Elliott Hall's Blog, page 9

Finally, some good news

New York Times

Well, they finally got the bastard. Osama Bin Laden went down in a hail of bullets, which I'm sure gratified the twisted freak. Foreign Policy has a good timeline of the development of the operation.

It's been believed for some years that Bin Laden no longer had an operational role in Al-Qaeda. The organizational head is Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is still at large. There will be no immediate structural damage to Al-Qaeda. However, I don't think we should discount the symbolic power Bin Laden used to command. The fight against organizations like Al-Qaeda is more about images and ideas than it is actual fighting. The reduced organization of recent years has depended on idiotic loners being radicalized through the internet, rather than recruited into the cells of a more traditional terrorist organization. In that context the myth of Osama Bin Laden, the man who had evaded the most powerful nation on earth for ten years, did have a lot of power. It's also why so many loosely-affiliated organizations all over the world took on the name Al-Qaeda, like they were franchisees. They wanted some of the reflected glory of the man who had stood up to the US and lived, at least until today. Now that he's just another dead asshole, we'll see how eager they are to maintain that association.

Hague has ordered UK embassies to review their security as the world braces for Al-Qaeda's response. Bin Laden's death certainly isn't the end of the organization, but hopefully it has dealt a severe blow to the myth of its power.

Wednesday Exposition

In the sorting office – LRB. A really interesting article on the paradoxes of postal service in the e-mail age. Seriously.

Pat Robertson Thinks The Left Wants to Kill Babies to Turn Straight Women into Lesbians – Balloon Juice. On his deathbed, I fully expect Pat Robertson to reveal that he was secretly a performance artist the whole time.

Where does value lie in a restaurant meal? – Felix Salmon. Some interesting thoughts on what we're actually paying for when we got to a restaurant, especially a pricier one.

Andrew Marr superinjunction challenge cost 'tens of thousands', says Ian Hislop – Guardian. For my North American friends, a superinjunction is a ridiculous legal judgement that can stop people from even mentioning something – in this case Marr's private transgressions. With Marr it's just a little silly, but these injunctions have been used to cover up serious wrongdoing like in the Trafigura case, which suppressed a draft confidential report about a toxic waste spill in west Africa.

Top Ten Arab Spring Advances this Week – Juan Cole. Despite the violence in Syria and Libya, there are still reforms happening in the Middle East.

From Kung Fu Monkey we have Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma:

The Ghost Cities of China

Above is an interesting Australiant TV report on the empty cities and malls in China, built to juke the GDP statistics. The footage of empty malls and towns is really eerie, like the beginning of a zombie movie. The flats that are built are either not bought or purchased as investments and left empty. Meanwhile the thousands of workers who live packed into single rooms can't afford to buy because the property market is so overheated. It's having such a deforming effect on Chinese society that men without property can't get a date.

It will be very ugly when the music stops.

Gitmo and the unseeing

I've avoided reading about the Gitmo files up until now, because it's a nice day and I already know way, way too much about torture. And yet:

Faced with the worst-ever single attack by foreigners on American soil, the U.S. military set up a human intelligence laboratory at Guantanamo that used interrogation and detention practices that they largely made up as they went along.

…

The documents, more than 750 individual assessments of former and current Guantanamo detainees, show an intelligence operation that was tremendously dependant on informants — both prison camp snitches repeating what they'd heard from fellow captives and self-described, at times self-aggrandizing, alleged al Qaida insiders turned government witnesses who Pentagon records show have since been released.

The portrait of the incompetence, chaos and sometimes brutality that emerges from the files is sadly familiar. I read similar accounts in Jane Mayer's The Dark Side when I was doing research for The Rapture two years ago. The sad fact is that most of these revelations had been pieced together from other sources, yet no one has really cared. No matter how many times new and damaging facts come to light, we can't seem to wrap our heads around it.

Right now I'm reading China Miéville's The City and the City. Part of its premise is that two cities exist simultaneously on top of one another. There are parts where the two cities bleed into one another – 'crosshatches.' People can see the other city but have trained themselves to look directly at it and yet not allow themselves to see the other people, the other buildings – to 'unsee' it.

