Which countries have the top levels of support for Daesh/ISIS?

This is interesting, but raw figures are less useful than proportiona figure for  support in proportion to population, and got this:

1 Kuwait          100

2 Palestine        41

3 Saudi             30

4 Lebanon        28

5 Syria              23

6 Iraq                13

7 Tunisia          11

8 Egypt            3.9

9 Turkey          2.7

10 UK               2.2

11 USA             1.2

Remember that these are tweeters, and tweets do not translate directly into practical support, but nevertheless it is indicative of popular support.

"Dr" Melanie Phillips' unsubstantiated, desperate diagnosis of Breivik

Melanie Phillips has posted again on the right wing terrorist Breivik.

It is similar to the post to which I replied on Tuesday

She nails her flag firmly to the mast of Breivik being either psychotic (insane) or psychopathic. She says:
"Repeat after me very slowly: Breivik did not murder dozens of teenagers because he was ideologically opposed to cultural Marxism; he mowed them down because he was grossly mentally abnormal."

Not only that, but to hold any other opinion is also insane: 

"The suggestion that Breivik’s behaviour resulted from political rage – let alone from reading thinkers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill or Winston Churchill – is frankly itself an opinion in need of treatment".

It is not just Melanie Phillips that is going for the personal insanity/psychopathy defence. Breivik's lawyer is too. (Well, he would, wouldn't he?) Simon Jenkins in the Guardian is also going for the psychopathology gambit, as indeed is the leader writer in the Guardian and many other commentators.

I cut my political teeth back in the early 70s in joining the psychiatrists' campaign to oppose the incarceration of political activists in psychiatric hospitals under the Soviets. It is a serious matter to try to abuse psychiatry to invalidate political opinion. Phillips should think on this. 

I sent this letter in to the Guardian:

Your leader (National tragedy, 25 July) tries to diagnose Breivik as a psychopath. This should be left to the psychiatrists' report, but the fact that he defended school friends who were bullied makes this diagnosis somewhat unlikely.  From his writings, it is clear that he is a political ideologue, holding overvalued ideas that are shared with a community of rightist thinkers and commentators which includes people like Melanie Phillips, the English Defence League, and many others who see Islam as an absolute threat to Western values. There is a striking symmetry between the thinking of this group and that of their enemy Osama bin Laden, who also held a dualistic view that divides the world into two opposing camps, the righteous and the infidel. Breivik hates the "traitors" who allow Muslim immigration and support multi-cultruralism, which is why he killed the Labour Party youth rather than Muslims. In the same way, Al Quaeda direct a lot of their fire on moderate Muslims who, in their view, are compromising with the Western enemy. It is this absolutist, dualistic mode of thinking that drives fringe extremist political actors to carry out their atrocities, and the answer to the problems they cause lies not with psychiatry, but with  political philosophy that is based on physical and social reality.

They did not publish it.

It is very understandable that right wingers like Phillips (and Jenkins, who seems to be developing a nasty list to starboard, like Phillips, who also used to write for the Guardian) should wish to send Breivik off into la-la land. They have a serious problem if someone in their cognitive neck of the woods, someone who has such a broad overlap of ideas with them, should express the anger that they share with him in such a repulsive way.

I say once more: we must wait for the psychiatrists' report. [see below] Phillips and the rest are happy to found  their case on their gut feeling that he must be mad. 

As a psychiatrist, having skimmed through his manifesto*, my impression is that he is not thought disordered in a psychiatric sense, not schizophrenic or psychotic. He probably has a borderline personality disorder of the obsessive, controlling type, but is not an impulsive sociopath. He has an overvalued idea, a paranoia that he claims is evidence-based, that Muslims are trying to take over the world, an idea which he has systematised and to which he has constructed a response that has for him an internal logic, leading him to try to kick off a war between Christian Europe and Islamism, a war that is to him inevitable. He has an overvalued idea of his own importance. His behaviour may have been affected by drugs (? androgenic steroids) which he chose to take. He will claim that he acted rationally, out of his own free will, on behalf of what he perceives as  the welfare of Western civilisation. In short, he is an oddball, but he is a political activist of the extreme right wing type, and is responsible for his actions.

We will see to what extent the psychiatrists will find differently, having interviewed him.

As things stand, Phillips, Jenkins and other journos who loudly proclaim his insanity with their customary certainty are whistling in the wind, doing the old journo trick of making statements of their opinion sound as if they were incontrovertible fact. 

Phillips is driven to this position because if Breivik is acting as the military wing of her anti-Islamist "fight for Western Civilisation", he has delivered her cause a serious body blow to the position held by her and the cohorts of influential right-wing commentators.

--------------------------

*which I have 3 times tried to download, always ending up with a corrupt file
Link to Robert Lambert, terrorism expert. Terrorists are not psychologically abnormal.

Update: He's not insane. Which makes him the military wing of the Islamophobic community.

Melanie Phillips, right wing commentators and the terrorist Breivik

Melanie Phillips complains that she is being "smeared" by Sunny Hundal in Liberal Conspiracy, who shows that the right-wing terrorist Breivik pasted into his "manifesto" two quotes from Phillips, one about the "fatherless" culture, and one about immigration, entitled "The outrageous truth slips out:Labour cynically plotted to transform the entire make-up of Britain without telling us"

Phillips begins her defence with : "there are only two references to me or my work in its 1500 pages."

Er. Yes. OK. But that is two more than she would really be happy with in an ideal world.

