"The Crowning Attainment of Historical Study" - David Aaronovitch on the Death of Osama bin Laden

THE TIMES | Tuesday May 10 2011

Times Modern, pp4-5

Bin Laden dead? Only in theory

With the death of Osama bin Laden, the conspiracy theorists have mined a rich vein of incredulity. Yet, asks David Aaronovitch, are the internet and 24-hour   news channels making us all susceptible to exotic disbelief

What Americans now "needed" to do, the BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner told Radio 5 listeners on Saturday night, was to match the newly released video of a blanketed Osama bin Laden watching TV with the rooms in the house where he was killed. And to do it so that we could all see. That was what was required.

But, the sceptical soul demands, why would President Obama and company "need" to do any such odd thing? Might such "proof" be of assistance to the US in fighting the remnants of al-Qaeda? Hard to see how. Or could it help to reassure the world community — some of whom seem to believe that bin Laden should have been taken as though he were a local villain being apprehended by the parish plod — that the killing was justified? Nope.

Sceptical? What is the scepticism about here? Sceptical about what Obama "needs" to do? That's a funny kind of thing to claim scepticism about; more a practical matter than one of belief. Or is the scepticism about there being any necessity to provide evidence? Again, that's a funny thing to be sceptical about. It's almost a one-liner: You say we should not believe things without evidence, but I'm sceptical. (You can have that one for your next dinner party.)

I think it's really a matter of the 'sceptical soul' - that is the person who is by nature a sceptic - and I think Aaronovitch is suggesting that scepticism is relevant here because - you guessed it - he's about to go off on another sneering binge, in which he and the rest of the quietists are, despite appearances, sceptical by nature, while the rest of us are flaky weirdos with fixed ideas.

Gardner's concern was not, in fact, connected with the practicalities or ethics of what we may not any longer call the War on Terror. His advice was aimed at quieting the idea that it wasn't bin Laden who was shot that night in Abbottabad, or that if it was bin Laden he was already dead, or any of the other exotic conspiracy theories that started almost the instant the news broke.

The fact that Aaronovitch has chosen Frank Gardner, of all people, to upbraid for conceding too much to the shabby basement-dwellers illustrates just how implacable his demand for orthodoxy is. And see how the sceptical stance 'account of covert op not to be trusted' has been transformed into a positive thesis - that what actually happened was one of (x,y,z...), that is, anything incompatible with the official account, including its bare denial. In other words, the rejection of a claim has been presented as a family of positive assertions, the only common component of which is of course the rejection of the claim. Thus scepticism becomes credulity, credulity scepticism. Voodoo Bollocks!

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Conspiracy for Dummies, Lesson 1: don't write it down

A rare - minor - case in which the conspiratorial (dishonest, co-ordinated, unacknowledged) behaviour that's an integral part of big business as usual is actually blown wide open.

BBC News:

Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE), has been found guilty of tricking people into switching from their existing energy firms.
...
Steve Playle, of Surrey County Council Trading Standards, which brought the prosecution, said he was delighted with the court's decision.

"When we first became aware of the sales script being used by Scottish and Southern Energy we were convinced that it overstepped the mark and was misleading to potential customers," he said.

"A doorstep seller had a print out which he claimed showed consumers were paying too much with their current energy supplier, but the print out did not show this.

"The seller didn't actually have a clue but the sales script was cleverly designed to put potential customers on the back foot and to open the door to a sale," he added.

'Wilful mis-selling'

It is thought to be the first time that one of the big six energy firms has been prosecuted for using dishonest sales techniques.

The problem of doorstep trickery has plagued gas and electricity consumers since the industry was privatised in the 1990s.

Audrey Gallacher, of Consumer Focus, said the firm's behaviour had involved "deliberate and wilful mis-selling."

"'Misleading doorstep energy sales have been a nightmare for consumers for years, leaving many switching to a worse energy deal," she said.

"This verdict has revealed a deliberate tactic by SSE, not the behaviour of a rogue salesperson."

Honestly, it's really not difficult to do it properly: you employ the right kind of people (this can be by trial and error - just sack those who don't reach their targets) and rely on them to use a bit of initiative in making up the gap between your required result and what they can get by being honest. Even if managers coach the slower sales staff to improve their dirty tricks skills, they don't actually build it into a written script. That way, you have ample deniability, because as intimated, without the script, if you get caught you can simply blame "the behaviour of a rogue salesperson". No controlling mind, no awareness at upper management level, one expendable drone sacked and replaced, business as usual.

