is expected. Shortly after the handover on 28 June, a US soldier who had been kidnapped in April was killed and a number of explosions rocked Baghdad.” And yesterday, because of the security situation there, Medecins sans Frontieres pulled out of Afghanistan after twenty-eight years work. On the same day the warmongering American press, as they did with Iraq, were accusing the Europeans, presumably those of the “old” variety, and the United Nations, of lacking backbone. Happily, with near enough 200, 000 troops engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, and an election in November the Bush administration are unlikely to do anything more than sit on their hands and mouth platitudes, while two Saharan tribes continue their age-old battle in Sudan. As the United States are unlikely to become involved, the Blair government will not want to send in a military force, even if the cash could be prized from Mr. Broon’s hands, unless it is backed by a specific United Nations Security Council Resolution. And there will of course be no such resolution. China will almost certainly use its veto in the Council.  This did not, I hear you ask, stop Blair from his illegal invasion of Iraq. [Irony alert on] But surely the intelligence services would not produce a dossier confirming that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction had been flogged to the Khartoum government. Or they had decided to dig up “Chinese” Gordon’s bones and use them in some heathen ritual [irony alert off].What should we do? We should ensure that any military action, any peacekeeping, should be undertaken by Sudan’s neighbors. We should assist in humanitarian aid when it’s safe to do so. And that’s the lot. The idea of unilateral military invention in one of the largest countries in Africa has “Iraq” written all over it. t

July 19, 2004

Etna, Vulcano and Stromboli

Sorveglianza Visiva This link, I hope, takes you to webcams of the three active volcanoes in Italy. Enjoy! t

July 17, 2004

Excellent cadavers

Last week both The Independent and Guardian reported the Castellammarese mafia clan had muscled in whilst Steven Soderberg was on location at Scopello where he was directing "Oceans 12". Scopello is a few miles away from the clan's base at Castellammare del Golfo. An e-correspondent, who knew this town was one of my favourite holiday haunts wrote: "I've just been reading about this in the Independent ( from yesterday) you go to some dangerous places on holiday - although apparently the mafia don't kill people these days - put that one to the test if you dare.Great names though - Joe Bananas !!!" Sicily has always been a strange and troubled island. In 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti a Tuscan MP travelled to Palermo to report on an Island that had become something of a thorn in the side of the newly united Italian state. " Someone who had just arrived might well believe....that Sicily was the easiest and most pleasant places in the entire world. But if [the traveller] stays a while, begins to read newspapers and listens carefully, bit by bit everything changes around him....He hears that the guard of that orchard was killed with a rifle shot coming from behind that wall because the owner hired him rather that somebody else.....Just over there, an owner who wanted to rent his groves as he saw fit heard a bullet whistle past his head in a friendly warning and afterwards gave in.Elsewhere, a young man who had dedicated himself to setting up nursery schools in the outskirts of Palermo was shot at...because certain people who dominate the common people in that area, feared that, by benefiting the poorer classes, he would acquire some influence on the population that they wanted to reserve exclusively for themselves. The violence and murders take the strangest forms....There is a story about a former priest, who became the crime leader in a town near Palermo and administered the last rites to some of his own victims. After a certain number of these stories, the perfume of orange and lemon blossoms start to smell of corpses." Cheers. t Scopello  Posted by Hello

July 15, 2004

Why?

