Touring bassist with Danish band Junior Senior at the Roskilde Festival 2005.

Interesting post at The Wonk Room :

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.” [...]”

I suppose it’s fitting, if disturbingly ironic, that techniques adopted wholesale from methods intended to extract false confessions were used in an attempt to generate evidence of a non-existent Al Qaeda-Saddam operational relationship.

It was in many respects also a self fulfilling process. The encouragement of torture to get evidence of terrorist links to Iraq created a torture culture in parts of the US military/intelligence complex. This lead to the Abu Ghraib scandals. In reading about the war in Iraq it is clear that at least some of the insurgency were motivated by these and other travesties inflicted by the US military.The ultimate effect of using torture to ‘prove’ terrorism in Iraq lead to terrorism in Iraq.

JG Ballard has just passed away. Described by the New York Times suchly: Ballard would eventually be deemed worthy of his own adjective, “Ballardian,” defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

It is always difficult to get a sense of an author from a short passage, but this is from a short story, Voices of Time:

The dome was in darkness, all the windows shuttered, but the generator still hummed in the X-ray theatre. Kaldren stepped through the entrance and switched on the lights. In the theatre he touched the grilles of the generator, felt the warm cylinder of the beryllium end-window. The circular target table was revolving slowly, set at 1 r.p.m., a steel restraining chair shackled to it hastily. Grouped in a semi-cicle a few feet away were most of the tanks and cages, piled on top of each other haphazardly. In one of them was the enormous squid-like plant had almost managed to climb from it vivarium. Its long translucent tendrils clung to the end of the tank, but it body had burst into a jellified pool of globular mucilage. In another an enormous spider had trapped itself in its own web, hung helplessly in the centre of a huge three dimensional maze of phosphorescing thread, twitching spasmodically.

All the experimental plants and animals had died. The chimp lay on its back among the remains of the hutch, the helmet forward over its eyes. Kaldren watched it for a moment, then sat down on the desk and picked up the phone.

While he dialed the number he noticed a film reel lying on the blotter. For a moment, he stared at the label, then slid the reel into his pocket beside the tape.

After he had spoken to the police he turned down the lights and went out to the car, drove off slowly down the drive.

When he reached the summer house the early sunlight was breaking across the ribbon-like balconies and terraces. He took the lift to the penthouse, made his way through into the museum. One by one he opened the shutters and let the sunlight play over the exhibits. Then he pulled the a chair over to a side window, sat and stared up at the light pouring through into the room.

Two or three hours later he heard Coma outside, calling up to him. After half an hour she went away, but a little later a second voice appeared and shouted up at Kaldren. He left his chair and closed all the shutters overlooking the front courtyard, and eventually he was left undisturbed.

Kaldren returned to his seat and lay back quietly, his eyes gazing across the line of exhibits. Half asleep, periodically he leaned up and adjusted the flow of light through the shutter, thinking to himself, as he would do in the coming months of Powers and his strange mandala, and of the seven and their journey to the white gardens of the moon, and the blue people who had come from Orion and spoken in poetry to them of the ancient beautiful worlds beneath golden suns in the island of galaxies, vanished for ever now in the myriad deaths of the cosmos.

JG Ballard, The Voices of Time, 1960.

It seems like you cannot go past a TV show or movie at the moment that they do not have Apple computers lying around the place. I was watching 30 Rock just before and when they went to check some Puerto Rican website, they of course wandered over to Jack Donaghy’s computer which looked like a 24″ iMac:

This is of course the same computer that I use:

I have heard that even hardcore geeks are into macs because it is Unix based and thus is essentially a Unix computer with a nice GUI, so all the linux geeks get into them.

The news today reported on the rescue of an American merchant seaman who was being held by Somali pirates (see for example, this Washington Post article).

The interesting dimension in the Somali pirate story is that it is still occurring at this time after so many resources have been directed to the issue. Somali pirates have been operating of the coast of Somalia for some time, this is a prime location as there is a large traffic of cargo ships travelling past Somalia as they exit from the Suez Channel and relating ports around the Gulf.

Countries from around the world, developed and developing, have sent naval ships to the ocean off of Somali to counter the pirates, and while we will see occasional stories of triumph overall this naval surge does not appear to be that successful. It is not difficult to see why. The sea area around Somalia is vast, dotted with merchant ships travelling too and fro and also seething with Somali fishing vessels, some of which may contain pirates.

Arrayed against this are relatively few large industrial strength warships, primarily designed for high-intensity modern naval warfare. Some are armed with enough cruise missiles to level a Somali town, but perfectly useless for catching pirates.

And it has always been this way. When the United States had problems with Barbary pirates from North Africa capturing United States ships in the Mediterranean at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries they launched two wars against the Barbary nations, landing and fighting in Tripoli and other North African ports (1801-1815).

The way to defeat pirates is to remove the safe havens they have on land, not to try and intercept them in the endless oceans.

The implications of this however, for the Somali situation are too terrible for many to contemplate. Somalia is a “failed state”, and one in which the United States intervened for humanitarian reasons, only to have the soldiers killed by warlords in desperate gun battles in the narrow streets of Mogidishu (see Black Hawk Down). Bill Clinton rapidly removed the American forces, and I doubt any President is likely to wish to go down that road again.

With the most effective response closed off, it will be interesting to see how affected nations adapt to the Somali pirate threat and if their military forces, and in particular their navies, are able to come up with a strategy the uses all their high-tech equipment to defeat a low tech opponent for which the were never designed to.

I am at the moment considering how to update, improve and focus this blog. At the moment I am looking at other technology and themes and expect to be able to put something in place soon.