Let that be a lesson to these firms. Consumer protection means you do have to put a modicum of effort into making it look good.

Still, it's no biggy. The appeals process will no doubt be pursued (by the richer side) until such time as it's exhausted or finds that this was a case of a rogue manager and not the company's fault. And if past form is anything to go by, the fine will be manageable enough: for all I know it will be outweighed by the financial benefits of running a fraud without needing to pay for staff who have enough initiative to take a hint.

UPDATE, originally 12 May (Blogger has had a meltdown and quietly rolled back a few days' changes to this and other blogs, it seems):

Audrey Gallacher, Head of Energy at something called Consumer Focus agrees that This verdict is a wake-up call for the energy industry, but seems to take a more sanguine view than I do about what lessons might actually be learned:

Firms should be reviewing their...pay and incentives systems for salespeople...

Since this must be intended as a remedy for 'don't ask don't tell' sharp practice on the doorstep, it amounts to the suggestion that sales as we know it be abolished.

Wikileaks Cables: Possibly a Plant of Selective Information? (A comment montage)

I've been speculating in the blog comments for a while about the possibility that the leaker of the latest Wikileaks dump might have been selective about what was leaked. Now I call in those comments, being far too lazy to type it all out again, still less to reorganise
it and tidy up. Come home, my pretties!

from http://aaronovitch.blogspot.com/2010/11/sort-of-response-to-recent-anonymous.html, 2-5 Dec 2010:

 Tim Wilkinson said...

[...] so undamaging to the US - and so convenient in many cases for their PR effort - is

the preponderance of the documents I've come across so far that I'm inclined to give some consideration to the possibility that Akhmadi-Najad is on the right track when he claims that this latest batch was an engineered 'leak' of selected material.


Though the pronounced (though not too blatant, obviously) pro-US bias could just be down to what the papers have focussed on. It may be that this is influenced by the pseudo-coercive machinery of D-notices rather than just their customary obesiance to the authorities, though the latter could probably explain it.


But at some point Wikileaks was/is bound to be on the wrong end of such a trick (which is after all a standard bit of spy work, including adding just enough material just damaging enough to make it convincing).


Ideally I'd like to see some evidence that the selection of cables leaked doesn't have gaps in it. But I don;t really know what such evidence would look like, let alone think it likely that any is going to be forthcoming.

12/02/2010 05:02:00 PM

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Annie Machon v Christopher Andrew on MI5

...on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4:



Less interesting and entertaining, but included for completeness, the first half of the segment:



UPDATE: Machon's book Spies Lies and Whistleblowers can be found here.

No Smoky Room, No Smoking Gun: Corporate priorities in the case of BP

Reportage relating to the the US commission into BP's catastrophic oil spillage:

BP, firms did not shirk safety for money - panel

Well, that is the headline, but what was actually said is:

"To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favour dollars over safety," the commission's Chief Counsel Fred Bartlit said at a meeting exploring the causes of the Gulf of Mexico spill.

This is a general problem in corporate governance: heads of corporations operate by setting incentives, and really don't want to know (certainly not undeniably) the dirty details of how objectives are met. No-one needs to say 'prioritise profit over safety'. We know that safety regimes on oil rigs are dreadful, and it's pretty clear that the reason is one of cost (what else? Love of carnage?). Budgets are set, regulators are captured. Of course profit has priority over safety: the safest course would be to go out of business, and the reason that course is not taken is profit. The rest is haggling, and the 'Health and Safety' side in that arbitration is very obviously not going to get the better of that arbitration.

To take a slight tangent 'Heath and Safety', thanks to a media campaign which goes in tandem with the anti-EU-regulation crusade, has becone a dirty word in common parlance, not by coincidence. Both campaigns resemble that mounted in the early 80's, most notably by the Sun, against the 'Loony Left' and what would now be called 'political correctness', particularly in their cherry-picking and gross exaggeration and distortion of anecdotal accounts - 'baa baa green sheep' and other stories. Poltical correctness is now a confirmed third member of the unholy trinity, though opposition to it is less obviously (or less directly) related to the interests of business.

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Hunter and Hunted: the two pathologists of David Kelly

The latest grudging drip-feed of information about the Kelly case was the release of pathology and toxicology reports. Searchable text of the pathology report is here).