Isn’t Iraq getting better? That was a question, asked by one of my e-correspondents. Of course it’s a trap. Say yes- and there you are justifying the invasion. Say no- and you are a supporter of Saddam. But the starting point for me, and it’s perhaps the thirty years of lawyering that I blame, is whether the action we took in invading Iraq was legal. Did it conform to International Law? To answer that question you don’t have to drag a dozen tomes from the shelf and blow the accreted dust from them. All you need to do is visit the United Nations website or Google “United Nations Charter” and look at the results. It is clear that a Security Council Resolution, specifically authorising any military action not in self-defence, must support any armed intervention in a sovereign state. There was never any serious attempt, either in the UK or the USA, to defend the invasion of Iraq as an act of self-defence, even though the September 2002 dossier may have been intended to approach such a position. And the attempt of the UK Attorney-General to squeeze authority for the invasion of a sovereign country within a list of UN Resolutions, going back the cease-fire resolution passed at the conclusion of the first Gulf War has persuaded few, if any, independent international lawyers of his case. For me that ends the argument. But sure, I hear you say, Saddam was such and evil tyrant these legal niceties can be ignored. A few years ago, the criminal justice system was involved in debate about what was called “Noble Cause Corruption”. “I am sorry to say that in some police forces, especially in elite detective squads, . . . a culture of perjury grew up over the years. One senior officer referred to it as noble cause corruption. He meant that if the goal was thought to be worthy, the means did not matter very much” (Chris Mullin (Sunderland, South), House of Commons Hansard Debates for 6 March 1995, col. 47) As you can see from Chris Mullin’s quote it’s basically a recycling of the “ends justifying means proposition. The argument goes that the police were well aware of those criminals who were involved in serious offending. They could therefore break the law, committing perjury by fitting up, firming up, tidying up, massaging, embroidering or tailoring their testimony. I found such a line of reasoning morally repugnant. And I suspect most people feel the same. And if you are pretty neutral as to whether your actions are lawful, then it’s only a small step to justifying torture or actions adjacent to torture.

Holiday Pix

Castellammare del Golfo July 2004 Posted by Hello

Lunchtime in Sicily

Voracious clams Posted by Hello
Yours truly finishing a plate of spaghetti with clams or as the menu described "voracious clams". The restaurant is "La Cambusa" overlooking the port at Castellammare del Golfo Sicily.

July 13, 2004

Light the blue touch paper

This is from funny old world in this weeks Eye!

"I wanted to play a prank on her, but I can see now that I hadn't really thought it through," thirty-five-year-old Shannon Kramer admitted to police officers from his hospital bed in Jacksonville, Florida. "I'd driven my girlfriend out to the beach in my Ford Mustang,and she'd got out. She was walking around, and I was sitting in the driver's seat, and I thought it would be kinda funny to shoot a firework at her out through the car window.

"I had a box of six-inch rockets with me, so I took one out, aimed it at her through the window, and lit it. Only then did I realise that the electric window was wound up, and that because I hadn't left the key in the ignition, I couldn't wind it down. I suppose I should have opened the door quickly and got out, but by the time I'd thought of that, the rocket had gone off, and started whooshing round and round inside the car. It was awful. So bright and loud and hot and fast. I thought I was dead. I couldn't see, I couldn't hear, it set fire to my hair and clothes, and ended up jammed between my legs and shooting flames into my buttocks.

"When it was all over, I tried to get out, but I couldn't walk or even stand up, and I was temporarily blinded. The ambulance men told me I've got second-degree burns to my buttocks, groin and legs. And needless to say, I've lost my eyelashes and most of my body hair, and the rocket even scorched an outline of my sandals onto my feet. I suppose it's lucky that the rest of the rockets didn't catch light too, otherwise I might really have been in trouble." (Orlando Sentinel and St Petersburg Times, 5/4/04.

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/content/showitem.cfm/issue.1110/section.fow

Cheers. t

July 08, 2004

Anti Social Behaviour.

I've just returned from a week spent in a small town in western Sicily. Castellammare del Golfo is about 40 kilometers from the island's capital Palermo. It is a small town and according to a teacher I met there a couple of years ago, it has an official unemployment rate of about 10-15%. The schools term had ended, which meant the town's kids were left to their own devices during the day. OK, there's a beach and a small football pitch, but I noticed teenagers seemed to congregate at a local park. The same park that the retired men used to discuss football and politics in the mornings. There were sometimes about twenty youngsters sitting on the seats. None, so far as I could see, had abused alcohol, though alcohol was freely available most of the day. Their behaviour was not threatening, though they were noisy. In fact just typical teenagers. I suppose in England, police officers or Blunkett's new Community Wardens, would be wandering about asking these kids to give their names and addresses and why they were outside. And if they could not offer a good reason, they would be marched home. Why on earth does the Home Office use the United states as a template to reduce so-called anti-social behaviour, which has not been that successful, rather than our European neighbours