Friday, December 31, 2004

Well, did the CIA fund Osama or not?

The American Charge' d'Affaires has written to the Guardian and denied that the CIA gave money directly to Osama bin Laden. So I write to the Guardian as follows:

Is it then not the case that in the 1980's, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to mujaheddin factions by an organization known as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services - MAK)?
And was MAK not a front for Pakistan's CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate?
And was the ISI not the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras?
And was Osama Bin Laden not one of three people who ran MAK, taking overall charge in 1989?

And while we are in question mode, is it not the case that agents who turn against the CIA are sufficiently common to be given the name of "Blowback"?


I sent these points in to the Grauniad, but no show. So I have written to the US Embassy with them. But if the charges above are true, the US Embassy should not get away with it. And the Grauniad will have been publishing misleading information (as if...). So - a case for a correction from the Reader's Editor?

Or is life too short?

Prevention: Worth a Mention?

The "news" bulletins of the Boxing Day Tsunami disaster are stuck in a rut of counting the numbers and asking people how difficult it is to clear up the mess.

The intrepid journalists might spend a little time thinking about prevention. It is not impossible.

The International Action Center has this:
Officials in Thailand and Indonesia have said that an immediate public warning could have saved lives, but that they could not know of the danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean.
Such a system is not difficult or expensive to install. In fact, the detector buoys that monitor tsunamis have been available for decades and the U.S. has had a monitoring system in place for more than half a century. More than 50 seismometers are scattered across the Northwest to detect and measure earthquakes that might spawn tsunamis. In the middle of the Pacific are six buoys equipped with sensors called "tsunameters" that measure small changes in water pressure and programmed to automatically alert the country's two tsunami-warning centers in Hawaii and Alaska. Dr. Eddie Bernard, director of the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, says just a few buoys could do the job. Scientists wanted
to place two more tsunami meters in the Indian Ocean, including one near
Indonesia, but the plan had not been funded, said Bernard. The tsunameters each cost only $250,000. A mere half million dollars could have provided an early warning system that could have saved thousands of lives. This should be compared to the $1,500,000,000 the U.S. spends every day to fund the Pentagon war machine.


And here's a report of a meeting of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in 1999 - but it seems a little delicate - the page keeps freezing if you try to select and copy text. It details the concerns of Australian delegates five years ago to set up an Indian Ocean monitoring system like that which exists in the Pacific. The Delegate of Indonesia supported the need for a co-ordinated Indian Ocean tsunami warning
system and pointed out that Indonesia is veryvulnerable to local tsunamis on its Indian Ocean coasts. In
its capacityas the ASEAN Earthquake Information Centre (AEIC), Indonesia provides quick epicenter
determination (preliminaryversion) of significant earthquakes (magnitude greater than or equal to5) to
the ASEAN member countries. This can be extended to countries in the vicinityof Southeast Asia in an
anticipation for tsunami warning systems in the Southwest Pacific and Indian Ocean.


The Group re-affirmed that a major tsunamigenic region exists in the Indian Ocean area in the vicinity of Indonesia and recommended that Australia and Indonesia co-ordinate their activities in the development of a Indian Ocean warning system during the intersessional period. This could be facilitated with the joint involvement of Australian and Indonesian experts in the ITSU Visiting Experts Programme. The Delegates of Australia and Indonesia were invited to consider ominating candidates for the 2000 Visiting Experts Programme and inform the IOC Executive Secretaryand the ITIC Director accordingly.

Why has nothing come of that concern?
Who decided that it would not be money well spent?

And while we are at it, will the European Parliament see to it the the EU sets up a Tsunami Early Warning System to be ready for the time when of one of the Gran Canaria volcanoes falls into the sea?
Caroline Lucas can sort that out for us if we ask her nicely.

Thursday, December 30, 2004

Reflection - the Colour and Cost

I walk in the sun on the green field spreading flat and wet under my feet, along the smooth manufatured river bank, up to the chevron weir that always somehow smells of laundry, where the water of the Congresbury Yeo is aereated. A boy is fishing, but the water is brown because of recent rain and the fish have gone somewhere else - either that or they do not eat when the water is silty.

One day the river will rise over the banks again, and spill onto the fields designed to contain flood water. Once, twice, three times it will fill the flood plain, and drain away again through the rushing constriction under the road bridge. Then one day, the water will flow in faster than it can flow out, and all our carpets will get wet again. Probably nobody will drown, although one or two hearts may fail, and there will be much depression subsequently.

This could be prevented by fluming the bridge, and planning an emergency by pass channel to conduct the water into Yeo Moor which is plenty large enough. But this would cost money - a fraction of the cost of the damage from a flood sure, but nevertheless it would cost, and that would come out of the Environment Agency's inadequate budget. A disaster, on the other hand, would come from the insurance companies' budget. I tried to get the insurance companies interested in flood prevention, but they "did not want to go down that path".

We have committees whose job it is to see that no money is spent on preventing trouble. Committees who specialise in saying No, and deriding voices who warn.

Committees who decide that seismic warning systems in the Indian Ocean area would cost too much.

Committees whose decisions have killed more people than Blair and Bush could dream of.

The sky is blue, the grass is green, the water is brown, the sun is golden, but the surface of the river has no colour of its own.

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

One God or three perpetually warring gods?

This is probably a mistake, putting this up. I only do it because it is an adaptation of a contribution to the Monbiot Forum I did this morning.

It cannot be denied* that the so-called War on Terror is in part a clash of monotheistic fundamentalisms. Unfortunately in the context of fundamentalism, debate is superfluous, as the protagonists already have an absolute answer to everything although their absolute answers differ absolutely from each other. So today's blog is a total waste of electrons.

Notwithstanding that this is a waste of time, we non-fundamentalists have a right to ask questions, since we are liable to die in the crossfire. The question I would put is this:

"God, YHVH and Allah, are they three words for the one and the same entity, or do they represent three different entities?"

Islamists would reply yes to the first option, but Jewish and Christian fundamentalists, although coy on the subject, seem to fall for the second option.

Truth is complex. Although Mohammed (blessed be his name) and Jesus (blessed be his name also) both made statements supporting war (Jesus is reported as saying "I am come not to bring peace but a sword", and there are several places in the Koran which support swordplay) the concept that offers hope of peace - the concept that the Singularity is worshipped by different cultures in different ways and under different monikers, is closer to the surface in Islam than in the Judaeo-Christian traditions.
more

I hope this helps, but it probably does not.

*This thing about the religious motive for the WoT is of course, not true. Plenty of people deny it, not least people who hold that since gods do not exist, they cannot couse wars. If only life were that simple.

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Argent Moon


The moon is skittering among branches
dodging behind low hills
as we roll out the magic ribbon,
burrow through tatters
of ancient forests.

Although the land is squared with fields
and ripped by roads
still a few trees gather on high places
to offer naked arms in silent prayer
towards the sky

ruled by a hanging moon
staring with that idiot face

a howling fishbowl moon
its silver occupant
swinging its claw-tail
frozen forever.

You need a telescope
to see the ruthless tyrant
of Iraq. He hides there too.

the moon is tracking among branches,
skulking behind grey hills
a secret agent
always on our case.





(c )Richard Lawson

Monday, December 27, 2004

Smiling in the face of tectonic shifts

Mohan is still smiling today because the huge Boxing Day 2004 tsunami stopped just short of the house of his family in Sri Lanka. But his village is a washed away, gone. His hand moves to one side in a dismissive wave. His mouth is still smiling - he almost never stops smiling, I like people like that, I always remember the muddy smile of a scrum half at medical school as he emerged from the bottom of pile of bodies - but the smile is gone from his eyes. It has not hit him yet.

Fifteen thousand dead. Huge. That is as many as the smallest estimate of casualties caused by the BushBlairTsuanmi in Iraq. But it cost the British and American taxpayer billions to do that. Nature does it free of charge, at a snap of its fingers.

What can we say? I murmur sympathy; he says some Hindus thought something like this would happen back in 2000, raising his eyebrows to show he does not necessarily believe that kind of stuff; I hand him a brass pound, saying we are all mortal; he says we can do nothing and gives me 40p change; I pick up the flimsy Guardian, and mentally make a resolve to give a little money to the aid effort; one of us says Happy Christmas and the other says same to you.

In the end, the only real measurement of life is not in quantity but quality. And one of the surest ways of generating quality is by smiling.