I'll concentrate mainly on the pathology document. It appears to tell us little of interest that we didn't already know - as those who decided to publish it must have been well aware. There are however a few interesting aspects:

The report's content is at odds with the remarks Dr Hunt recently made to the press (the 'textbook suicide' remarks) which were widely reported (not for the first - or the last - time) by all the usual commentators as laying to rest 'conspiracy theories' about Dr Kelly's death.

Those remarks were I believe made with the agreement of Hunt's Home Office employers. In fact it strains credulity to imagine that Hunt came up with the idea himself and the HO just granted permission. I think 'at the insistence and under the supervision of' would probably describe the facts better than 'with the agreement of '. Indeed, Hunt must have known that he was breaking confidentiality in making those statements, and he was sanctioned by the GMC for doing so without the permission of the coroner in the case.

So this later Hunt appears to have been under some pressure to make public statements which he must have been aware would be a breach of fundamental professional ethics unless properly authorised (which they weren't). One lever for the exertion of such pressure might have been his ongoing investigation by a Disciplinary Committee which via a Byzantine layering of official bodies - the Pathology Delivery Board under the Police, Science and Forensics Unit of the National Policing Improvement Agency - is evidently basically controlled by the Home Office. Hunt, under pressure, seems to have been wlling to blur the distinction between the roles of coroner and expert witness, since his scripted remarks give the impression that he is in a position to draw conclusions about matters other than the direct cause of death.

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Jonathan Evans #2: Like murderous intrigue? Join MI5! (Also, conspiracy in ancient Rome)

As part of the recent campaign to project a more touchy-feely image (as opposed to the sneaky-watchy, breaky-entery, even hurty-killy image that has somehow emerged over the years), Jonathan Evans, the latest head of MI5, has been chatting to Martha Kearney:

MI5 boss attracted by 'intrigue' of I, Claudius - The head of MI5 had admitted he was attracted by "the intrigue" of I, Claudius as a boy as he disclosed the details of his classical education background."
(- Telegraph)

Since the Telegraph (and the Today programme, which drew my attention to the story), have emphasised the idea - not so far as I can tell explicitly reflected in the content of the interviews - that Evans was attracted to the Service by a fondness for tales of intrigue and murder in Imperial Rome, I'll happily if flippanty take their sensationalist spin a tiny step further, hence the title of this post.

On coming across this titbit, I was reminded of a book that emphasises the ubiquity of conspiracy in ancient Rome, especially perhaps in the Imperial period: Victoria Emma Pagán, Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History. The book starts well, emphasising for example the peculiar problems that conspiracy poses for historians:

because conspiracy is a hidden, secret event, it resists—defies—exposition. In recording any conspiracy, important facts always remain in the shadows; to tell the tale of a conspiracy is to guess at a very great deal. So how does one reveal something that is deliberately kept secret? How does one speak with any authority on matters about which one knows little or nothing for certain? Of course, all historians face uncertainty and ignorance about their subject matter at some point. For all these reasons, I maintain that a conspiracy is an ideal circumstance in which to observe how a historian confronts the limits of knowledge.

I would agree with this for the most part, though I would go further and suggest that these problems create the need for a distinctive epistemic which deals with the deviant conditions of the conspiratorial realm - 'opposed' or 'adversary' epistemics. This is analogous in some ways to 'non-ideal theory' in political philosophy - that is, theory which, in taking account of the radical complications caused by recalcitrant people who refuse to behave as one's simple, 'ideal' theory would prefer, may well become a very different beast. I'd suggest that forensics will be a useful source here, though I think I mean this in a broader sense than Pagán when she writes: Forensics, ballistics, acoustics, optics: every available scientific method has been applied and reapplied to the evidence. My conception of forensics is not merely as another word for forensic science as seen (so I understand, sniff) in those CSI programmes, but as encompassing the whole theory of what it is that detectives and prosecutors do, or rather what they ought to do, and how they ought to go about doing it.

[UPDATE 4 Nov 2010: Actually, not just detectives and prosecutors but also perhaps courts, though the standard and burden of proof need not be the same. Those are determined largely by pragmatic concerns such as the costs of trying or punishing the innocent.]

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The House of Cards and the Numbers Game: Two Models of Secrecy

'Coventrian', in Aaronovitch Watch comments, describes discovering Denis MacShane's dodgy dealings:

'However, the big mystery is the strange sequence of invoices from The European Policy Institute (EPI), which doesn't seem to have any presence on the Internet other than it was founded by Denis MacShane. The invoices are strangely repetitive, lacking in detail as to what work was done and with all contact details redacted. Why?

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Crooked Timber comment overflow: Wikipedia on Conspiracy Theories (via the New York Times)

Comment overflow from Crooked Timber, on this article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times (reproduced at the end):

Krugman quotes from Wikipedia:

A conspiracy theory, says Wikipedia, "attempts to explain the cause of an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance."

I think there are problems here - one is the assumption of pragmatic explanatory status (previously discussed), in which the word 'theory' plays a role, since it is capable of suggesting a parallel with paradigmatically explanatory endeavours like scientific theories. (The word often also, or instead, imports a presumption of mere speculation, or of  a lack of adequate evidence. I note with approval that Wiki doesn't include any such evaluative element in its definition.)

Relatedly, the assumption that some reasonably compact and dicrete event must be involved is inaccurate, though as a defender of 'good' conspiracy theories, and strategically an aspiring rehabilitator of the term 'conspiracy theory', I don't mind this too much since those 'conspiracy theories' which are short on determinate and significant events obviously tend to be vague about all sorts of things, as well as defective in other ways - and if they are booted out of the nominal category 'conspiracy theory' so much the better.

Another more substantive problem is the 'covert alliance' bit - secrecy and/or deceptiveness of the plan is one thing (though it can be challenged as inessential to conspiracy both as a matter of definition and as a matter of salience in this context; the same goes, less plausibly and importantly, for the requirement that an 'alliance' be involved). But specifying that the 'alliance' itself must be covert is wrong - especially on a natural reading which places 'covert' at the extreme end of the secretiveness spectrum (the Bilderberg Group provides a good illustration of this spectrum with its progressive relaxation of secrecy, thanks largely to the efforts of 'conspiracy theorists').

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Edward Feser on Counterknowledge and Conspiracy Theories

1. Conspiracy Theories

Edward Feser is a teacher of and writer on philosophy, who has written a couple of articles on 'conspiracy theories', one on the counterknowledge website, one not. 

Feser summarises his views on the possibility of treasonable or similarly criminal conspiracies carried out by members of the government and government agencies as follows:

First, that while conspiracies of a small-scale nature do sometimes occur, the nature of modern bureaucracies makes it practically impossible for would-be conspirators secretly and effectively to engineer anything on the scale of a 9/11 “inside job” or JFK assassination scenario. Second, while liberal democratic societies are capable of great evil, the adversarial nature of their institutions and the diverse ends and belief systems of the people staffing these institutions make it practically impossible for would-be conspirators to organize enough relevant personnel to do evil of the specific sort involved in 9/11 “inside job” or JFK assassination scenarios. Third, the scale of deception posited in conspiracy scenarios of this scale is so all-encompassing that it effectively undermines the very evidential base that conspiracy theorists themselves must rely on to support their theories.

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Themes, Disgusting Bloodthirsty Chickenhawks, Etc.

[EDIT: if you've followed a link promising neocon propaganda about torture, you may (it's hard to believe, but you just might) wish to skip my musings and go directly here.]

The recent spasm of interest in the Hutton/Kelly business (which I’ve been unobtrusively and undogmatically mentioning for years - links to follow, when I track them down) has brought a bit of traffic to what was previously not much more than an archive of my sporadic productions. I’m going to try and keep it going as a proper blog, and among other things to gather together various bits and bobs I’ve blurted into cyberspace over the last few years. That includes quite a few longish emails I’ve circulated to a select group of one or two hapless victims, and this post is one of those.

But first, a word on the theme of Themes, and specifically the prospect of this becoming a conspiracy-theory-themed blog.

The trouble with ‘conspiracy theories’ is that I don’t really consider it to be a theme at all. My interest in use of the term is twofold: first, as a form of abuse that has been very successfully disguised as an ordinary descriptive term and is thus a cause of much sophistical rhetoric and a great deal of self-censorship. The climate of self-censorship can be observed in the great lengths people go to to deny being ‘conspiracy theorists’ or propounding ‘conspiracy theories’.

The deceptive nature of the term as it is used lies in a peculiar feature: the term can be applied to any theory about a conspiracy (though this is done selectively), but once the label is applied, it is treated as indicating that the theory has certain defects, notably and most crudely, being untrue. Yet the basis for inferring such defects is shifty: sometimes it is treated as deriving directly from the definition of 'conspiracy theory' (but this would mean it can only be applied after a theory is shown to be defective), sometimes from a general empirical truth about all conspiracy theories (but there is clearly no such general fact, if the term applies to any theory of conspiracy). By shifting between these different positions sufficiently skilfully, polemicists can perform the conjuring trick of inferring the defects without having to justify the application of the discrediting term.

