Floating Guantanamo
This from Yahoo Singapore:
The UN has learned of "very, very serious" allegations that the United States is secretly detaining terrorism suspects in various locations around the world, notably aboard prison ships, the UN's special rapporteur on terrorism said.
While the accusations were rumours, rapporteur Manfred Nowak said the situation was sufficiently serious to merit an official inquiry.
"There are very, very serious accusations that the United States is maintaining secret camps, notably on ships," the Austrian UN official told AFP, adding that the vessels were believed to be in the Indian Ocean region.
"They are only rumours, but they appear sufficiently well-based to merit an official inquiry," he added.
Last Thursday Nowak and three other UN human rights experts said they were opening an inquiry into the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Washington has been holding more than 500 people without trial, and into other such locations.
The United States has neither refused nor granted requests by Nowak's group to visit Guantanamo.
"We have accepted, upon the request of the State Department and Pentagon, to limit our investigation for now to Guantanamo, but even in accepting this we have not had a positive response" to the request for a visit, Nowak said.
He said that if the "investigation into Guantanamo leads us to other things, we will follow them. We will bring up all these matters to the US government and expect Washington to say officially where these camps are."
The use of prison ships would allow investigators to interrogate people secretly and in international waters out of the reach of US law, British security expert Francis Tusa said.
"This opens the door to very tough interrogations on key prisoners before it even has been revealed that they have been captured," said Tusa, an editor for the British magazine Jane's Intelligence Review.
Nowak said the prison ships would not be "floating Guantanamos" since "they are much smaller, holding less than a dozen detainees."
Tusa said the Americans may also be using their island base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean as a site for prisoners.
Some 520 people suspected of terrorism are currently being held without trial at Guantanamo and others are in camps the United States has refused to acknowledge, the human rights organization Amnesty International has said.
The United States has said that prisoners considered foreign combattants in its "war on terrorism" are not covered by the Geneva Conventions.
More on Rendition
Corriere della Sera reports:
Investigators locate likenesses of thirteen operatives wanted for questioning. Identification photos ready. Milan public prosecutors apply to Eurojust. Investigations focus on use of US embassy cellphones.
MILAN - From today, thirteen CIA agents are wanted all over Europe. The operatives are accused of abducting Imam Abu Omar in Milan and taking him to Egypt, where he was tortured. The formal transmission of the arrest warrant to the Eurojust judicial coordination office means that it will automatically become effective in all EU member countries. At this stage, any European police officer could arrest, as well as identify, the thirteen CIA agents, who are now “on the run”. According to the American press, the CIA is believed to have taken steps by relocating the operatives to duties outside Europe. Investigations, which so far have involved the Milan consulate, have now been widened to include the US embassy. According to sources at DIGOS, the special operations branch of the Italian police, some of the abductors are thought to have used “cellphones that are part of the service equipment issued to US diplomatic staff in Rome”, even “during the abduction”.
WANTED ALL OVER EUROPE - The public prosecutor’s office has asked police forensic scientists to enhance the photos of the thirteen CIA abductors to facilitate the Europe-wide search. The entire “photo album” will be forwarded to Eurojust and Europol, the coordinating body for police forces, to be circulated to airports and border posts in particular. The identification photographs of the wanted agents were seized by DIGOS officers at the twenty-three Italian hotels where they had stayed during their three-month preparation and the week-long abduction operation. The three women and ten men used their American passports to register at the hotels, many of which kept photocopies of the documents. Some of the photocopies are a little dark, hence the request to the forensic police to make all thirteen faces identifiable.
