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10. august 2005
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This doesn't sound good at all:
Armed men entered Baghdad's municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city's mayor and installed a member of Iraq's most powerful Shiite militia.
The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d'état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.
"This is the new Iraq," said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. "They use force to achieve their goal."
The group that ousted him insisted that it had the authority to assume control of Iraq's capital city and that Mr. Tamimi was in no danger. The man the group installed, Hussein al-Tahaan, is a member of the Badr Organization, the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri.
The militia has been credited with keeping the peace in heavily Shiite areas in southern Iraq but also accused of abuses like forcing women to wear the veils demanded by conservative Shiite religious law.
"If we wanted to do something bad to him, we would have done that," said Mazen A. Makkia, the elected city council chief who led the ouster on Monday and who had been in a lengthy and unresolved legal feud with Mr. Tamimi.
"We really want to establish the state of law for every citizen, and we did not threaten anyone," Mr. Makkia said. "This is not a coup."
You could have fooled me, from the above description.
Update: Interview on Radio Free Iraq.
If al-Tamimi had indeed resigned from office, it is hard to make this out to be a coup. Obviously, storming the office with an armed militia, and abusing personell, is not what you'd expect in a democratic state.
8:42:48 PM 
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It appears the US intelligence failures before 9/11-01 were even worse than we thought.
The New York Times published a report today claiming, in part, “a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States.” This DoD unit supposedly made the identification in 2000. Assuming this is accurate, it is another outrage against "the wall," the Department of Justice (DOJ) driven policy in place at the time that prevented Intelligence agents from easily sharing information with criminal investigators and prosecutors. This policy was one of the key problems identified by the 9/11 Commission in the Government’s failure to “connect the dots” before the 9/11 terror attacks.
Via Roger, here is a distrubing section from the Associated Press:
Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. and vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, said Tuesday the men were identified in 1999 by a classified military intelligence unit known as ``Able Danger.'' If true, that's an earlier link to al-Qaida than any previously disclosed intelligence about Atta. [...]
Weldon said that in September 2000 Able Danger recommended that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI ``so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists.'' However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because they said Atta and the others were in the country legally so information on them could not be shared with law enforcement.
As has been known for some time, one of the people behind the disastrous "wall" between intelligence and security services, that prevented effective anti-terror cooperation, was September 11 panel commissioner Jamie S. Gorelick. It's not a good idea to leave security entirely in the hands of lawyers.
Another pressing question: Why was this hidden from the same official 9/11 commission?
Michael Cutler adds:
I am astounded at the foolishness of how our government works, or more often, fails to work! This International Herald Tribune article on the Mohammed Atta cell (a reprint of the original NYT story) glossed over the fact that the information that was obtained by the military apparently was not sent to the State Department to add to the department's watch list! What the article failed to state is that one of the reasons for putting this sort of information on the State Department watch list is to provide guidance to State Department officials who ultimately make the decision whether or not to issue visas to aliens seeking entry into the United States. This is, in effect, the first line of defense for our nation. Any strategist will agree that the best way to deal with a threat, or a potential threat, is to keep it as far away as possible.
Cutler is an outspoken critic of the US visa waiver programme. In this case, even visa checking was futile since information known by one government agency simply failed to make it to another government agency.
7:21:00 PM
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A Norwegian portal service, Neste Klikk (Next Click), has just linked my blog with this amusing commentary [my translation]:
On Jan Haugland's and Bjørn Stærk's blogs and the group blog Document.no, the vocabulary is at times strong and characterised by war rhetoric.
Oh my. My fellow countrymen come here looking for angry words and war rhetoric, and I can't just let them down... Hang on. I'll think of something really angry and war-like to say soon. In the meantime, I hope you feel at home and read on. Eventuelt i min norske avdeling.
5:26:21 PM
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Microsoft has won a serious settlement from a spammer:
US software giant Microsoft has won a $7m (£3.9m) court settlement from a businessman considered to be one of the world's biggest senders of spam e-mail.
Scott Richter agreed to pay the sum after Microsoft filed a lawsuit against his internet firm Opt In Real Big.
Microsoft alleged Opt In Real Big had sent millions of unsolicited commercial e-mails, using forged sender names and false subject lines. [...]
"We have now proven that we can take one of the most profitable spammers in the world and separate him from his money," said Microsoft chief counsel Brad Smith.
"I think that sends a powerful message to other people who might be tempted to engage in illegal spam."
In Russia, they send even harsher messages.
4:34:30 PM
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Damian Thompson worries that hardly anyone bothers to refute and debunk conspiracy theories. These are common enough among among western people - witness the popularity of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, or the many people who believe the CIA murdered John F. Kennedy, or that the US government was behind 9/11. It takes on an even more sinister quality (or lack thereof) when you talk about conspiracy theories that are endemic among minorities, including Britain's Muslim population.
My local Islamic bookshop is a ramshackle place whose volumes are barely visible through a mist of dust and burnt spices. Here the jovial staff - "All right, mate?" - will sell you commentaries on the Koran, hanging lamps, copper teapots and phone cards. They will also dispense, equally cheerfully, copies of a paperback which explains that Jews ritually murder Christian children and use their blood to season Passover matzo balls.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a version of the medieval "blood libel" cooked up by the tsarist secret police a century ago. It is a work of the blackest propaganda, its every assertion demonstrably false. Yet it is circulating in 21st-century Britain, through bookshops, online book services and websites, nearly all of them Islamic but by no means all of them readily identifiable as the "extremist" outlets that Tony Blair proscribed at his press conference yesterday. The audience for the Protocols stretches far beyond fanatical jihadists; no one has surveyed "moderate" Muslims to discover how many accept its central tenet, but my guess is that community spokesmen would have a hard time accounting for the results on the Today programme.