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The Week in Tinfoil: Conspiracy Theory News in the UK, Aug 30 - Sep 5 2010

Another week's worth of conspiracy- and 'conspiracy theory'-related news stories. I'm sure I've missed some - I haven't been paying very close attention to the news, which not ideal. And it's a bit late for the intended Sunday slot. Any suggestions for things to add gratefully accepted. Thanks to Bensix for the early spot of the Demos paper in response to last week's instalment.

On to the week's tinfoilery:

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Who lacks imagination? Howard Jacobson on 'Conspiracy Theorists'

...in last Saturday’s Independent (28 August 2010):

Conspiracy theorists lack imagination: In our determined unimaginativeness, we turn Kelly and Blair alike into less than men.
('We' here of course means 'they': and make sure you're not one of them.)

Unfortunately, what follows is itself lacking in imagination. The introduction is a dreary trudge through the usual weary tropes:

those who see a conspiracy in the fall of every sparrow (shurely: suspect foul play behind the violent death of a publicly dissenting member of the military-intelligence establishment?)

Too much time on their hands

Paranoia

An overactive imagination (This is a cunning decoy hidden among all the other ever-so-reasonable possibilities)

they invent where invention is not called for

they reject plain and feasible explanations in favour of elaborate and unlikely ones

they mentally inhabit a middle earth of spies and secret agents, of liars, double-dealers, hypocrites, and murderers (like the one - hobbits aside - that Kelly physically inhabited then?)

the world explicable to them only as a place where nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted to tell the truth

And later: the monkey of conspiracy is out of the cage

But what's the gimmick? What peg is this stuff hung on? Well, we know this already from the title and lead, and it's a pretty flimsy one, based on a minor departure from the otherwise rote recitation of ritual abuse:

But of this I am sure: suspicion might be the word for it, daydreaming might the word for it, but imagination is not. Instead of an excess of imagination, They have too little of it. That might get the attention of one of two of the lighter-sleeping readers.

So we have our headline, but how is it justified? What is the intriguing insight that underlies this modicum of originality in Jacobson's otherwise entirely pedestrian screed? We'll ignore the deeply uninformative literary namedropping, and get to the point.

Instead of the blind and innocent victim of malign political forces (for which read the "Bliar" Blair, or those he had unloosed), we were presented with a man more like ourselves in nature and in circumstance – a challenge to our imagination in the sense that profound fellow-feeling for suffering is always difficult when we would rather root out blame and apportion punishment.

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The Week in Tinfoil : Conspiracy Theory News in the UK, Aug 22-29 2010

...being a rundown of recent news stories involving allegations of conspiratorial behaviour, and of 'conspiracy theorising'. Maybe not the best day to do it, since I haven't had a chance to check all the Sunday papers, but still. I'm thinking Faraday Sunday might become a regular feature.

I'm hoping commenters can point out any errors or omissions; if so, I'll update appropriately.

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Spurious Retraction Syndrome (or: do you really want to say it's straight out of a textbook?): Dr Hunt on Dr Kelly

There have been a few remarks about recent statements in the press by one of the pathologists in the Kelly case, Nicholas Hunt. Unfortunately Hunt chose the Sunday Times to speak to, so the first edit of his interview is behind the Murdoch paywall. angrysoba provided this excerpt from the Mail:

Dr Hunt says he found up to a dozen cuts on Dr Kelly's wrist, each around 2in to 3in long, one of which opened the ulnar artery. 'Some cuts were very shallow, some were deeper and deeper, which is typical of someone feeling their way. You have a knife, apply light pressure and realise that it actually takes a bit more effort and you get more bold as your resolve increases. It's one of the classic features of self-inflicted injury.' He adds that there was clear evidence Dr Kelly repeatedly dislodged clots or scabs to ensure he continued bleeding. 'His wrist was red so he must have been doing this for some time.'

which is notable for the fact that Hunt says some cuts were shallow, others 'deeper and deeper', thus implying what appears pretty implausible: that he was able to observe the order in which the cuts were made. Of course, the multiple cuts tend to indicate a suicide and progressively deeper cuts - but it's just a small example of the importation of conclusions into descriptions of data (see 'read-ahead', below).