EMBASSY CELLPHONES - CIA procedure does not necessarily involve advising the local US embassy of any covert operations. In the case of the Abu Omar abduction, the problem is that according to the warrant the abductors were coordinated by Robert Lady, who was working as CIA station chief under the cover of "consul of the United States in Milan”. In this already delicate situation, police discovered that the cellphone used by Harty Benamar, one of the agents who actually carried out the abduction, was reactivated one and a half years after the abduction, from 11 to 19 September 2004. The new user was an American citizen, S.L., who changed the number with a new SIM card but not the cellphone itself, which is identified by its IMEI code. Initial investigations ascertained that the new user was working for the American diplomatic service in Rome. Apart from this, the cellphone always hooked up to the same base station during office hours, the TIM antenna in Viale Molise 4. This is the nearest base station to the American embassy, which is only 100 metres away. This incautious reactivation convinced the police that the cellphone was part of a batch supplied to the embassy. Some of the abductors were believed to have returned the phones to the embassy after the operation. During the abduction, Bob Lady is known to have used a landline and cellphone belonging to the Milan consulate. In addition, “subscriber 16”, another of the abductors’ cellphones, used by one of the six agents not yet identified, received a number of calls from two public callboxes in Rome. They are located in Via Veneto 2 and Via del Tritone 56, both very close to the US embassy. It is suspected that the callboxes were used to avoid direct contact between “subscriber 16” and US diplomatic staff.
AT THE PENTAGON - In the next few hours, a formal request to United States magistrates for judicial assistance will leave Milan. For the time being, the most important rogatory letters concern two telephones in Virginia, the CIA’s home state, which were contacted four times each by the operating unit chief just after the abduction. The calls may have been made to report that the mission had been accomplished. Magistrates have already drafted a request to question as a suspect the former commander of the 31st Fighter Wing, Colonel Joseph Romano, who received three calls from the same cellphone just before the hostage arrived at the US base in Aviano. Today, Romano is a high-ranking Pentagon officer and, according to investigating magistrates, one of the few people who know the true identity of Agent X, the operative in charge of the abductors.
Paolo Biondani
English translation by Giles Watson
Beanz don't Mean Heinz
Instead of opening a tin of these chaps, how about making this simple Italian alternative? Credit to
Slow food movement.
600g cannellini beans (dried or fresh)
6 sage leaves
2 garlic cloves, whole
2 rosemary sprigs
3 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed with the flat of a knife
½ cup olive oil
350g passata (strained tomato pulp)
salt and black pepper
If using dried beans, soak them overnight.
Cook the beans on a low flame in fresh water with 4 sage leaves, 2 garlic cloves and 1 rosemary sprig until soft.
Meanwhile, brown the crushed garlic and remaining herbs in olive oil in a terracotta or other heavy-bottomed pan. Add the passata and salt and pepper to taste, then cook until thickened. When the beans are done, add them together with a small amount of the cooking water. Reheat and adjust the seasoning before serving.
Politics and the English Language
This is from
Chicken Yoghurt's blog:
On Thursday last week, I had a very rare and blissful weekday away from my desk. In the sun, I read and re-read George Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language.
(You can find it easily online, but I'm not going to link to it. I say you should go and buy it in a collection of Orwell's essays - everybody should have at least some Orwell on the book shelf. If you do decide to get the essay online, don't read at your desk - print it off and go and read it in the garden with a cold beer like I did.)
After finishing it, and after suppressing a panicky and almost irresistible urge to bury Chicken Yoghurt under the patio and retire to a life of online trappism, I was pleased to find I've reached some of the same conclusions as Orwell did on the subject of the use of English and political writing, just by my own route.
For those who haven't read it, Orwell sets out how poor, lazy writing, particularly in politics - the use of tired metaphors, the garnishing of verbs with operators (make contact with, be subjected to etc.), pretentious diction and meaningless words - leads to poor, lazy thinking. In turn, poor, lazy thinking leads to poor lazy writing etc. etc. until the end of time. Modern writing, he says...
...consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.
Which is the new Chicken Yoghurt strapline right there. Orwell shows withering contempt for phrases like ride roughshod over, toe the line, give rise to, with respect to, phrases that this site is riddled with. My cheeks are hot with shame. It was a relief though, to read that good writing...
...has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style."
Hope for me yet.