She list the following other writers quoted by Breivik: "Bernard Lewis, Roger Scruton, Ibn Warraq, Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, Daniel Hannan, Diana West, Lars Hedegaard, Frank Field, Nicolas Soames, Keith Windschuttle, Edmund Burke, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Friedrich Hayek, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Ghandi, George Orwell and many others; indeed, it’s a roll call of western thinking and beyond, past and present". 

She leaves Jeremy Clarkson off the list. Fair enough. Not a thinker.

OK. Scruton, Warrraq, Steyn, Darymple, Hannan and West - all conservative commentators - have some soul-searching to do, along with Phillips. 

As do the tabloid press generally. 

She goes for the psychopath diagnosis: "the words of a deranged individual are being cited by people like Hundal who are taking them entirely seriously". As a psychiatrist, I doubt that he is psychopathic or psychotic, but we must await the psychiatrists' report for that. From what I have seen so far, I would say he is intelligent,  highly controlling, a political activist with an over-valued idea that European culture is under threat from Islam.

With her customary belief that attack is the best form of defence, Phillips says "The supposed beliefs of the Norway massacre’s perpetrator has got the left in general wetting itself in delirium at this apparently heaven-sent opportunity to take down those who fight for life, liberty and western civilisation against those who would destroy it. "

Phillips' belief that there is a war on for western civilisation encapsulates Breivik's Manifesto in a nutshell. 

A PhD could be written on parallels between Phillips' writings and Breivik's. He killed the Labour young people because they were "traitors" to Christian Europe by allowing immigration and promoting multi-culturalism. And here is Phillips calling the Conservatives a "quisling" party because of signing up to the Lisbon Treaty. (For younger readers, Quisling was a Norwegian traitor in WWII. Ironically, she wrote this years before Breivik's Norweigian massacre).

The parallels are there. Phillips may protest that she is being subjected to the Guilt by Association fallacy, but guilt by association is exactly how Phillips and her fellow Islamophobes work. 

They love putting the heat on all Muslims because of the actions of a few fanatics. 

They love putting the heat on all immigrants by publicising the crimes of a few. 

And they love putting the heat on all benefits claimants by publicising the fraudulent activities of a few.

Phillips and the tabloids generally share another feature with Breivik. 

They have an over-valued idea, the idea that immigration is the main problem that we face as a society.

Immigration is indeed a  problem, if only because it causes so much anger in the minds of many people, but let us put it in context.  

In 2011 we face the following domestic problems. (This is not a full list, just things off the top of my head) 

• deficit
• near-recession  
• unemployment 
• poverty 
• crime
• rising fuel prices
• rising food prices 
• homelessness 
• absurd penal system 
• militarism 
• a set of overbearingly powerful media barons
• police corruption. 

Then the broader problems: 

• biodiversity loss
• soil loss
• pollution
• a major nuclear leak that has still not been plugged
• overfishing 
• Peak Oil
• exponential population growth
• ocean acidification
• and above all, looming across our children's future, global warming.

Abroad, we have 

• wars
• dictatorships
• torture
• famines
• drought 
• poverty

Note that the last six are major drivers of immigration into this country. 

Which problems are the tabloids concerned about? Crime, benefits scroungers, and immigration. The other problems are ignored, under treated, or, in the case of global warming, denied. (Phillips is an AGW denier, as are most right wing journalists).

Even the problems they do highlight are not given an in-depth treatment. Never do they look at causes or reasonable solutions. They just run stories designed to make people angry. I recall Kelvin MacKenzie saying on TV that the whole point of his journalism is to "Make people angry".  

They are certainly succeeding. Tabloid readers are angry. Right wing blog commenters are consistently angry. 

Breivik shared the anger of the right wing commentators and tabloid readers, but he did something about it. 

It was controlled and diverted into his grand 9-year plan to start the 21st century Crusade, a war between "Christian" Europe and the Islamic jihad, and eventually expressed in his horrific terrorist act.  

Phillips and the whole crew of right wing apologists and commentators have some distancing to do. 

In an ideal world, they would also have some re-thinking to do. They should ask themselves questions like:

• Are my writings calculated to make people angry, pure and simple?
• What is the cause of immigration? 
• What can we do politically to reduce the causes of immigration?
• What can we do to help communities understand each other?

Let us hope that the Norwegian tragedy will cause the whole of the right wing press, including Melanie Phillips, to examine what they are writing about, cause them to ask themselves whether they are giving the full picture of the problems that the world faces. 

Maybe a critical point has been reached, when the right wing press stops trying to make its readers angry over a handful of problems, and begins to explore the whole range of interconnected problems that we face.

Maybe.

We live in hope.


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Previous post : How to prevent the next tragedy?

Anders Behring Breivik: How to prevent the next tragedy?

Image from breivik's manifesto


The tragedy in Norway caused by Anders Behring Breivik raises many questions.


The first question to pop into the minds of the tabloid press was:
"Why are the Islamists attacking us again?" The Mirror implicated Al-Qaeda in its first front page response. Then it turned out that it wasn't an Islamic terrorist, but a Christian terrorist, and the media let go of the terrorist angle, and has been instead asking the tough "How does it feel to have your son/daughter blown away in a massacre?" questions instead.


Here I try to look at the real questions that the journos should be asking.


Is Breivik "mad"?



The authoritative answer to this must be made by psychiatrists when they have interviewed him. As a psychiatrist, from what I have read of him so far, I have seen no clear evidence of psychosis. Clearly his terrorist actions are psychopathic, since he showed no empathy for his young victims, but that is tautological, since no terrorists show empathy for their victim.  At school he helped kids who were being bullied (Danish link) which rather works against the psychopathy tag. His ability to plan long-term and act (wrongly) in the interests of what he believed is his culture rather than his own immediate interests also works against the diagnosis of personal psychopathy.



