Wednesday, 20th February 2008
10:07am
There is, obviously enough, much discussion about the debacle of Northern Rock and whether the Chancellor is now a broken reed as a result of government dithering and incompetence. I think the real story is somewhat different and rather more fundamental. Many have commented on the Prime Minister’s shattered appearance and have put this down to the strain of dealing with Northern Rock. But from all I read and, more especially, hear it seems to me that Gordon Brown has simply lost it, period.
His behaviour is erratic and bizarre; he phones colleagues at all hours with imperious demands while dithering over every decision he has to take. Ever since things started to go wrong for him and public fury and cynicism boiled over, he has clearly been radically destabilised. He seems to be wholly unable to cope with criticism, and more to the point unable therefore to look clearly at what is so patently going wrong and put it right. He tries to big-foot every minister and meddle in every department for all the world as if he has an uncontrollable tic; he is the Touretter of public administration. Yet the more he meddles, the more everything falls to pieces underneath him.
Northern Wreck may be headline news, but almost every day brings further evidence of what can only be described as the systematic collapse of public administration in Britain. In a country which once ran an entire empire and thus constructed a legend of administrative genius, the word ‘couldn’t’, ‘run’ and ‘whelk-stall’ are now on everybody’s lips. Today, for example we are told that the Crown Prosecution Service managed to lose a disc containing the DNA details of 4,000 offenders, some of whom are believed to be murderers and rapists, which the Dutch sent to Britain to be checked against the national DNA database. When the disc finally turned up in a drawer last month, it was discovered that these details match up against 11 people who have committed further crimes in Britain during the past year, a figure which could end up being very much higher. In the same month that this disc went missing, it emerged that 27,000 paper records on British citizens who had committed crimes abroad had been left in boxes in the Home Office rather than being entered on the Police National Computer; and it provides further embarrassment for the Home Office, which recently revealed that it had cleared more than 10,000 illegal immigrants to work as security guards.
The
Times supplies a helpful time-line of missing data debacles:
January 2007 Revealed that since 1997 nearly 1,600 government computers containing sensitive information had been stolen
September A CD containing the names, national insurance numbers, dates of birth and pension data of 15,000 Standard Life customers lost
October Laptop with data about 2,000 people with ISAs stolen from a Revenue & Customs employee
November 20 News of two CDs with details of 25 million Britons lost in post from a Revenue & Customs office in Tyne & Wear
November 23 Emerges that six more CDs with confidential information had gone missing
December 6 Four CDs containing details from court cases go missing
December 17 Details of three million British learner drivers lost in the US
December 18 Revenue loses data of 6,500 private pension holders
December 23 Nine NHS trusts in England say they have lost patient records kept on discs
January 9, 2008 Laptop with details of 600,000 people taken from navy officer’s car in Birmingham
January 26 Details of 1,500 students lost in the post.
With public administration in chaos and Gordon Brown in Drowning Street, one has to ask – just who is in charge of the clattering British train?
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Tuesday, 19th February 2008
7:48am
There is some excitement over the draft document on the nature of the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the world which was written in 2002 by John Williams, who was then the Foreign Office press officer, and which has just been released. This was a precursor of the Government's own dossier on the threat, which was presented to Parliament as part of the case for war. The Times tells us:
an analysis of the two dossiers shows that each lists similar intelligence judgments about the threat from Iraq, although they appear in a different order.
Well golly gosh and just fancy that. It is being claimed that this proves that the government’s dossier on the threat from Saddam -- exhibit A for the charge that we were taken to war on a lie because the dossier contained a claim (subsequently said to have had no legs) that Saddam had weapons that could be deployed within 45 minutes of an instruction to do so – was not the intelligence document it was held to be but had been cooked up by government spin doctors. The Times says:
Mr Williams who has said that he wrote his draft ‘hurriedly over a weekend’ in early September 2002 – a day or so before the JIC produced its first draft – claimed Iraq was ‘covertly attempting to acquire technology and materials for use in nuclear weapons’. In similar vein, the JIC dossier said Iraq was trying ‘covertly to acquire technology and materials which could be used in the production of nuclear weapons’.
The Williams dossier said Iraq was developing a longer-range missile ‘capable of threatening Nato (Greece and Turkey)’. The JIC dossier referred to the development of missiles ‘capable of reaching the UK sovereign base areas in Cyprus and Nato members (Greece and Turkey)’. The Williams draft said Iraq had ‘retained a dozen al-Hussein missiles capable of carrying a chemical or biological warhead’. The JIC accused Iraq of ‘illegally retaining 20 al-Hussein missiles’. Both the Williams draft and the JIC dossier referred to Iraq’s acquisition of uranium, ‘despite having no civil nuclear programme’.
Question: which is more likely, that a) a Foreign Office press officer would invent all this evidence of what Saddam was up to off the top of his head or b) that he would have copied chunks word for word from Foreign Office/intelligence estimates of the threat from Saddam which had already been made and which formed the basis of the dossier that the government eventually presented to Parliament?
What’s more, given the hysteria about the 45-minute claim, it is also striking that this did not appear in the Williams draft. That is because it wasn’t yet a claim that the intelligence service was making.
John Williams himself appears naively to believe that
a fair-minded reader will conclude that what I wrote was consistent with the UN approach on which I was at the time focused.
No chance. The ‘Blair lied people died’ crowd have seized on his draft as proof that the whole thing was cooked up by spin doctors, just as they had always said. Williams now apparently thinks that his belief at the time, that the government was right about the threat posed by Saddam, was wrong. But in his somewhat confusingly written piece for the Guardian, he says this about his opposition at that time to the government’s decision to produce a dossier at all:
I wrote a note that August arguing it should not be for Britain to take on the burden of proof, rather Saddam should be obliged to show he no longer had weapons of mass destruction. This was what the UN resolutions had long asked him to do.
Absolutely. The case for war was always that Saddam was in breach of those resolutions and the cease-fire agreement at the end of the 1991 war by failing to show that he had dismantled his WMD programmes. That is why he was still a threat and why the war was legal and just. The terrible strategic error Blair made was to take the burden of proof away from him by trying to get a further UN resolution and then seeking to prove the case against Saddam to the public. When that politically-driven strategy failed, people concluded wrongly that there was no case for war.
One further question. Just what do people think was in the super-secret Syrian facility bombed by Israel last year -- and where did it come from?
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Monday, 18th February 2008
1:13am
The BBC has been caught with its prejudices showing so badly that it has actually apologised, albeit in weaselly fashion. As the Jerusalem Post reports, it equated the murdered former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and the Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh who was killed in Damascus last week as ‘great national leaders’ in the Lebanese mind.
The BBC took the unusual step after Don Mell, the Associated Press's former photographer in Beirut, lambasted the parallel, drawn by BBC correspondent Humphrey Hawkesley in a BBC World report last Thursday, as ‘an outrage’ and ‘beyond belief.’
American journalist Mell was held up at gunpoint by Mughniyeh's men as his colleague Terry Anderson, AP's chief Middle East correspondent, was kidnapped in Beirut in March 1985. Hawkesley's report on what he called ‘an amazing day for Lebanon,’ when a memorial rally for Hariri was followed by Mughniyeh's funeral, concluded: ‘The army is on full alert as Lebanon remembers two war victims with different visions but both regarded as great national leaders.
The BBC later said that the scripting of this phrase was imprecise and open to misinterpretation because The description of Imad Mughniyeh should have been directly attributed to those demonstrating their support for him.
Well, that’s more than a bit iffy in itself. The idea that the Lebanese should regard Mugniyeh and Hezbollah, a violent invading force in their country which plunged them into war and of which they are trying desperately to rid themselves, as anything other than a terrible plague is simply perverse.
Poor show all round.
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12:49am
Violent attacks on British Jews hit record levels last year, although the overall number of anti-Jewish incidents was down slightly on the previous year to its second highest level ever. As the Guardian reports:
Overall, in 2007 there were a record 114 violent assaults, one of which resulted in life-threatening injuries, among 547 race hate incidents against the Jewish community.
To put this in context, there are around 280,000 affiliated Jews in Britain (out of a population of more than 60 million). Given how reluctant many Jews are to report the harassment to which they are subjected, I reckon these figures — which are high in relation to the size of the community — understate the true situation.
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12:20am
In the week that the Hezbollah terrorist mastermind Imad Mugniyah was killed in Damascus, it turns out that advisers to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Israel-bashing Zbigniew Brzezinski for Obama and Hassan Nemazee for Clinton, both fetched up in Syria too. What in the world were they doing, in the middle of an American presidential campaign, in a place listed by the US State Department as a terrorist-sponsoring state? asked the
New York Sun. No-one in the Clinton camp provided an answer. As for Brzezinski, he
himself issued a statement to the Ba’athist controlled press in Damascus, where he was quoted by the official Sana News Agency as saying that the ‘talks dealt with recent regional developments, affirming that both sides have a common desire to achieve stability in the region, which would benefit both its people and the United States.’
But what can the US have in common with Syria, a key component of the axis of evil and the operational ally of Iran? As the NYS asks: Where is the sense of reality about who President Assad is and what his regime is all about? To suggest, as the Syrians report Mr. Brzezinski said, that they share some kind of common interest in respect of ‘stability’ is disingenuous…Where do they stand in respect of Syria — and why can't they bring themselves to explain what their advisers are doing in the capital of one of the countries most hostile to America and Israel?
It would be nice if the rest of the US media could tear itself away from the spectacle of Hillary v Princess Obama and start asking such questions too.
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Friday, 15th February 2008
2:04pm
Professor Gwyn Prins, one of the authors of the RUSI report made a most important point on the Today programme (0830) when he observed that 'we are at war', although we are behaving as if we are in peacetime. This is undoubtedly true and is the source of so much of the current confusion (Guantanamo, 42 days, etc) and wholly inadequate government and establishment response to the Islamist threat. As the report asks:
Is there any longer a clear distinction between being at war and not being at war? A declaration of war is almost inconceivable today, and yet both our defence and security services are in action against active forces, abroad and at home, at this moment.
The resulting confusion and unease, the report suggests, has produced
uneasy similarities with the years just before the First World War
Too many in that establishment cannot get their heads round the fact that, while what we are up against is not war as conventionally understood, ie aggression between states, it is much more than terrorism (not to mention ‘crime’ as the government would have it) because of the strategic goals, which are the overthrow of the west. Partly because the establishment persists in thinking that as this is such a preposterous proposition (how can people stuck in the 7
th century possibly ever overthrow the most powerful civilisation in the history of the planet? Too ridiculous for words, dear boy!) it could never happen and therefore should not be taken seriously, and partly because that establishment is so terrified by the implications of a religious war of cultural conquest that it takes refuge in a myriad different fatuous other explanations for what is happening.
The real problem, as the report says, is that there is no common agreement about the existence, nature or priority of the threats that we face, a lack of consensus which leaves us open to ambush.
A vicious circle has thus been set up. There is no coherent and comprehensive mechanism for the analysis of risks and threats within government that the electorate can see to exist, and so rely on. When the unexpected occurs, the response to it is likely to be incoherent and ad hoc: short-termist and uncertain. This encourages government to ‘spin’ and manipulate, to cover the shortfall in real strength and coherence with public relations ploys. This will play into our enemies’ strengths.
And at the very core of all of this lies the deepest problem of all – the fact that in Britain we no longer know what we are. With confidence in our cultural identity all but destroyed, we cannot defend that identity any more. That’s what has to be addressed. That’s why multiculturalism is so lethal for us. That’s why the Archbishop’s comments were a declaration of national suicide. The report suggests ways of addressing these core issues by taking security out of the arena of party politics. Can this be done? Is there the political will to do it? Or are we trapped in a vicious circle as a result of the very collapse of national self-confidence that the report identifies?
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10:05am
The stark warning published today by the Royal United Services Institute about Britain’s catastrophic failure to deal with the issue of terrorism and extremism is of the highest importance. Written by group of former military chiefs, diplomats, analysts and academics for a body which is an internationally recognised authority on defence and security issues and which has been described by Gordon Brown as ‘leading the debate about homeland security and global terrorism’, it is an absolutely devastating condemnation of the government’s failure to even conceptualise the problem let alone deal with adequately. It argues that
The UK presents itself as a target, as a fragmenting, post-Christian society
which is increasingly divided on its history, national aims, values and political identity.
That fragmentation is worsened by the firm self-image of those elements within it who refuse to integrate.
This is principally caused by
a lack of leadership from the majority, which, in misplaced deference to 'multiculturalism', failed to lay down the line to immigrant communities, thus undercutting those within them trying to fight extremism…The country's lack of self-confidence is in stark contrast to the implacability of its Islamist terrorist enemy, within and without. We look like a soft touch. We are indeed a soft touch, from within and without.
In addition, Britain has only a
bare-bones defence and security establishment
relying on a weakening UN, Nato and EU which leaves it open to threat.
The government has issued a furious response claiming that the RUSI report is out of date and citing all the great things it is doing. But as Professor Gwyn Prins, one of the report’s authors, said this morning on the Today programme, such claims are utterly spurious. Both in allowing and even exacerbating the progressive fragmentation of British society and the appalling weakening of our military and defence infrastructure, the government and British establishment have left this country wide open to the pincer movement of cultural colonisation and terrorist attack being mounted against it by the Islamic jihad. In the wake of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s shocking remarks and this week’s perverse Court of Appeal judgment which rewrote and emasculated the Terrorism Act 2000, the RUSI warning could not be more timely — and more chilling.
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9:10am
Last night I appeared on BBC One’s Question Time.
You can also hear my interview with Stephen Crittenden on Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Religion Report here.
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Thursday, 14th February 2008
12:11am
This is too good not to share.
Enjoy.
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Friday, 15th February 2008
6:49pm
If it is true, as Hezbollah is claiming, that its deputy chief Imad Mughniyah has been killed by the Israelis, this is an immensely significant development — a real blow against Iran and almost certainly an astounding coup for the Mossad.*
As Amir Oren writes in
Ha’aretz, Mughniyeh was at the top of the FBI’s most wanted list, second only to Osama bin Laden and more important even than Hassan Nazrullah, Hezbollah’s leader.
Iran saw Mughniyah as a crucial asset. Along with the Iranian ambassador and the commander of the Revolution Guard Corps, Mughniyah served as the Iranian presence in Lebanon. All of the Iranian-planned terrorist attacks carried out by Hezbollah were masterminded by Mughniyah himself.
His significance was not merely that he was held responsible for a long list of atrocities, including the bombings of the Israeli embassy and the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994, a wave of abductions of Westerns in Lebanon in the 1980s, the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy and marine barracks in Beirut which killed over 350, and many more outrages. He was probably the most cunning, audacious and strategic terrorist in the world. Because of his outstanding demonic prowess and the fact that he was linked to al Qaeda (all those who labour under the delusion that Iran and al Qaeda could not be in alliance please note) there are those in the intelligence world who believe that 9/11 could not have taken place without his input. As the Jerusalem Post reports:
He also apparently had strong ties with Al Qaida and according to the testimony of Ali Mohammed, a senior Al Qaida operative who was arrested for involvement in the attacks on American embassies in Africa, Mughniyeh met with Bin Laden in Sudan in 1993. Hizbullah, Mohammed said, provided explosives training for Al-Qaida fighters. This relationship and the fact that Mughniyeh was Hizbullah's liaison to Al Qaida, has led western intelligence agencies to raise the possibility that he was also involved in the 9/11 attacks.
The blow to Iran from his death is severe — a rare and serious setback for the godfathers of terror in Tehran. It is therefore a great victory in the war for civilisation. But for Jews worldwide, it must also be a source of renewed anxiety. Iran may well want to take its revenge and, as we saw in Buenos Aires, Jews around the world are considered to be legitimate targets. As ever, we now hold our breath.
*UPDATE: A number of conspiracy theories are beginning to circulate around the question of who actually killed him. Time magazine carries a piece about the speculation.
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