Orwell's scorn for "pretentious diction" - not a sin I think I'm guilty of - is something that really gets me kicking the cat, particularly when it comes from the oh-so-superior and better-paid caste of newspaper columnists. Take Polly Toynbee and her fondness for the phrase bien pensant for instance (there are other examples). Revealing myself (yet again) as an ill-educated clot, I'll admit I have no idea what it means. And frankly, I respect neither Toynbee nor her writing enough to go and find out in order to understand the points she's making. I have enough French however to know that the first syllable of pensant is pronounced ponce.
Why use such phrases if not to boast of a superior education and flatter the egos of those readers fortunate enough to have had the same? Toynbee's columns become upper-middle class closed shops and hers are not the only ones. This isn't inverted snobbery on my part - if these writers would only resist the temptation to parade their vast intellects they'd then reach a wider audience and I (and others like me, I hope) would reach the end of the column, possibly with my views changed or at least my train of thought diverted, instead of turning the page in disgust.
But it's the awful, lip-licking euphemisms and the insulting low standards of writing and speech from politicians that I like to whine on about endlessly and it was very nice to have my prejudices confirmed by someone as eminent as Orwell. I, of course, didn't arrive at my conclusions via a perceptive analysis of the use of English but via the less worthy road of my obsession with the corrupt, febrile and rancid personalities of most politicians (don't blame me - they started it). Take one of my favourites, Peter Hain, and what he calls his "political journey" over the course of his life. What he really means by the term is that he now votes for and defends policies - like house arrest without trial, cluster-bombing civilians and the ban on peaceful protest - that 30 years ago would have driven him to blood-spitting fury.
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible," says Orwell. "Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."
See also collateral damage - that's dead civilians to me and you - and the favourite of low-wage conservatives like Blair, Gordon Brown and Conferation of British Industry director general, Digby Jones - flexible labour markets. Which means employers should be able to sack workers more easily, pay them lower wages, make them work longer hours and not worry so much about providing a safe working environment.
Orwell's example is the use of the word democracy:
In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
This is demonstrated when you hear Tony Blair and George Bush talk about democracy in Iraq. The flavour of democracy on sale in Iraq right now is very different from the flavour we have here in the West. Blair and Bush can point to the brave souls in downtown Baghdad risking their lives to put a piece of paper in a box but they then ignore the fact that fatwas issued by clerics, vote rigging and intimidation affected the results. Hence the south of the country is now fast becoming like Taliban-era Afghanistan, but hey! the Iraqis got democracy.
The recent Iranian election result wasn't to the liking of Jack Straw and Donald Rumsfeld and so they expressed doubts of the legitimacy of the poll. Fair enough, I happen to agree with them. But I notice they didn't dwell on the reports of voting irregularities that were circulating at the time of the election in Iraq, including stories of our allies the Kurds preventing ChaldoAssyrian Christiansfrom exercising their democratic rights.
I'd like to think that, were he alive, Orwell would have a reserved special place in his heart for Tony Blair, him being guilty of what Orwell called "a lifeless, imitative style." You only have to look at the speech Blair made to the European Parliament last week:
It is time to give ourselves a reality check. To receive the wake-up call. The people are blowing the trumpets round the city walls. Are we listening? Have we the political will to go out and meet them so that they regard our leadership as part of the solution not the problem?
Reality check, wake-up call, part of the solution not the problem. And that was just in one paragraph. Is there an upper limit for the number of cliches you can use in one paragraph? Blair is fast approaching the Parody Barrier and once he breaks it will reach escape velocity and be beyond satire.
"Of course we need a social Europe. But it must be a social Europe that works," he said. Fine, but what is a social Europe? Were there any people in the pubs across Europe that night slapping their foreheads and shouting "My God! He's right. Of course we need a social Europe!"?