That is precisely what we have been doing ever since Guantanamo opened. Now we have America's own documents showing the detention of a senile 89 year-old, a fourteen year-old boy who was the victim of a kidnapping, and a man brought to the prison because of the knowledge of Khowst and Kabul he'd learned as a taxi driver. They held an Al-Jazeera cameraman named Sami al-Hajj for six years claiming he was a terrorist courier, but then interrogated him about the news network. We know people were tortured there out of desperation, fear and simple incompetence.

We already know, but we refuse to see.

Wednesday Exposition

Roman high street reopens to visitors after more than 20 years – Guardian.

Bloomsbury signs agreement with National Archives – Telegraph. I hope this means material in the archive will be more accessible. I'm not sure how they're working out the copyright issues though.

Almost all media in Slovakia goes behind a single paywall – Roy Greenslade. It will be really interesting to see if this united front pays off. I think language will play a big part in this. English is too widely written to allow for a paywall like this.

British Library buys poet's 40,000 emails – Independent.

Arizona turns against the Tea Party – Independent. I think the headline is premature. The legislature went full-on Birther, creating a standard of documentation that meant no one in Arizona would able to run for the presidency. They may have pulled back a bit, but Trump is still getting mileage out of Birtherism.

Finally, in honour of Elisabeth Sladen:

Convicting the innocent: How Eyewitnesses Can Send Innocents to Jail

Ronald Cotton, falsely convicted of rape in 1984

She examined those two pictures for "four or five minutes." She then said:"Yeah. This is the one," and added, "I think this is the guy."

A detective asked her, "You 'think' that's the guy?" and she answered, "It's him."

…

Cotton was sentenced to life in prison plus 54 years. At a post-conviction hearing, Cotton's lawyer presented Thompson-Cannino with a man Cotton had met in prison and believed might be the real culprit. His name was Bobby Poole. She said: "I have never seen him in my life. I have no idea who he is."

Cotton served 10 and a half years before DNA tests exonerated him. The tests matched Bobby Poole, who then pleaded guilty. Ronald and Jennifer wrote a book together, Picking Cotton, about what went wrong. They now travel the country together to lobby for improved identification practices.

Brandon L. Garrett, writing in Slate, discusses just how many ways an eyewitness identification can go wrong. Police can steer a witness towards an id, ask questions in a way that nudges a witness towards more certainty than they have, all unconsciously.

I remember Conan Doyle talking about how unreliable eyewitness identifications were in Julian Barnes' Arthur & George, and that was at a time when fingerprints were still struggling to gain acceptance in policework. One of the reasons that shows like CSI and Waking the Dead are so popular is that they provide the illusion of absolute scientific proof. Rather than a trial being several different accounts of an event judged by twelve fallible human beings, a case becomes a scientific theorem that can be solved as completely as a math problem. The reality is not always so glamorous.

It's official: I am a Twit

Well, it was bound to happen. I'm on Twitter now, and have begun with a story about the MOD thinking through the 'ethics' of killer robots. I think that's appropriate.

So follow me! To somewhere!

Review of The Children's Crusade at Crime and Publishing

There is a fine review of The Children's Crusade at Crime and Publishing.

I would have an excerpt here, but trying to excerpt a review of my own book just feels weird.

The Decemberists – The Mariner's Revenge

I've accidentally fallen into a theme of storytelling songs, so I'm sticking with it.

Wednesday Exposition

Bloggers sue Huffington Post – Guardian. This may sound weird, but I see a Big Society angle in this. Volunteerism and mutualism go out the window once there's money to be made.

Cinemas threaten not to show studio films in dispute over 'movies on demand' – Financial Times. Another round of media musical chairs. Everyone knows there aren't enough seats left, so who is standing when the music (of the internet) stops? Normally I'd vote cable companies, but they also provide most of the internet in North America.

Observations on Fukushima – Atomic Power Review

Manhattan DA investigates Bear Sterns Mortgage Traders Atlantic.

As a companion to that, Felix Salmon's excellent The Wall Street Mind – Oblivious will make your blood boil. Anyone over the age of eight should realise that people who get away with profitable crimes will commit those same crimes again.

Were I to get my hands on the men responsible for the financial crisis, I'd put them in a room and force them to watch this:

Except I'm pretty sure that would be torture.