On the other hand, there are some odd statements in his Manifesto.

"I took a year off when I was 25 and played WoW [World of Warcraft] PvE hardcore for a year."


Obsessive gaming is a fairly common phenomenon among young men. Did the wargaming 24/7 for a year have an effect on his mind? Again, we will have to wait for the psychiatrists' report.

He signs off his manifesto:
"Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement"


That's a bit fantastical and megalomanic. It summarises the message in his video, posted a few hours before his terrorist act. The basic thinking in his manifesto is that Christian Europe is being taken over by a conspiracy of Marxists, multi-culturalists and Islamists. Any European who backs these ideas are traitors. The Knights Templar are to be reformed as a resistance to the Islamification of Europe.


In one part of his manifesto he says that Muslims are animals: his main enemy are the politicians who encourage the animals to invade. Hence his attack on the Labour youth camp.


He hopes to use his court appearance to spread his message. The police are finding him a "difficult suspect" - I imagine because every answer he gives wanders off into the subject of the Knights Templar &c.


He hopes to do more of this when he gets into the dock. Unless the judge blocks his access to the media.


The thinking is paranoid, but since it is shared by others in a political culture, it is not evidence in itself that Anders is a paranoid schizophrenic. There is no evidence of thought disorder as such in his writing, that I have seen. 


Rather than being evidence of personal psychosis, it is evidence that nationalist paranoia is once more rising to disturb the peace of Europe.

Psychiatry does not really have much helpful to say. Breivik may be given "diagnoses" of  borderline personality disorder or borderline psychosis, but in the end, the psychosis is not so much personal as political, because he shares his beliefs with many other people.


The closest we can get to psychopathy is by creating a new category of social psychopathy, where a group of political activists act solely in the interests of their social group to the detriment of other social groups. Their identity is extended to include their class or sub-class, be that white, British, "Christian European", Islamic or whatever. This group then acts psychopathically, without regard for the feelings or interests of anyone outside the group.


(BTW, having said that, psychology has much help to offer in the management of quasi-psychopathic regimes.)




What was his motivation?


Motivation is more interesting. He clearly saw himself as a political actor, and so, in the absence of evidence for psychosis, it is as a political actor that he should be judged.


First, anger is the main emotion that we find with right wing or extreme conservative bloggers and commentators. Disdain and contempt for the opposition, a firm sense that they are so right they do not have to explain their reasoning.


In his manifesto, Breivik believes that the aforementioned grand conspiracy is taking place to destroy Europe's "Christian" culture and replace it with an Islamist culture.

This thinking is the political equivalent of paranoia. It is well understood. You identify an ethnic, religious or cultural group and project all your internalised problems, your anger, your worries, your conflicts, onto them. It then all becomes simple. All you have to do is to defeat the "enemy" and all will be well.

This is the classic cognitive path that gave rise to World War II.

Mathew Goodwin has an important analysis of what is happening.

Breivik and the EDL have found a workaround for the racist hate speech laws problem. They are not against people on account of their race. No. It is their religion that is the problem, not their race. Islam is trying to take over the world, using multiculturalism as its cover.

So once again, the West has to confront its demon:. Hate politics, based on paranoia and projection.

This is going to be hard. However, there is a glimmer of light behind the clouds.  The  Mail OnLine, which up until now has done as much as anyone to stir up hate against multi-culturism and human rights, today posts a piece about Breivik and the EDL.

How do we prevent the next attack?

Dare we hope that Breivik could lead to the Mail and other tabloids actually thinking about how it encourages hate politics? I doubt it, because really addressing hate politics involves a lot of thought, and covers a lot of ground. To communicate all the factors in play in a way their readers could understand would require real journalistic skill. But we live in hope.

Defeating the extreme nationalist Right involves more than counter-demonstrations, or Ministers of the Crown lecturing them. It involves looking at policies on housing and employment, since homelessness and joblessness are the twin burners that lift the extremists'  hot air balloon. Both unemployment and homelessness are unnnecessary, and maybe grey politicians will be stimulated to address these problems if the BNP makes progress. The situation needs a bunch of other reforms. And - yes, we do need to address immigration, since that is clearly a provocation to the likes of the EDL. Addressing immigration means working towards avoiding war. It means addressing population growth and family size - a big religious and cultural question if ever there was one - including the question of how to manage contraception refuseniks.

The political and economic background matters. But so also is early identification of killers like Breivik.

A Venn diagram approach might be helpful. With Breivik we have a rather isolated individual with extreme right views, who had a gun, and also had access to large amounts of Ammonium Nitrate, which has dual use as fertiliser and explosive.

Now in principle, if the police and security services look at the databases, they can find right-wing extremists who have gun licences. Those individuals deserve closer scrutiny.

Are they on Facebook? What are they writing in the comments columns on blogs?

This immediately raises questions of civil liberty. But these are precisely the liberties that the Right would swiftly take away from all of us if they were running the country.

Intrusion into privacy is a hot topic at the moment. The extremists will view it as a confirmation of the Multiculturalist Conspiracy. But this is how paranoia always works. It is a self - fulfilling prophecy.

There is a just and proper reason for security services to investigate right-wingers, in order to avoid a repeat of the Norwegian tragedy.