(This "The people are blowing the trumpets round the city walls. Are we listening?" shtick from Blair also shows his increasing separation from reality, not being one to listen to many trumpets himself. Whether it be a million people marching against war or 78% or the electorate either voting against him or abstaining at the general election)
But then, most people with even half an ear on what comes out of Tony Blair's mouth and the mouths of any New Labour hack will know what Orwell is talking about. In his essay he mentions not once but twice, a dying metaphor that Blair is particularly fond of: "stand shoulder to shoulder with". How many times have you heard Blair say that since September 11 2001? Politics and the English Language was written in April 1946. Considering how accurately it critiques Blair-speak, it could have been written at any point since Blair's ascendancy to the Labour leadership in 1994.
Another recent example is Gordon Brown's speech that he made at the Mansion House last Wednesday. It was widely trailed (itself another euphemism – it means "the media were told what he was going to say before he said it") and shown live on the 24-hour TV news channels. I came across it by accident and, after getting past the realisation that Gordon Brown always looks like he's just got out of bed and his hair looks as if it's got an accumulation of a week's worth of Brylcreem in it, I came to the conclusion that although he was talking, he wasn't actually saying anything. "Global Britain, Global Europe"? What does that mean? And how about this:
And in a global economy that requires not just entrepreneurial traders but all round flexibility, the Britain that will succeed will be the Britain that nurtures the spirit of enterprise from our classrooms to our boardrooms, and makes the long term decisions so that as a nation we will move up the value added chain and invest in science, skills and transport and infrastructure, not least by speeding up an all to inflexible planning system to speed up investment in housing and commerce – making Britain the premier location for R and D and the world leader in skills and the creative industries.
"all round flexibility", "spirit of enterprise", "the value added chain"? I've clearly missed the bus to the future where instead of nadsat we're supposed to speak in impressive-sounding snatches that can mean almost anything. But Orwell also says:
A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.
Brown's speech was the oratorical equivalent of a Pot Noodle. I decided some other poor sod could try and digest it and headed for tastier dishes. The next day's Independent was able to sum up the Chancellor's interminable, nutrition-free message to Europe in just three words: "reform or stagnate."
And so I find, that when people talk about a phrase being "Orwellian", it is not the Newspeak and Doublethink of 1984 that they are referring to but this essay where Orwell tries to save a drowning language. Nothing much much changed since he wrote it almost 60 years ago but I find there's a personal satisfaction in listening to Orwell and trying to rescue the language oneself in some small way. There's certainly a smug thrill to be had in creating new metaphors.
If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase - some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse - into the dustbin, where it belongs.
Orwell has his detractors on both the Left and the Right. Being a latecomer to him and his writing, I'm not yet sure why this is so but I'm hoping the biography I've just bought will tell me. I'd argue however that what he says to writers in Politics and the English Language is nigh on irrefutable.
Most of us can't afford sub-editors or proof-readers to polish our prose and buff up our banter. But imagine having George Orwell looking over your shoulder, constantly encouraging you to come up with something new and find fresh ways of expression. Wouldn't that be something?
The challenge now, for me, is to put Orwell's words where my mouth is.
Brass Neck'd Brown
In Lancashire they use the expession "He's got the brass neck for owt! It's an expression almost synonymous with hubris.
Gordon Brown in his Mansion House speech showed he has bucket loads of the stuff.
How about this load of drivel?
"To those who say there should be no change without security, we have to reply, there can be no security without change."
What security has been given to our pensioners by Broon's medicine when according to the latest statistics-: - 2.2m (1 in 5) pensioners live below the official poverty line. The same number as in 1997.
- 1.5m pensioners are malnourished or at serious risk of malnourishment.
- 1.5m pensioners believe their house is too cold in winter.
- Last year, 22,000 older people died as a result of the cold. The same number as in 1997.
- 5m pensioners suffer a long-term illness that restricts their daily activities.
- 7.2m pensioners in England do not have access to free public transport.
- Pensioners save the taxpayer an estimated £24bn a year providing unpaid social care, childcare and volunteering.