A few other points:

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Aaronovitch twitters, the world titters: more on David Kelly

Aaronovitch twitters:

Have just noticed that the police off. whose 'revelations' on Kelly were written up as new in Mail, had said it all in testimony to Hutton.

DC Coe's Evidence is easy to check- it takes just over 4 pages of the 112 generated by a 2¾-hour session, which I calculate to represent about five or six minutes.

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Piss and Wind: David Aaronovitch on the death of David Kelly

…in Saturday’s Times (August 14, 2010)

There is no mystery over David Kelly's death proclaims the headline. Well, in one sense you might say that: no mystery, no esoteric ineffables, no transcendent unknown. Of course that is not the sense in which the headline is supposed to be taken – not officially – but it sounds a lot more plausible than ‘no room for doubt’, ‘no stone left unturned’ or ‘no unresolved issues’.

Because whether or not the uncritical reader might assent to the absence of ‘mystery’, there remains the small matter of a suspicious death and a flagrant failure to investigate it. There’s a stiltedness about ‘no mystery over’, too, perhaps suggesting that ‘mystery’ might have been substituted for some other word – but it's a bit early for idle speculation.

The lead line summarises Aaronovitch’s argument admirably:

A body, a knife, pills, a cut wrist - conspiracy theorists and campaigning doctors must accept the truth

Simple, hardheaded and tinfoil-free. No brains falling out of too-open minds here. Simple, like a stick figure.

A principle of simplicity in explanation is all very well as a tie-breaker between otherwise equivalent propositions, though its status is as much a matter of convenience as anything, and it is in practice irrelevant outside philosophical ontology and the most abstract reaches of theoretical science. Aaronovitch’s approach is more radical – simplicity of explanation actually justifies ending empirical inquiry, even dismissing great swathes of information. The difficult and complex data - the shading and sketchmarks that crowd Aaronovitch's stick figure - are banished, wiped away by a powerful new implement - Occam’s Eraser.

Every six months or so since 2004, a group of doctors or "medical experts" has written to the newspapers calling, in effect, for a new inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly, who died seven years ago this summer. Yesterday's letter in The Times, which received significant coverage, was different in so far as the names were mostly new, and the qualifications were more relevant. The content, however, was much the same.

Aaronovitch must get a really good discount on scare-quotes. I haven't been following the letters pages, but I doubt very much that Aaronovitch can produce an instance of a false claim to medical expertise. On the contrary, all those I've heard expressing doubt of the official narrative on medical grounds have been careful not to misrepresent their expertise, for example the first paramedics on the scene: "we're not medical experts. All we commented on was the amount of blood…"

Note "calling, in effect [i.e. not actually] for a new inquest": there was no inquest. By a peculiar and highly irregular process, the original inquest was adjourned since it was to await the outcome of the Hutton inquiry. This was odd since the relevant provision (the Coroners Act 1988 s17A(1)) was intended for mass deaths, and previous invocations had always been accompanied by a proper statutory public inquiry, not some half-baked setup like the Hutton job. In fact the coroner initially expressed what appeared to be disquiet at the informal nature of the proposed inquiry, in particular the lack of essential subpoena powers. Further, Hutton's terms of reference (‘circumstances surrounding the death’) seemed designed to look at anything but the matter in hand, which is indeed what it did, being largely a vehicle for Alistair Campbell to fuck (as he would say) the BBC.

But the key to the Hutton stitch-up was a really flagrant move: the inquest, having been adjourned pending the outcome of the inquiry, was reopened and the coroner leant on to perform the most cursory - token – inquiry, which was for all practical purposes conducted in secrecy. It was from this hurried and clearly inadequate source that a final death certificate emanated, which was then treated by Hutton as establishing suicide.

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Book review: The Transparent Cabal by Stephen Sniegoski

Book Review
The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel by Stephen Sniegoski (Foreword by Congressman Paul Findley Introduction by Paul Gottfried).
(Enigma Editions, Norfolk Virginia 2008).

(Word version here)

In this meticulously researched and cogently argued book, Stephen Sniegoski presents the thesis that the 2003 Iraq war was, at root, all about Israel.

More precisely, Sniegoski argues that

the origins of the American war on Iraq revolve around the United States’ adoption of a war agenda whose basic format was conceived in Israel to advance Israeli interests and was ardently pushed by the influential pro-Israeli American neoconservatives, both inside and outside the Bush administration…

Such a thesis does not mean that the neoconservatives intentionally sought to aid Israel at the expense of the United States, but rather that they have seen American foreign policy through the lens of Israeli interest.

