July 2006

The first episode of the new series of Doctor Who was screened in Australia last night, and the preview of coming episode showed our old friends the Cybermen. As my son observed, they’re the least satisfactory of the Doctor’s enemies because they are just second-rate Daleks. Today, I opened my copy of the London Review of Books, to find the exact same observation from Jenny Turner, reviewing Kim Newman who objects to the cliched, but apparently universally true, observation, that children watched the series from ‘behind the sofa‘. Support for Rupert Sheldrake, or just evidence that the series reliably produces the same responses in lots of viewers?

Also in my mailbox, after a return from travel was an issue of the Scientific American with the front page headling Do Stem Cells Cause Cancer ? (answer, apparently, yes). My immediate thought was to wonder how long this will take to turn up as a talking point in the Republican alternate universe.

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Well here we are, and I might as well start things off. I’ll be backing Italy. The French team have played some nice football, but France as a nation were largely indifferent to the competition until their team got within sight of the trophy. The Italians, on the other hand, care deeply. My Italian friends will be ecstatic or suicidal; my French ones will either give a smile of contentment or a shrug of resignation.

I’ve been listening a lot to Si Schroeder’s _Coping Mechanisms_ over the last couple of weeks, and wanted to recommend it, although I can’t really describe it very well. My Bloody Valentine is the closest comparison, but it’s still not very close. There’s a free MP3 “here”:http://www.trustmeimathief.com/gallery/sounds/schroedersound/02%20Si%20Schroeder%20-%20Lavendermist.mp3, and you can buy the album as a CD, MP3s, Ogg Vorbis or whatever you like “here”:http://www.trustmeimathief.com/. Full disclosure: I used to know Simon in Dublin, but I haven’t seen him in over six years.

Like many others, I’ve spent much of this week thinking about the bombings in London on 7th July last year. I want to mark the day but find it hard to write anything that’s not superfluous or self-regarding. So I invite you to read the thoughts of anonymous blogger Rachel from north London who was caught up in the bombings, and perhaps to consider signing a petition calling for a public inquiry into the bombings and their aftermath.

More on the Mancini affair. First, the foreign minister, Massimo D’Alema (who’s one of the less pleasant operators on the Italian left imo) has suggested that the Italian government “knew about Abu Omar’s kidnapping”:http://www.repubblica.it/2006/07/sezioni/cronaca/arrestato-mancini/amatop-riforma-servizi/amatop-riforma-servizi.html.

bq. It appears to me unlikely that operations of this sort, which seems to have involved actors at the highest level of the services, could have taken place totally unbeknownst to the political authorities (my translation).

Second, the justice minister, Giuliano Amato has suggested that there may be a need to reform the secret services. There appears to be a debate taking place within the Italian government over whether the blame should be laid at the door of individual actors within SISMI or SISMI as a whole. Amato is being quite cautious – but hinting that serious reforms are needed. Prodi is even more cautious – but may become less so as this develops (see below).

Finally, Laura Rozen links to a “story”:http://www.eurotrib.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2006/7/6/184443/8436 at the _European Tribune_ suggesting that Mancini was running an elaborate dirty tricks operation with dossiers on thousands of Italians considered enemies of the previous Italian government. I’m not sure what the sourcing is for this piece, but it’s certainly interesting and consistent with much of what we know already.

Now on the one hand, as “Robert Waldmann”:http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2006/07/not-seeing-forest-for-trees-brad_06.html suggests, none of this is likely to surprise many Italians. There’s a long tradition in Italy of “dietrologia” – of assuming that politics is a shadow play, where the really important things happen back stage among clandestine actors of one sort or another. Most Italians will likely be less surprised that SISMI was involved than at the revelation that some within SISMI seem to have resisted the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar. But on the other, there does seem to be an interesting political realignment taking place. I wouldn’t like to bet hard money that the Italian government is going to use the scandal as an excuse to clear out some of the rotten wood from the Italian intelligence services, which have traditionally been run like a state within a state (think of a combination of the worst attributes of J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton and you won’t go far wrong). But Romano Prodi is among those who have suffered directly from smear campaigns run by people with SISMI connections in the past, and may well be personally inclined to do something about it, as the scandal gathers force. It’s also becoming increasingly clear that there were connections between SISMI and the Berlusconi government which went considerably beyond formal lines of authority, suggesting that there may be some political gains to be made by investigating further. More as this develops.

Well, this will be a short post…

Usually I avoid writing about annoying aspects of Belgian life and its weird mix of individual opportunism and ossified institutional arrangements (what I call ‘the dodgy and the stodgy’). There are endless examples; landlords that leave their non-Belgian tenants without power or water but sic the authorities on them at even the threat of non-payment; the ISP I never received service from which nonetheless billed me for months, ignored registered letters, and only desisted when the very efficient Dutch debt collection company they used reviewed the correspondence and sighed ‘yes, this seems to happen a lot, there’. And then there’s the schizophrenic Belgian tendency to ignore people in distress in public places (ask any ex-pat whose been knocked off their bike, attacked, mugged, or just fallen over in the street) yet go on enormous public protests following murders. And don’t get me started on the bizaare collective amnesia about the Congo.
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Michael Ledeen fails to think things through:

In today’s “reportage” of the World Cup semifinal between Italy and Germany, the (lefty) Washington Post reported that the game-winning goal was scored on a left-footed kick, while the (righty) Washington Times reported it was scored on a right-footed kick. The Post account was correct, but don’t you find it mysteriously symbolic of something or other?

I…words fail me.

A rather important political development in Italy. Marco Mancini, the second-in-command of SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency has been “arrested”:http://www.repubblica.it/2006/07/sezioni/cronaca/arrestato-mancini/arrestato-mancini/arrestato-mancini.html, along with his former boss, General Gustavo Pignero, for his part in the extraordinary rendition/kidnapping of Abu Omar. The “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/world/europe/05cnd-italy.html?hp&ex=1152158400&en=4d148c71cfab4a33&ei=5094&partner=homepage also has a piece on this, but its focus is on the magistrates’ decisions to issue arrest warrants for four Americans who were allegedly involved. It seems to me that the SISMI part of the story is the more important one. There’s no prospect that the US is going to comply with warrants issued against its agents, but there is a real possibility of substantial political repercussions from the SISMI arrests.

The path to justice in Italy is a long and tortuous one – arrest by magistrates is no guarantee of successful prosecution. But the arrest of a key figure in the Italian intelligence agency suggests that the unwritten rules of Italian politics are changing. SISMI has traditionally been a law unto itself, with many connections to shady right wing groups in Italian politics, and an unstated presumption of judicial immunity. This may not be true any longer. The Italian government has issued a statement which is a quite perfect example of the art of flowery Italian political rhetoric – effusive and entirely meaningless expressions of confidence in the loyalty of the Italian intelligence apparatus to the state, which strongly suggest to me that some of the principals of aforementioned intelligence apparatus are being measured for the chopping block. Readers of “Laura Rozen”:http://warandpiece.com/ and “Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ will remember that there are many interesting things that Mancini’s boss, Nicolo Pollari, could reveal about Nigerien uranium and forged documents should he choose to. It’s still unlikely that he’ll be forced to make that choice, but it’s a little more likely than it was yesterday.

Kieran has been complaining about mixed metaphors, but at least the mixer avoids directly contradicting themselves. Which is perhaps more than can be said for Paul Kelso writing in the Guardian blog.

bq. Few would bet with confidence against Scolari coaxing another odds-defying performance from his side.

I’m not as confident as several of the commentators here that prices in betting markets are a good guide to the truth, but even I think they are a decent guide as to what people will bet, and even bet with confidence, on.

Consider this a France v Portugal open thread. Everyone else I know is cheering for France, with good reason, but I still feel a little bad for the Portugese fans after they missed what must have seemed like a golden opportunity to win Euro 2004. So I’m probably going to feel bad for whoever loses, which is always a great way to watch a football game.

Senator Ted Stevens is getting a lot of stick for “his description”:http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/index.blog?entry_id=1512499 of how the Internet works:

bq. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now, Net Neutrality is great and everything, and Stevens is on the wrong side of that issue (and many others), but why all the snickering? Sure, he rambles a bit, and in the long version he accidentally says “an internet was sent by my staff” when he clearly means “an email.” It seems, though, that it’s his saying “tubes” and “a series of tubes” that’s provoking most of the derision. But network nerds the world over regularly refer to the availability of bandwidth in terms of fat or narrow “pipes”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Pipe, which is essentially the same imagery. Odd.

Just drawing in toward half time. Good game so far. Germany look good. (The Referee has done very well, too.) I hope Germany edge it in regulation.

_Update_: 72nd minute. Very funny incident w/the Italian No. 16, who fell down writhing with the agonies unto death. The Ref ran back to him, clearly said something like “Get up you fucker or I’ll book you,” and the guy jumped up and ran off double-quick.

_Update_: Well, that was a dramatic last two minutes. Fair dues to the Italians.

The kids got a toy food set and … well, here it is:

Click for a larger image. ‘Cleanlily’. Use that in a sentence. ‘The nurse employed the sterilized instruments cleanlily, but her smile said ‘naughtily’.’

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Many thanks to Steven Poole for a very stimulating series of guest posts on topics as diverse as football, religion, Chomsky and torture. Be sure to head over to Steven’s own blog “unspeak.net”:http://unspeak.net/ , from where you can follow the links to buy his excellent book Unspeak in which he dissects the evasive and shameful rhetoric of our many professional apologists for power.

Writing yesterday in the Independent, Alan Dershowitz makes the familiar case that modern terrorism poses such an unprecedented threat to western society that the law needs to be rewritten. He argues, for example, that “we need rules even for such unpleasant practices” as “waterboarding” – or, to speak plainly, water torture. There are currently plenty of rules on interrogation in general, laid out in places like the UN Convention Against Torture, Geneva, and the extant 1992 edition of the US Army’s own Field Manual FM 34-52 on Intelligence Interrogation; it’s just that the US government doesn’t feel like following them. Dershowitz supposes that this might be moot because people suspected of contemporary terrorism “do not fit into the old, anachronistic categories” such as PoWs, and so it is unclear what it is permissible to do to them. In fact, CAT, UDHR and so on leave no possible category of human being unprotected from torture or other inhumane or degrading treatment.

Alternatively, he appears to suppose that it might be moot on the grounds that “waterboarding” is too newfangled to have been explicitly prohibited. I Am Not A Lawyer, but this seems no better an argument.
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