John Mortell’s blog

Interesting article from the BBC here that, if accurate, undermines pretty thoroughly the claims for the ’surveillance society’:

The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals.
In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers.

.. Is the fascinating headline from this foreign policy article. As you can probably guess from my other articles on the topic, I’m quite interested in the idea that military power (at least in terms of the ‘West’) can/is becoming more based on drones/remote power that is both cheaper and less intensive with regards to manpower. For example the article notes that

According to the Government Accountability Office, $24.5 million will purchase a set of four MQ-9 Reaper hunter-killer drones plus a ground station and satellite relay (while) .. The latest guess of the price for a single F-35 fighter-bomber is $100 million.

When the same article notes that one man can run four drones at the same time, this differential in manpower and price becomes obvious. Though as in pointed out in the other article I linked to, what such a difference in risk to your own soldiers means in terms of Western nations willingness to go to war is anybody’s guess.

Anyway, the foreign policy article has some interesting notes about Afghanistan, including the suggestion that current military planners are looking at the wrong lessons from history and should instead be looking at periods of ‘peace’ (relatively) in Afghanistan, rather than the British / Russian invasions…. All worth a look.

Just one of the things that U.S soldiers have thought Afghan children to say in this Liveleak video:

On one hand, its hard not to appreciate the frustration of (mostly) younger men stuck in the position these guys are in, but somehow, I doubt the U.S media handlers for the army appreciates this sort of thing….

Horrific idea here coming out of a Seymour Hersh talk to the American Civil Liberties Union which suggests that as a means of torturing female combatants who were arrested with children, the children were sexually assualted as a means of putting their parents under pressure.

The video of the talk can be found here with the important parts coming in at an 1hour 30 with a Guardian article here mentioning rape as an ‘interrogation tool’.

As I said to my supervisor last week when having a quick meeting about my dissertation, the most unexpected problem I have encountered is not a strictly ‘academic’ one but rather, that the topic itself, namely the Lebanon war of 2006 is quite depressing.

I don’t mean ‘depressing’ in a sort of existentialist way of ‘war is hell’ or ‘why can’t people just get along’ sense, but rather that I’m finding it very hard to read about many of the (mostly Israeli) actions that have tremendous human impact and the general human suffering involved, and either maintain some feeling of objectivity and, more importantly (at least for my personal sanity) do not leave me with an unhelpful feeling of anger or disgust directed at the Israeli state..

In many ways this feeling come from several different areas.. Which for my own health and sanity I want to break down to see if I can make sense of the constituent parts:

For starters, I am not exactly what you would call pro-Israel. I generally believe that the Israeli state is sectarian, racist and generally quite unpleasant in its dealings with many of its neighbours and ‘Arab’ citizens (also with ‘Jews’ that don’t make the cut for whatever reason, like the Russian immigrants or the ‘African’ Jews). The main problem I have here is that I can accept that some of my prejudices are just that, and that the alternative states in the region are not exactly ‘good’.. But that still doesn’t excuse or block the fact that for me, the persistent, consistent and obvious abuses committed by Israel.. at the very least make it hard for me to maintain my objectivity.

As an example, one of the things that have gotten to me most in reading about the war is that Israel, in the last 48 hours of the conflict, while negotiating a cease-fire dropped cluster bombs on Lebanon. Apparently, just to kick the Lebanese population ‘while it was down’. Given that I’ve seen articles on the BBC talking about the civilian deaths from this war, there use seems to just be a means of terrorising the population.

So, solution to problem one – find (reasonable) sources, that can explain to me, without using the mindset that they’re ‘just filthy Arabs’ why Israel’s actions are correct or moral.

Problem two – the fact that I’m being bothered by the morality. I’m having a hard time distancing myself from the current situation. While writing this would probably be easier if I could just ‘turn off’ any political senses I have, the general current historical proximity of the events makes this pretty hard, if not impossible.