So this is the toughest question:

"Should known right wingers who own guns be subject to personality profiling and increased surveillance?"

The answer from the press and politicians will probably be "no".

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Next post: Right wing commentators have some sould searching and re-thinking to do

USA is chasing Assange harder than they chased the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqarwi

The reaction to Wikileaks can accurately be described as hysterical, in the sense of uncontrolled emotional outbursts. Prominent North Americans including Sarah Palin have issued death threats against Julian Assange. In Canada, the Prime Minister's former campaign manager issued such a death threat, and a lawyer has issued a legal challenge against the threatener. It would seem that in the USA there is no law against issuing a death threat, or if there is such a law, nobody cares about it. We shall see.

What is notable is that there has been swift and effective action taken against Wikileaks' financial assets. I was among the last to make a Paypal donation, before Paypal closed the Wikileaks account. They have frozen about 60,000 Euros of Wikileaks assets according to the BBC.

The Swiss have also frozen Julian Assange's personal accounts, on the technicality that he was not domiciled in Switzerland. I wonder what proportion of accounts in Swiss banks would have to be closed if that principle were generally applied.

The US is attacking Assnge with more efficiency than they attack terrorists, organised crime, arms dealers and the like.

 I took an interest in the freezing of terrorists' bank accounts back in November 2004. Basically, I had been writing to the FCO asking about this. Naturally, they said it was all covered, then it turned out that they had not touched the assets of a very prominent terrorist. More here.

 Interestingly, Bush had avoided touching that terrorist, despite twice having a chance of topping him.

His name was Abu Musab Al-Zaqarwi.

So they regard Assange as worse than a terrorist, at least in terms of the

The military response to terrorism has been counterproductive.

Elisa Manningham-Buller, ex-head of MI5, has told the Chilcot Inquiry that the invasion of Iraq had the effect of radicalising more Muslim youth. The implication is that the 7/7 atrocity on London might not have happened if Blair had not been suckered by Bush and Rumsfeld into joining in their ill-judged adventure.

She is the second major player to make this assertion. David Omand the Government's security and intelligence coordinator had the same view. 

As does Dr Robert Lambert, ex-head of the Muslim Contact Unit, a counter terrorism squad, who said that the war on terror made more terrorists.

It was obvious to any objective and rational observer (which term excludes most mainstream politicians and journalists) that the invasion of Iraq would have this effect on the minds of Muslim youth.  The conclusion now is penetrating into the mainstream that the "war on terror" that they supported has made the terrorism problem worse, not better.

This is a major mistake.  If doctors made a mistake of similar magnitude or consequence, they would be struck off. Yet Bush and Blair are roaming free in the world, Blair making thousands of pounds on the after dinner speech circuit.

Not only are they free, but lessons have not been learned. The next time the Government feels the urge to invade some god-forsaken country, we will go through the same ritual: the ruler of the country will be presented by the mainstream media as "The Hitler of our Day", the news will be full of propaganda about his atrocities, peace campaigners will be marginalised, the financial and diplomatic cost of the forthcoming war will be set aside, and in we will go.

How to sum up? Various expletives come to mind, but they are not helpful. We have to accept that Government tends to make irrational decisions. In psychiatry, we try to address irrationality by bringing the patient in contact with reality, so that they can compare and contrast their cognitive world with the real world that exists outside of their mind set. For politicians and mainstream journalists, this would mean some kind of Truth and Reconciliation process, where their writings and statements are methodically compared with the outcomes of their decisions.

7/7 - Politicians defending the indefensible.

Five years on from the vicious, anti-human suicide bomb attacks on London.

How do we defend ourselves against these attacks? There are three ways:
1 Intelligence - finding out who is planning to attack us
2 Police -arresting would be attackers before they act
3 Financial action - freezing bank accounts of real terrorists. (Not done very well)

We do not defend ourselves by attacking Muslim countries, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Afghanistan fiasco is making things worse, not better, because it drives disaffected Muslim youth, in the UK and across the world, towards desperate action.

This is not just the  opinion of bleeding heart liberals. Sir David Omand held the the post of Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office from June 2003 until April 2005, and he held that the wars would make terrorism worse, not better.

Today, the Guardian reports that Dr Robert Lambert, ex-head of the Muslim Contact Unit, a counter terrorism squad, saying that the war on terror made more terrorists.

Yet still poliiticians try to defend the indefensible, pretending that the Afghan adventure is somehow increasing our security, that the deaths of our soldiers are in a good cause. And still they turn away the obvious solution for success in Afghanistan - medicalise the opium crop.

Politicians are, by and large, intelligent people. How do they end up defending such irrational positions? Policy is a kind of machine that moves not by the rules of rationality, but of rationalisation - providing a line of quasi-plausible reasoning for an action that is based on irrational motives.

Terrorism aboard airliners - the Schuringa Rule

Hat tip to Jasper Schuringa, the Dutch film director who tackled Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the guy who tried to blow up a civil airliner over Detroit. He heard the bang, saw the smoke and took action.

Soon after 9/11 I wrote to Government asking them to advise airline passengers to overpower any hijackers in order to avert threat of an airliner attack on Nuclear Power stations. They refused, saying that it might lead to claims against them if anyone got hurt!

Clearly, if there is a terrorist on board, the passengers are all at real risk of death. Their best chance is to overpower the terrorist. Jasper Schuringa acted logically, but he had to cross several passive passengers to do his thing. All it takes is for the steward, after explaining where the lifejackets are, to as all able bodied people to overpower anyone who threatens an act of terrorism. That way, activism becomes the default, not the exception.

It could be called the Schuringa Rule.

Gulbuddin and Nidal Hasan: what to do?

Two violent acts of murderous betrayal: Gulbuddin, the Afghan policeman, a determines fighter against the Taleban who switched sides, and Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, the psychiatrist who opened fire on soldiers at Fort Hood on Thursday.

Two acts which further undermine the fragile trust which exists between Western soldiers and their colleagues and allies who happen to be Muslim.

The Afghan army and police are almost certainly riddled with Taliban sympathisers and sleepers.

The Muslim community everywhere is continually radicalised by the War on Terror, which is not called the War on Terror any more, but has not been given another name. I propose somehting like "Pointless and Counterproductive War" to fill the terminological vaccuum .

Politicians will utter mealy-mouthed regrets, statements of continuing resolve, and determination to secure victory, but this will not happen while the profits from the poppy fields go to support the Taliban.

How can trust be rebuilt? Pulling out would help, but that in itself could lead to the Somalisation of AfPak, leaving the region in a worse state that it was before.

There is a technological solution that could somewhat help to build trust.
Latent Taleban/insurgent sympathisers or plants could be identified by use of polygraphs, picking up subconscious responses in response to images of Osama bin Laden &c. This could be applied to all army personell, screening Caucasians for racist views and other signs of instability.

Polygraphs are not perfect, and need a great deal of interpretation, but nevertheless as a screening test, idenfifying people who need closer examination, they have a role.

I have suggested the same technique in weeding the proverbial "rotten apples" out of the police service in this country, receiving a chorus of protest against the proposal from police commentators here.

OK, it ain't going to happen, because the Civil Service never accept anything that is not beaten out on their own anvil. But it still is a practical option, the only practical option on the table, along with purchasing the poppy crop and using it as medicine.

[Update 7 Nov 2009: The challenge we should be putting to the apologists for the war is this: "Can you supply evidence to show that the number and intensity of terrorists and would be terrorists is less now than it was when George W Bush initiated the War on Terror?"

It is true that many terrorists have been killed, and Al Qaeda has been weakened as an organisation, but are there less disaffected Muslims, especially young males, than there were? We should doubt it. These two cases, especially Nidal Hasan, suggest not. The fact that Hasan showed no signs of fanaticism suggests that there was an unconscious process of dissidence going on within his mind, and that this welled up into action when he was faced with the reality of going out to help in a war effort that would involve killing fellow Muslims in support of an ostensibly Christian empire.

We are in a vicious circle: Hasan is critical of the war, and cracks in a murderous way. Americans have a backlash on Muslims in their community, which creates more latent and active Islamic backlashers, which creates more "Christian" backlasher and so on until kingdom come.

I would not wish anyone to think I am advocating polygraphs as a way to fight this ill-considered war more efficiently and safely; like all wars, it is mad, bad and sad.]

[Update: Gulbuddin had been sodomised by Afghan officers, and was aiming to kill that officer.]

Benyam Mohammed, torture, responsibility, reform

Welcome home, Benyam Mohammed. Well, as much of a home country as you have ever had in your three decades of life. I hope that you make a good recovery from your traumatic years of captivity, abuse and torture. You came to the UK from Ethiopia, asked for asylum, got addicted to drugs, went to Afghanistan to "see a Muslim country with my own eyes". The US claims you visited an Al-Qaeda camp. You got arrested in Pakistan with a false passport, and were tortured and abused in various countries for seven long years.

Did you see Al-Qaeda? Maybe, maybe not. Young travellers go to all sorts of places. What evidence do the US authorities have? If it is based on confession, it is valueless evidence, not worth the paper it is written on. If there is independent evidence, then you have been punished more than enough for a young man's lack of judgment. In the end, all charges against you were dropped.

It looks as if the UK "Intelligence" Services are accomplices in your abuse and torture. This presents David Miliband and Gordon Brown with a serious problem. Both have said that Britain does not to support torture or to condone torture. If this is the case, then the "Intelligence" officers who colluded in Binyam's torture must face trial and prison. If, on the other hand, they both knew about the MI5/6 torture policy, they are lying and should resign.

Clearly, an inquiry is necessary.

Torture is the worst form of chimpanzee behaviour. The confessions extracted under torture are valueless as evidence. Despite this, the Authoritarian Right tries to make a case for torture. They argue:

"What if you knew a bomb was going to go off in one hour, killing hundreds of your people, and you were holding the bomber? Would it not be right to torture him to find the location of the bomb?"

This is a hypothetical scenario, and no other piece of policy would ever be rested on such a flimsy piece of fiction, especially not a policy with such serious humanitarian and reflexive implications. Thousands are being tortured in real life every day, and the Right wants this to continue under the pretext of an imaginary scenario?

But if we take the scenario at face value, it does not work, because a terrorist can hold out for an hour. He can buy respite by giving a false location for the bomb.

Third, there is the reflexive aspect of condoning torture on the basis of this fairy tale. If Britain tortures people, Britons will get tortured, period. So in condoning torture, the British Government, under NuLabour, will cause British citizens to be tortured in the future. In doing this, they have failed in their Responsibility to Protect, and have in theory and in principle become an illegitimate government.

We need a change of Government, but not just a change to a Tory Government, because everything that NuLabour have done, every mistake they have made, the Tories also would have done and made, quite possibly with bells and whistles. We need radical reform of government, a fresh start, with a new approach to economics, civil liberty, and representation.

Welcome home, Benyamin. You have suffered horribly, but your suffering may be one of the factors that triggers a radical reform of the country that gave you asylum.

Mumbai, emotion and rationality

The knock-ons for the terrorist attacks in Mumbai begin. Indian home office government ministers resign. A war of words starts between India and Pakistan. A youth interviewed in a demonstration declares with adolescent certainty that what is needed is "a war with Pak".

Let us assume that the attacks (despite a denial from one source) were mounted by Laskar-e-Toiba (LeT), the "Army of the Righteous" (sick). They are a Pakistan-based Islamist group whose primary objective is to get India out of Jammu and Kashmir, but while they are at it they wouldn't mind restoring Islamic power over South Asia, and parts of Russia and China. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Oh, and they want to destroy the Indian republic and put an end to Hinduism and Judaism. And they have a fatwa against the Pope because of his unguarded remarks against the Prophet (PBUH).

LeT seem to be supported by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI, the most powerful and cloudy of Pakistan's three intelligence agencies, which has been kinked with election rigging, corruption, illegaity, and support for the Taleban. Confused?

The ISI appears to be a state within a state. This should not come as a surprise. Secret Services are by definition not transparent, and transparency is incompatible with democratic accountability. I have no clear idea how to respond to this problem. A few years ago I proposed some Green Party policy to try to rein them in, but it was crushed by the Handbrake Tendency. I must learn to be more dogged.

Contrary to immediate claims, there were early warnings of the attack, going back to March of this year, which specified the hotels targeted. It was said that the attack would come by sea. Fishermen warned in August of suspicious activity.

Given that security services do exist, it is surprising how ineffective they are. Mrs Thatcher had intelligence of Gen Galtieri's plans to invade the Falklands/Malvinas, but it was not acted on. The US security agencies ignored early warnings of 9/11.

The Indian Government will probably follow the US and UK by increasing surveillance of the whole population and reducing general civil liberties, but the real problem lies in assessing and integrating warnings. They probably get thousands of bits of information, and as a GP I can testify to the inherent difficulty of filtering the signal from the noise. However, it can be done. Computers can help, by handling vast volumes of information, although they are not infallible (computers discarded early data showing the ozone hole because they did not expect that to happen).

More importantly, a single agency needs to be responsible for filtering potentially important information, especially if 2 or more bits of information are pointing in the same direction.

There are other rational responses that can be made, but the overwhelming likelihood is that the attack will get an irrational response, with relationships between India and Pakistan, both nuclear armed, getting more angry.

Anger - the wish to hurt the one who is perceived to have hurt us - is a primitive emotional reaction, and if deployed, inevitably leads to escalation of the problem.

Philosophical rationality is the counter to anger. It takes the higher vantage point and the long-term view. It notes the emotion expressed by others, and integrates it as a factor in the equation, but it looks at all the causes of the problem, and tries to find an answer that addresses the whole field of problems. We humans do have the capability to respond in this way, it is just that we find it quicker to make an emotional reaction.

Icelandic assets: Abuse of anti-terrorism laws by Government

"Iceland's prime minister Geir Haarde said the U.K. government is to blame for triggering the crisis when it used anti-terrorism laws to seize the assets of Icelandic banks in the U.K." (Bloomberg)

Another scandalous abuse of the legal process by the Labour Government, added to their catalogue of abuses at places like Heathrow and Kingsnorth

So the Government has no scruples when it comes to seeing Terrorism Act is applied to non-terrorists. How about real terrorists, do they get their assets frozen by the Government?

Faithful readers of this blog will recall the story I broke here and here and here and here of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi , the unlovely terrorist who beheaded poor Ken Bigley.

Months before they kidnapped Ken Bigley I wrote to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to ask how the financial component of the "war on terror" was going.

They wrote back saying, fine thanks, no problem, on top of the case, no worries.

Then when Ken was kidnapped, it was reported that the Government was taking action to freeze the assets of Abu Musab al-Zaqarwi, Ken Bigley's killer.

So the Government had not previously taken action against al-Zarqawi's group.

Logically, this was either because either
(a) they were ignorant of his existence, or
(b) they knew of his existence, but did not see fit to freeze his accounts.

I wrote via my MP 12 months ago to ask which was the case.

Baroness Symonds at the FCO replied.

"The Government always takes action to freeze the assets of any terrorist or terrorist group, whenever it is apparent that there are clear grounds on which to do so".

This is a clear indication that Government knew of the Musab al-Zaqarwi's group's existence, but did not see fit to freeze its assets.

Zarqawi had a long history of terrorist activity predating the Ken Bigley kidnapping.

Conclusion: the Government is only too ready to apply the AntiTerrorism Law to non-terrorists, but incompetent when it comes to applying similar powers against terrorists.

Why is this? My gut tells me that the banksters resist any government interference with their affairs, even when they are holding money for terrorists.

Sept 11th - defence against terrorism

Here's another one to the Editor of the Guardian

The means that our leaders have used to defend ourselves against terrorism (A world that changed, Leader, September 11) comprise police action, intelligence, financial measures and military violence and torture. Police action and intelligence have been notably successful. Financial measures were incompetent, at least in the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose financial assets were frozen only after he kidnapped poor Ken Bigley. The question for advocates of military violence and torture is whether they have increased or decreased the threat of terrorism. Although this is a difficult question to answer categorically, common sense suggests that by increasing the sense of alienation and anger in the Muslim community, it has actually increased the level of the terrorist threat.

CSIS; Is Terrorism that much of a Problem?