Of course, given the prevalence of conspiracy theories in the west, we should not be surprised. Even as science moves forward, conspiracy theorists keep clothing their fantastic stories in a pseudo-scientific language, and many are impressed. It's pretty harmless to believe that Atlantis existed in Antarctica, but less so to believe that "alternative" medicine is preferable to medical science.
The health section, meanwhile, stocks as many titles rubbishing medical science as those explaining it. These, too, are conspiracy theories, and not as harmless as they appear. (A musician friend of mine will walk with a stick for the rest of her life after natural healers identified the emotional roots of a "virus" that turned out to be a near-fatal bacterial infection.)
Even more serious problems, however, come from pseudo-historical tales that invents a villain, and that villain may well be the western world, or the Jews, or the Hindus, and these conspiracy theories fuel the murderous hatred of the jihadists. Ironically, it is modern technology that has exploded conspiracy theories into the mainstream.
One effect of these books is the pollution of intellectual life: intimidated by the success of Pyramids of the Gods and The Da Vinci Code, real archaeologists and historians are increasingly presenting the past as a succession of mysteries. But it is the broader methodology of this "hidden wisdom" that poses the real threat - because it is employed, among others, by British suicide bombers.
All conspiracy theories collect supposed facts to bolster an existing thesis: the reverse of scientific method. Political conspiracy theories, alleging a global plot by the powers of Satan, have circulated in their modern form since the 18th century - "circulated" being the operative word, since they have depended on literature being passed from hand to hand. Television speeded up this process in the Middle East, thanks to the Arab world's Jew-obsessed state broadcasters. But it was the internet that really opened up the apocalyptic possibilities of what the American historian Richard Landes calls "self-brainwashing".
Perhaps the problem is that way too few people are willing to step on people's toes and say "that's nonsense." It is considered rude to point out that Dan Brown's borrowed theories have no merit as history whatsoever. Debunking is rude. And it is even more so when the conspiracy theories are popular among minorities.
It is not just that multiculturalism, whether in Britain, France or America, teaches students to be ashamed of the history of their host society. It also declines to challenge the conspiracy theories to which ethnic minorities - including the non-Muslim black community - are susceptible. I was once at a conference at Boston University at which a panel of mixed-race academics discussed the proposition (accepted by 30 per cent of black Americans) that the United States government manufactured Aids as a weapon of genocide. After a respectful debate, I asked each member of the panel if he or she was prepared to denounce the theory. Nobody was, on the grounds that it might constitute "disrespect".
We need more disrespect, not for people, but for bad, stupid and evil ideas.
3:42:31 PM
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Apparently, an avian flu vacine has been developed. That is certainly a positive development ahead of what just may become a major pandemic.
1:13:31 AM
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Arthur Chrenkoff: Good news from Afghanistan, part 15.
Another superb roundup of very positive developments in the troubled country.
What isn't good news, however, is that Arthur will quit his blog in a few weeks. His first-rate blogging will be sorely missed in the blogosphere.
12:47:13 AM
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How much stupidity are we supposed to be able to handle in a single day? Bush, what were you thinking? Now everybody comes crawling out of the woodwork. Enter Utah State Senator D. Chris Buttars (R), who writes against evolution in USA Today, and even by creationist standards this is a particularly ignorant article.
These vehement critics claim that there are mountains of scientific proof that man evolved from some lower species also related to apes. But in this tremendous effort to support Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, in all these "mountains of information," there has not been any scientific fossil evidence linking apes to man.
The trouble with the "missing link" is that it is still missing! In fact, the whole fossil chain that could link apes to man is also missing! The theory of evolution, which states that man evolved from some other species, has more holes in it than a crocheted bathtub.
I realize that is a dramatic statement, so to be clear, let me restate: There is zero scientific fossil evidence that demonstrates organic evolutionary linkage between primates and man.
This is so massively ignorant, and false, it is hard to know where to start.
First, it's this semantic trick with "the missing link." Say you have two species, A and B, and scientists propose that B was a descendant of A. "You have a missing link," cries the creationist. But a paleontologist digs up a fossil describing an organism that is a quite perfect intermediate between A and B, which I'll call ab.
"Aha", exclaims the creationist triumphantly, "Now you have two missing links! There is no intermediate between A and ab, and neither one between ab and B." And so on...
Anyone who has followed the origins debate will know there are lots of intermediates between our early ape-like ancestors and modern humans. One particularly famous specimen is Lucy, of the early hominid species Australopithecus afarensis. "Lucy" was quite chimp-like, except that she was bipedal, like modern humans, and unlike all contemporary apes.
As we move closer to our time, there is an abundance of fossils recording the existence of hominids with a gradual increase in brain size, and the closer we come to modern times, the more similar to modern humans the fossils get. This timeline should solidly bury the outrageous lie that there are no such fossils. You can just as well say the world is flat. Sen. Buttars, you are either a total ignoramus or a blatant liar. But at least you admit that "Intelligent Design" is all about (bad) Christian theology that has nothing to do with science.
PS: I debunked creationist Roy W. Spencer yesterday. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
12:10:09 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 26.08.2005; 13:08:08.
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