The other major problem I have is that I’m having a hard time finding a focus in this topic. Partially it is because there seem to be no books on anything to do with the Middle East in which you do not at the very least find gross distortions or lies. But mostly it is just the problem of finding something that I can sink my teeth into enough without getting .. dragged down perhaps? As an example, anything pro-Hezbollah, skirts dangerously close at times to ‘evil hooked-nosed Jews came and ate my baby’… While things like Robert Fisk often spend quite a length of time discussing how ‘this old woman lost her entire family to a disproportionate Israeli attack’… But as I’ve sad in my ‘problem one’, finding anything that isn’t basically the ‘Faux news’ version of the world that supports Israel is nearly impossible.. In terms of my focus, this is making it very difficult to find a focus that I can feel comfortable with.

On the other hand, speaking of my prejudices, I’m not certain that they are a problem. Mainly because I am willing to acknowledge that I have them? But on this factor, I’m not certain.

Anyway, apologies for the rambling, and (probably) incoherent nature of this post, but I had it suggested to me that doing something like this may at least get other people to give me helpful suggestions, or would at least help me sort it out in my own head..

I have always been a bit suspicious of the idea that it is a good thing to use profiling as a means of catching criminals and/or terrorists and I was pleased to see this article that suggests that it actually is not the most accurate means of catching people:

According to new research, it is no more effective to profile strongly—that is, subject individuals to increased scrutiny in proportion to their presumed likelihood of malfeasance—than it is to randomly flag individuals in the general population when it comes to rooting out terrorism. The reason, says study author William Press, a computer scientist and computational biologist at the University of Texas at Austin: terrorists are vastly outnumbered by innocents, and it’s a waste of time and money to screen and rescreen the same benign people.

Interesting interview from today’s Guardian with the woman most associated with the Abu Ghraib scandal. While there’s no major insights, it does show you a more human element to the workings of the people involved.

England’s sense of persecution is so advanced at this stage that the question of whether or not she is contrite has almost no meaning. In the most notorious photo, she holds a leash with a naked man crawling out of his cell on the end of it. In another, she makes the thumbs up sign behind a human pyramid. In another, she grins at a naked prisoner as he is forced to simulate masturbation.

After the photos came out, people looked at England’s childhood for some kind of explanatory episode, an early demonstration of cruelty, or else evidence that she had herself been abused. While Graner, the ringleader and the man who took some of the photos, has had three court orders secured against him by his ex-wife for alleged domestic violence, England, 10 years his junior, barely had a backstory at all. She was, she says, only in trouble at school once, when a boy in her science class talked her into writing a letter making fun of the teacher. “And I apparently left it on the floor in the classroom. She knew the handwriting. I was, like, he made me do it.”

This article brought a huge smile to my face…

Some analysts write fearful tracts that the pirates have links with terrorists and extremists, that the chaos is a direct result of international neglect of Somalia, and try to link pirates to the islamist insurgency that control much of the south or the recent terrorist bombings in Somaliland. This is nonsense. The origins of Somali piracy are not found in the southern half of the country, where a “transitional government” is dueling the Union of Islamic Courts with the half-hearted assistance of the Ethiopian military. Somali piracy originates in Puntland, a self-declared autonomous region of Somalia at the horn, hailed for years by policymakers as a model of a stable Somali state. Piracy has its origins in the organized communities of the Puntland coast. In the 1990s, a group of fisherman in settlements there banded together to prevent illegal fishing and the dumping of toxic waste off their shores. This harmless community action inspired many analysts to designate Puntland a model for Somali civil society. When some ships illegally fishing were boarded in attempts to police the region, the reward offered for the boats return was enormous—amounts that were many times the monthly income of entire villages. Piracy took off as an attempt to gain income from this type of civic policing, and slowly grew to what Kaplan called the “innocence” of piracy. It wasn’t long before the pirates became more ambitious, using the fishing boats they captured to hunt larger prey. And with the money that came in, small fishing towns were transformed into pirate havens. As responsible organizers, pirates have invested some of their profits back into the franchise, replacing barely seaworthy rafts with speedboats, AK-47s with modern arms, and GPS tracking systems to boot. The East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme says there were just 100 Somali pirates in action in 2005, but there are now well over 1,000.

Fascinating idea that the Somali pirates are probably the most organised and representative group in Somalia at the minute….

Good stuff..

Amazing to hear even more evidence that the Bush administration knew that there was absolutely no evidence that there were W.M.D’s in Iraq: