Category Archives: Beyond belief

Iran here we come

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Is the Bush regime getting ready to attack Iran? Paul Rogers thinks it might be. In April.

Timothy Garton-Ash has also been brooding on this.

f we don’t bomb Iran, Iran is quite likely to get the bomb. If Iran gets the bomb, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others in the Middle East will be tempted to follow. The last barriers to nuclear proliferation, already breached by North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel, could rapidly break – in the most volatile region in the world. The risk of nuclear war will then be greater than it was in the 1980s, when CND, END and other west European peace movements marched against new US and Soviet missile deployments. The likely scale of the nuclear conflict is much smaller than a superpower nuclear apocalypse, but that in itself makes it more not less probable that an unhinged leader would take the risk.

On the available evidence, the Islamic Republic of Iran is trying to edge towards a technological position from which it could, should it choose, rapidly move towards 90% uranium enrichment and the production of nuclear weapons. The best analysis we have suggests that Ayatollah Khameini, the supreme leader of the revolutionary regime, has not made a decision to go for nuclear weapons, and it would take a number of years to get there even if he had. But Iran has been doing a number of things that are not explicable simply by a desire to have the civilian nuclear energy to which it is entitled under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

The real question is therefore how, without the use of force, you can stop Iran going down this path…

Administration of justice, Bush style

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From the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

“This is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. “It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.

“We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America.”

Mr. Stimson made his remarks in an interview on Thursday with Federal News Radio, a local Washington-based station that is aimed at an audience of government employees.

The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.”

Stimson — who, incredibly, is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided [under a FOIA application], describing them as “the major law firms in this country.”

He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Karen J. Mathis, a Denver lawyer who is president of the American Bar Association, said: “Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work — and doing it on a volunteer basis — is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.”

I can’t understand it, officer — my Mondeo just keeps crashing

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From today’s New York Times…

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 7 — Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, is using the Consumer Electronics Show here to highlight several new consumer-oriented products and to unveil a partnership with the Ford Motor Company to build Microsoft technology into several Ford models…

And to think that Ford was doing quite nicely, at least when compared to GM…

Luckily, the problem will be easy to fix. Just reinstall the engine every few months. And accept the fact that your car stereo will no longer connect to your iPod.

Disintegrating Euros

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Hmmm… Do I believe this?

Users of the drug crystal methamphetamine may be causing euro banknotes to disintegrate, German police have told Der Spiegel magazine.

Sulphates used in the production of the drug could form sulphuric acid when mixed with human sweat, they say, causing banknotes to corrode.

Drug users sniff powdered crystals through rolled up banknotes.

About 1,500 banknotes have crumbled after being withdrawn from cash machines, German banking officials say.

Much of Germany’s supply of crystal methamphetamine is believed to come from eastern Europe, and has a high concentration of sulphates.

Its corrosive effects are also spread between contaminated notes and clean notes in wallets and purses.

The Bundesbank announced in early November that reports of bank notes worth between five euros and 100 euros disintegrating began to be received in the summer.

A 2003 report by the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg found that 90% of German euros were contaminated with cocaine…

The ‘Rule of Law’: Attorney-General’s statement translated

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The Attorney-General’s Statement reads:

“It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest.”

TRANSLATION: The rule of law is of course very important, except when it’s inconvenient for the government. In the past few years we have found it increasingly inconvenient btw.

“No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.”

TRANSLATION: All those reports about Labour MPs being up in arms because of threatened job-losses in their constituencies if the arms deal with Saudi Arabia doesn’t go through are just media speculation. And even if they are true we paid absolutely no attention to them. What do you think we are — politicians???

“The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.”

TRANSLATION: The Saud regime may be the most despotic, corrupt, tyrannical and bigoted in the Middle East (now that the Taliban have been temporarily deposed), but we need to have those bastards inside our tent because they loathe and fear Al-Qaeda even more than we do. Also we need to keep them on-side as we try to slither out of Iraq.

Sometimes, one has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief. Yesterday, a Labour Prime Minister was interviewed by detectives investigating a corruption scandal engulfing his administration — and it was judged a triumph by his staff that he wasn’t cautioned. This meant he was ‘just’ a witness, and not a suspect in the inquiry. And at the same time, his government’s chief law officer halts an inquiry that was on the brink of revealing illegal payments of perhaps £1 billion to a posse of Saudi princelings and their hangers-on because they were (as the BBC’s Security correspondent intimated this morning) livid at the prospect of having their ‘privacy’ invaded.

A humping good Christmas

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From Thursday’s Independent

DUBLIN: Staff at an Irish riding school had to postpone a Christmas party after Gus the camel chomped his way through 200 mince pies and several cans of Guinness meant for their festivities. Gus, starring in the riding school’s Santa’s Magical Animal Christmas Show, filled up while staff were changing for their party.

Hmm… I’d always wondered what camels stored in their humps. P.G Wodehouse would have known what to do with this material.

Compatability, Microsoft style

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From Tech News on ZDNet…

Microsoft has pledged to make its new Office 2007 file formats accessible within the company’s other products, but the timeline for that support varies widely.

Although the company already has converters available for older PC versions of Office, the Mac translation tools are still in development. Microsoft now doesn’t expect to have the tools available until late March or April, the company said Tuesday.

“We realize this will be an inconvenience for some of you,” Microsoft acknowledged in its Macmojo blog. Folks in the Mac software unit at Microsoft say they have experienced the pain firsthand, now that a good percentage of Microsoft employees are using Office 2007.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile unit said in an e-mail on Tuesday that its PocketPC and Smartphone devices won’t be able to read and edit the new formats until the middle of next year….

This won’t stop Microsoft executives dissing OpenOffice for its alleged inability to read MS-formatted documents, though. Monopoly isn’t just a social and economic problem; it’s a state of mind.

Beware Xmas Fare!

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James Miller pointed me at this!

Organisers of a village Christmas party have been told they must carry out a risk assessment of their mince pies – or their festivities will be cancelled.

Council bosses say posters will have to be displayed at the party in Embsay, in the Yorkshire Dales, warning villagers the pies contain nuts and suet pastry.

The cocoa content and temperature of the hot chocolate must also be checked.

Resident Steve Dobson said the rules had made the small party as difficult to arrange as the Great Yorkshire Show.

Mr Dobson said he learned of the regulations after writing to Craven District Council to ask if he could use a car park outside Embsay village hall to hold the free party for the community…

Scandal of Farepak phone lines

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The glories of capitalism. From today’s Observer…

MPs have slated Farepak administrator BDO Stoy Hayward for setting up an expensive premium-rate telephone information line for victims of the collapsed Christmas savings company.

BDO Stoy Hayward will itself receive a portion of the money earned from the 0870 telephone line, which charges 8p per minute during peak hours, 5p per minute in the evening, and 3p per minute at weekends.The accountancy firm says this is intended to cover the costs of handling compensation claims from up to 150,000 Farepak savers, and strongly denies it is profiting at the victims’ expense.

But the cost of calls threatens to pile unexpected financial hardship on Farepak savers from low-income backgrounds. Only last week BDO Stoy Hayward warned Farepak customers they could expect a maximum refund of 4p for every pound they had invested…