Difficult to see French pensioners queuing up for their spoonful?
Cheers
t
Biometric Fingerprints
Vive la Difference!
It's been a challenging couple of weeks for francophiles in the UK. And it's not going to get any better.
On Tuesday next week there is what the publicity blurb describes as a "reconstruction" of the Battle of Trafagar at Portsmouth. And no doubt the French and Spanish ships will be routed...again. Imagine the Sun's front page. "Frogs sunk again! Fast forward to the 6th July. Whilst Tony Blair is welcoming the G8 at the Gleneagles Hotel, Chirac will still be in Singapore having already heard whether Paris or London will get the nod from the Olympic Committee to spend lots of their country's tax hosting the 2012 games. Although other cities are in the running the bookies have, I think, stopped taking bets on London or Paris. If it's London there'll be a great splurge of patriotism- I'm with Dr Johnson on patriotism ; if Paris is chosen, all the French stereotypes will be hauled out, dusted down and given one of their regular airings
And before we can say Common Agricultural Policy, we'll be packing up our Renault Mégane to spend the summer in one of those super little Gîtes tucked away in the French countryside, sampling those wonderful local cheeses, marvellous wines and fabulous fresh bread, blissfuly unaware that it's probably the CAP that is financing our pleasures.
Strange old world.
À bientôt,
t
The British Task
Rather than lecturing our European partners about how wonderful the Union would become if only we all took doses of Mr Broon's medicine, I would like to have heard Blair coming up with someting like this; its from Will Hutton's thoughful "The world we're in."
"The British task.
First and foremost is to realise that, despite a common language we share with the US-the country that grew out of thirteen colonies- the rise of American conservatism has disconnected US civilisation from the European mainstream. Europe is our continent. We share the same history and the same core values. The British approach to the social contract and the public realm lies much nearer to Europe than to the US, and while British capitalism is organised more along US principles than any other EU countries, it has brought us scant advantage.
Inequality in Britain is scandalously high and productivity remains low; Britain’s companies under-invest, under-innovate and under-compete. A decade of raising demand fuelled by a deregulated financial system has given a one-off fix in terms of reducing unemployment: but households cannot go on for ever getting into debt at the same rate, permanently fuelling ever higher consumption. At some stage Britain will have to rely on its underlying productivity-and it is this that bodes ill for the medium term. The country likes to boast that it combines the best of America and Europe. A more honest assessment is that it has developed an economic model that reproduces the worst trends in American capitalism with few of the compensations, but has been unable to build a social contract that delivers anything like the same outcomes as mainland Europe.
Indeed, the dangers of allowing inequality to approach American levels in a small island that remains so European in its attitudes are barely understood. The British will not tolerate, nor can they afford, the ghettoisation of their cities, the emasculation of their public services and the pauperisation of their disadvantaged."
Cheers
t
It ain't what you say......!
As I've said before, it ain't what you say it's they way that you say it, and I'm afraid, I found Mr Broon's
Mansion House speech, or
Blair's at the European Parliament this morning, unlikely to persuade new Europe, let alone France, Germany or Spain. I don't suppose Blair is in the least concerned that it is UKIP and the Sun, who are climbing over each other to support him.
Tim Garton Ash usually gets it right.
He's right on the money today.
Cheers
t
And the Pig Got up.......
http://tinyurl.com/e4bnx
"One evening in October, when I was one-third sober,
An' taking home a ‘load' with manly pride;
My poor feet began to stutter, so I lay down in the gutter,
And a pig came up an' lay down by my side;
Then we sang ‘It's all fair weather when good fellows get together,'
Till a lady passing by was heard to say:
‘You can tell a man who "boozes" by the company he chooses'
And the pig got up and slowly walked away."
"The Pig Got Up and Slowly Walked Away", 1933 song
by Benjamin Hapgood Burt
Cheers
t
And exactly how long do you reckon the US/UK will be chasing their tails in Iraq?
Cheers
t