Sniegoski identifies the neocons as a group and establishes that they have, at least since the late sixties, been strongly motivated by a close identification with the state of Israel, and specifically with a Likudnik view of that state's interests. A substantial part of the book (the best part of five chapters) is dedicated to a detailed history of the neocons, and a huge amount of evidence is amassed, making this part of the book useful as a general - if not definitive - reference on the history of the neocons.

Among the events covered in this section are the neocons’ move from the Democratic to the Republican party - apparently motivated by the latter's more congenial attitude to an aggressive foreign-policy - and their wielding of disproportionate influence by means of a network of interconnected, overlapping and mutually supportive think tanks, which also extended to explicitly pro-Israel and indeed Israeli, and Israeli government, institutions.

The evidence adduced for the neocons' strong attachment to - even preoccupation with - a certain view of Israeli interests is overwhelming.  Besides their connections with the Israeli foreign policy establishment, Sniegoski adduces in evidence a number of policy documents, detailed below, which make it quite clear that the neocons were directly concerned with the interests, as they saw them, of Israel, unmediated by a conception of US interests.

In the course of establishing the neocons’ attachment to Israel, Sniegoski goes further and relates the development of a specific war strategy for the middle east originating with right-wing Israeli strategists, and carried forward both in Israel and among American neoconservatives, culminating in the emergence of the specific neocon plan to bring down Saddam. Sniegoski describes a consistent strategy which varies in its details but not in its central focus: the geopolitical ‘reconfiguration’ of the Middle East by a weakening of Israel's neighbour states, generally by means of destabilisation and fragmentation.

Sniegoski amasses a significant body of evidence for this approach, starting with a 1982 article by Oded Yinon, an Israeli foreign policy strategist and ex-government advisor, which recommends just such a fragmentation policy, with specific emphasis Lebanon as a model and Iraq as a target. It has been suggested that Sniegoski places too much reliance on this document in support of the fragmentation thesis as applied to the motives for the Iraq war, but  this is not clearly so. Certainly considerable evidence is presented that the strategy formed a main current in Likudnik thinking at the time and since.

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Cameron, the press and the Hello model

It's clear that the media have already anointed David Cameron, starting with the lionisation that greeted his (gasp!) memorising a speech. But it has now got to the point where they are collaborating in a transparent Hello-style publicity stunt, planned apology and all. All day yesterday Radio 4 news ran the story of Cameron's mild-swearing-on-the-radio 'gaffe' with no sign of scepticism, despite the fact that there can really be no doubt that the whole thing was planned in advance by Cameron and his spin machine. Apparently one of the freesheets mentioned the possibility that the mild swearing wasn't entirely inadvertent, but I haven't encountered any other mention of it even as a possibility - let alone a journo actually asking the direct question. The recording itself leaves little doubt that the 'profanity' was deliberate. Cameron very obviously worked his way up to his 'too many tweets make a twat' remark, which in itself is pretty clearly a prepared phrase. There were even preemptive giggles from one of his interlocutors, suggesting that even they were told in advance. At no point did Cameron show any sign of getting carried away. But quite general considerations make it quite unbelievable that this was anything but carefully choreographed. I'm trying to think of the last time I heard anyone accidentally swearing without being under he influence or involved in a thumb-hammering incident. It doesn't happen. Perhaps someone in an unfamiliar social situation, or someone who is inthe throes of strong emotion, but Cameron, the memoriser of speeches? It almost seems ridiculous to be commenting on this - but Cameron clearly thinks there is political capital to be gained from some quarter - and he's relying on not being directly challenged about, for example, the sincerity of his spokesman's apology. And it seems he can rely on the press in that regard.

What is an 'interesting coincidence'?

Intelligence and Security Committee report on the July 7 bombs

Is everyone in the ISC singing from the same songsheet? I only ask because at p68, I was struck by a jarring note in the otherwise soothing harmony: the gratuitous inclusion of the phrase 'astonishing coincidence'. On a still more discordant note: 'interesting coincidence'. Taken literally, this expression is pretty much an oxymoron. I would normally take it to be an archly ironic way of suggesting that the 'coincidence' might not be coincidental at all. Surely no-one on the committee is giving credence to a covert action hypothesis?