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has published a report by a Commission it set up under the leadership of Rich Armitage, U.S. deputy secretary of State in the first Bush term, and Joseph S. Nye from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Nye is perhaps the quintessential advocate for ‘Soft Power’. The report title is: The CSIS Commission on Smart Power A Smarter more Secure America. Here is an excerpt:

The threat from terrorists
with global reach and ambition is real. It is
likely to be with us for decades. Thwarting their
hateful intentions is of fundamental importance
and must be met with the sharp tip of America’s
sword. On this there can be no serious debate.
But excessive use of force can actually abet terrorist
recruitment among local populations. We
must strike a balance between the use of force
against irreconcilable extremists committed to
violent struggle and other means of countering
terrorism if we want to maintain our legitimacy.

I agree that I would not want an armed terrorist in my living room, but let us not let the Bush propaganda PaNAC us.

Yes, 9/11 was an outrageous act of terrorism, but the 3000 who died in that strange, potentially unnecessary and under investigated outrage are 14 times less than the 42,000 Americans who die in Road Traffic Accidents each year , or 1/84 the of the number Americans who have died since 2001 in RTAs. Yes, I know that this is not exactly comparing like with like, because it seems worse when a lot of people go at the same time, and to some extent people who die in cars choose to do so, which the victims of 9/11 did not (except the hypothetical terrorists) but even so, the numbers speak for themselves.

Then the other attacks. 7/7 here in the UK, and Madrid. Then a handful of embassy targets. It all seems a bit short of the apocalyptic proportions of what Mr Soft Power is trying to sell to us. Here in the UK, having lived through years of IRA bombings at a time when Americans saw nothing wrong at all with funding the terrorists who were bombing us on a regular basis, it is rather difficult to see what all the PanAc is about.

The fact is that the police and intelligence services are far more effective in defending us against terrorists than the military are. In fact, as he says, the military effort makes it worse. It fans the flames.

Fundamentalists are like Marxists. Leave them alone, and they soon start falling out among themselves. Fissiparous is the word. Attack them, and they have a raison d'etre.

So, sorry, there is serious debate to be had about whether America is sensible in spending trillions of borrowed dollars in trying to break Osama's poison butterfly on the wheel of American military power.

The kind of money Bush spends on his old family friend OBL would be far better spent in developing energy efficiency, and renewable energy technology.

There seems to be a remarkable degree of consensus on this thread that the "War on Terror" is a bogus war.

Yes, 9/11, M11, July 7th and the other attacks were outrages/atrocities/tragedies, as were the civilian deaths caused by the American backlash. Yes, we need the effective intelligence and police oprations to arrest any groups who want to bomb us. No, we do not need the limitations on our civil liberties that UK and US Governments are imposing in the name of WoT. No, we do not need the ridiculous military expenditure of the WoT. We should exit Iraq, and buy the Afghan opium crop for medical use instead of trying to stamp out the illicit opium trade.

Is that much pretty consensual (except for Iron Mike of course)?

If so, next question: what are we all going to do about it?

For Peace

Richard

Let us not have nuclear armed terrorists, shall we?

FT.com Article by Mohammed El Baradei:
The simplest way to produce an atomic explosion is to slam together two sizeable chunks of high-enriched uranium (HEU) in what is commonly called a "gun-type nuke". The approach might sound crude, and it is. No country currently uses this design for its nuclearweapons. But it is worth remembering two things. First, that it was an HEU gun-type nuclear weapon that killed more than 70,000 people at Hiroshima. Second, that terrorists tend to be less focused on elegance of design than on results. This brings us to a critical question: after nearly five years of living under the threat of sophisticated terrorism - and with clear signs of terrorists trying to acquire nuclear material through criminal networks - why are we still moving so sluggishly to get rid of global HEU stockpiles and to minimise civilian uses of HEU?

Intelligence Services Oxymoron

The release of the two brothers in east London who were raided, "on good intelligence", arrested and shot for a suspected chemical terrorist plot confirms that the intelligence services were fooled. Since the arrestees were in fact distinctly moderate Muslims, and since another moderate mullah was also fingered as being a terrorist, there is a lesson to be drawn. It seem that our "intelligence" services are being targeted by Islamists who are systematically feeding them with disinformation aimed at discomfiting moderate Muslims who have displeased them.

This raised the need for the Green Party to develop policy on our "intelligence" services. Their status is intrinsically problematical, since they are non-transparent and therefore un-green. How are they to be better structured, funded, monitored and controlled? What are their positives and their negatives? How would a Green Government manage them? To what extent do they infringe on our democratic assemblies? Which organisations would we wish them to infiltrate, and which organisations would we wish them not to infiltrate? What legal action should we take if it turns out that we ourselves have been infiltrated?

Abu Musaq al-Zarqawi taken out...

...of this blog.

About 2 years ago, I did a blog on the British Government's tardiness on freezing the assets of Abu Musab al-Zaqarwi has inexplicably become unobtainable, I will to recap the story (again) here.

Months before the Ken Bigley case (Kidnapped and beheaded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), I wrote to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to ask how the financial prosecution of the "war on terror" was going.

They wrote back, fine thanks, no problem, on top of the case.

Then when Ken was kidnapped, it was reported that the Government was taking action to freeze the assets of Abu Musab al-Zaqarwi, Ken Bigley's killer.

So the Government officers had not previously taken action against al-Zaqari's group. Now this was either because either (a) they were ignorant of his existence, or (b) they knew of his existence, but did not see fit to freeze his accounts. I wrote via my MP 12 months ago to ask which was the case.

Baroness Symonds at the FCO replied.

The Baroness writes, "The Government always takes action to freeze the assets of any terrorist or terrorist group, whenever it is apparent that there are clear grounds on which to do so".

This is a clear indication that Government knew of the Musab al-Zaqarwi's group's existence, but did not see fit to freeze its assets.

The question I next put to the Baroness is,
"How many other terrorist groups of Musab al-Zaqarwi's calibre is the Government aware of, but does not see clear grounds to freeze their assets?"

A related question is this: "How does the funding of the officials charged with the identification and asset freezing of terrorist groups, compare with the military expenditure on the Iraq invasion?"

A further question, which has just popped into my head, is this: "If Al-Zarqarwi was the last terrorist to be spared having his asset's frozen, why was this, given that he has a long history of terrorist activity predating the Ken Bigley murder?".

I have not yet had an answer to these questions.

You can ask them too, if you like. The address is

Foreign and Commonwealth Office
King Charles Street
LONDON SW1A 2AH

PS Bush passed up the chance to kill Zarqawi twice, before the invasion. It is thought that if he had killed him, he would have had even less pretext to invade Iraq.Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind - Nightly News with Brian Williams - MSNBC.com

Al-Zarqawi and the Baroness

Since my blog on the British Government's tardiness on freezing the assets of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has inexplicably become unobtainable, I will try to recap the story here.

Months before the Ken Bigley case (Kidnapped and beheaded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), I wrote to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to ask how the financial prosecution of the "war on terror" was going.  [update I wrote on : 25 March 2005]

They wrote back, fine thanks, no problem, on top of the case.

Then when Ken was kidnapped, it was reported that the Government was taking action to freeze the assets of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ken Bigley's killer.

So the Government officers had not previously taken action against al-Zaqari's group. Now this was either because either (a) they were ignorant of his existence, or (b) they knew of his existence, but did not see fit to freeze his accounts. I wrote via my MP 12 months ago to ask which was the case.

Baroness Symonds at the FCO replied.

The Baroness writes, "The Government always takes action to freeze the
assets of any terrorist or terrorist group, whenever it is apparent that
there are clear grounds on which to do so".

This is a clear indication that Government knew of the Musab al-Zarqawi's
group's existence, but did not see fit to freeze its assets.

The question I would now like you to put to the Baroness is,
"How many other terrorist groups of Musab al-Zaqarwi's calibre is the Government aware of, but does not see clear grounds to freeze their assets?"

A related question is this: "How does the funding of the officials charged
with the identification and asset freezing of terrorist groups, compare with
the military expenditure on the Iraq invasion?"

[A further question, which has just popped into my head, is this: " If Al-Zarqarwi was the last terrorist to be spared having his asset's frozen, why was this, given that he has a long history of terrorist activity predating the Ken Bigley murder?"].

To my recollection, I have not yet had an answer to these questions, so I will prompt them for a reply. I would have forgotten about this had someone not diverted the URL of the original page to the Not Found page.

You can ask them too, if you like. The address is

Foreign and Commonwealth Office
King Charles Street
LONDON SW1A 2AH

Moving towards Consensus on Terrorism?

Is the protracted debate on the Democracy & Terror - Discussion forum: moving towards consensus?

I fully agree with Matt's point about dealing with regimes like Saudi Arabia. I also agree that, in addition to his specific aims which I have pointed out, Bin Laden had a wider deeper emotional and religious objectives such as the conversion of the America to Islam, which is clearly a fantasy.

There is an eerie equivalence between the beliefs of the President of Iran's expectations of the return of the 12th Imam at the end of time, and the equally worrying belief of George W Bush that in the Second Coming of Christ, some time after the battle of Armageddon.
http://www.greenhealth.org.uk/IraqBBBible.htm

Again I accept the existence of deep irrationality and total rejection of Western values - good and not so good - by Islamists, which you continually emphasise.

I am glad that we agree on the unwisdom of the Iraq invasion.

So what should we have in place of the War on terror?

To summarise (as far as I see it - please add points that I overlook)

We need to defend ourselves against Islamist jihadi terrorists through good intelligence and police work, while still maintaining our democratic values and liberties.

We need to remove the many provocations of Muslim sensibilities that exist in the world - US bases on holy Saudi Arabian soil, oppressive and authoritarian secular regimes in Muslim countries, exploitation of Muslim oil, resolution of the Palestine/Israel problem.

There are many tools for this to come about, but my own personal 2p worth is
(a) Withdrawal of Western forces from Iraq, and their replacement with Muslim UN peacekeeping forces (yes, i know that this is highly problematical, not least because we are asking the UN to clean up the mess that we wanted and they opposed, and because it leaves us without the original objective, exclusive rights to Iraqi oil)

(b) The Index of Human Rights in the UN, which will have exert a systemic, continual inhibition on oppressive regimes

(c) A massive New Deal effort to develop sustainability in the Middle East (as a model for the rest of the world)making it ecologically secure in terms of water, food, sustainable energy, housing and waste disposal. The application of human energy, attention and resources towards constructive co-operation will divert the attention of the body of muslim opinion away from preoccupation with resentment and support for the totalist violence of people like Osama Bin Laden.

Are we moving towards some kind of consensus here on how we should respond to Osama Bin Laden? I hope so, because I want to divert my attention and resources back to averting the threat of Pandemic flu http://www.greenhealth.org.uk/AvianFlu.htm
and lobbying for the Index of Human Rights
http://www.greenhealth.org.uk/Index%20of%20Governance.htm