iPad Cat Toy App

(ht Huffington Post)

Did Chris Cox Cause Thursday's Wall Street Plunge?

It sure looks like it, after reading yesterday's Washington Post article by David Cho and Jia Lynn Yang:

In 2007, the SEC put in place new rules for how stocks are traded, led by then-Chairman Christopher Cox. The goal was to give investors more control over how their trades were executed and to guarantee the best price when they buy stocks.

When the NYSE received an order for a stock, for instance, the rules required the exchange to route the order to the platform offering the best price.

The new SEC rules toppled the dominance of NYSE. The trading of its own listed stocks dropped from 85 percent to 21 percent, said James Angel, a professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business.

As a result, a single entity can no longer put a stop to panicked selling. The markets Thursday were a preview of what happens when other trading venues take over, he said.

"We are dangerously unprotected from a real-time meltdown," Angel said.

Market officials and regulators are now unwinding millions of the trades that occurred on the electronic exchanges Thursday...

More on this at this video documentary website: Stock Shock:

Happy V-E Day!

Since US, British and French troops are marching in the Russian V-E Day parade this year, I thought this old Soviet poster (ht Ferghana.ru) featuring US, French and British (and Nationalist Chinese!) flags might be apropos...

Charles Crawford on the British Election

He calls the result "a well hung Parliament..."

In this context, the widest range of options and (vitally) sense of momentum is with the party which has much the biggest haul of seats and the highest number of votes, ie the Conservatives. Plus neither Labour nor the Lib Dems can afford a new election soon.

Which is why on balance after a flurry of uncertainty and desperate babbling brought about by sheer exhaustion, I expect David Cameron to lead the next UK government for a while under some sort of formal or informal arrangement as outlined above.

If this happens, an uneasy game of chicken will ensue: the Conservatives in effect will be saying to Parliament every day: "Vote us out if you dare - and face the consequences"...

President Obama's Pakistan Connections

From reading this account, on Pakistaniat.com, which points out that the President's mother worked in Pakistan for 5 years for the Asian Development Bank, overseeing a project in Gujranwallait from 1987-1992, it sounds like Barack Obama should be able to figure out Pakistan's role in NY's Times Square bomb plot for himself:

Barack Obama may have visited Pakistan for longer than any U.S. President or presidential candidate ever has. As so many college students do, he seemed eager to see the world. He was in Karachi in 1981 as a young student, returning from a visit to his mother in Indonesia. According to a New York Times report:

…Mr. Obama also spoke about having traveled to Pakistan in the early 1980s. Because of that trip, which he did not mention in either of his autobiographical books, “I knew what Sunni and Shia was before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” he said… According to his campaign staff, Mr. Obama visited Pakistan in 1981, on the way back from Indonesia, where his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, were living. He spent “about three weeks” there, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Bill Burton, said, staying in Karachi with the family of a college friend, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, but also traveling to Hyderabad, in India.

Finally, as mentioned in the excerpt above, Senator Obama had a number of Pakistani friends during his college days, and it was that friendship that brought him to Pakistan. Some details, again, from the same New York Times report:

…In Dreams from My Father, he talks of having a Pakistani roommate when he moved to New York, a man he calls Sadik who “had overstayed his tourist visa and now made a living in New York’s high-turnover, illegal immigrant work force, waiting on tables”… During his years at Occidental College, Mr. Obama also befriended Wahid Hamid, a fellow student who was an immigrant from Pakistan and traveled with Mr. Obama there, the Obama campaign said. Mr. Hamid is now a vice president at Pepsico in New York, and according to public records, has donated the maximum $2,300 to the Obama campaign and is listed as a fund-raiser for it. Mr. Chandoo is now a self-employed financial consultant, living in Armonk, N.Y. He has also donated the maximum, $2,300, to Mr. Obama’s primary campaign and an additional $309 for the general election, campaign finance records show.

An Associated Press story on Obama’s college friends has more interesting snippets. Especially his relationship with Sohale Siddiqi, from Karachi, is fascinating - all the more to the Pakistani reader:

The way Sohale Siddiqi remembers it, he and his old roommate were walking his pug Charlie on Broadway when a large, scary bum approached them, stomping on the ground near the dog’s head. This was in the 1980s, a time when New York was a fearful place beset by drugs and crime, when the street smart knew that the best way to handle the city’s derelicts was to avoid them entirely. But Siddiqi was angry and he confronted the man, who approached him menacingly. Until his skinny, elite univerity-educated friend - Barack Obama - intervened. He “stepped right in between. … He planted his face firmly in the face of the guy. ‘Hey, hey, hey.’ And the guy backpedaled and we kept walking,” Siddiqi recalls.

…Obama spent the six years between 1979 and 1985 at Occidental College in Los Angeles and then in New York at Columbia University and in the workplace. His memoir, Dreams from My Father, talks about this time, but not in great detail; Siddiqi, for example, is identified only as “Sadik” _ “a short, well-built Pakistani” who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party. Obama’s campaign wouldn’t identify “Sadik,” but The Associated Press located him in Seattle, where he raises money for a community theater. Together, the recollections of Siddiqi and other friends and acquaintances from Obama’s college years paint a portrait of the candidate as a young man. They remember a good student with a sharp mind and unshakable integrity, a young man who already had a passion for the underprivileged. Some described the young Obama’s personality as confident to the point of arrogance, a criticism that would emerge decades later, during the campaign.

Not everyone who knew Obama in those years is eager to talk. Some explained that they feared inadvertently hurting Obama’s campaign. Among his friends were Siddiqi and two other Pakistanis, all of them from Karachi; several of those interviewed said the Pakistanis were reluctant to talk for fear of stoking rumors that Obama is a Muslim. “Obama in the eyes of some right wingers is basically Muslim until proved innocent,” says Margot Mifflin, a friend from Occidental who is now a journalism professor at New York’s Lehman College. “It’s partly the Muslim factor by association and partly the fear of something being twisted.”

…Of course, he was only 18 when he arrived at the small liberal arts college nicknamed “Oxy.” His freshman roommates were Imad Husain, a Pakistani, who’s now a Boston banker, and Paul Carpenter, now a Los Angeles lawyer… Obama had an international circle of friends _ “a real eclectic sort of group,” says Vinai Thummalapally, who himself came from Hyderabad, India. As a freshman, he quickly became friends with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, two wealthy Pakistanis.

In 1981, Obama transferred from Occidental to Columbia. In between, he traveled to Pakistan - a trip that enhanced his foreign policy qualifications, he maintained in a private speech at a San Francisco fundraiser last month. Obama spent “about three weeks” in Pakistan, traveling with Hamid and staying in Karachi with Chandoo’s family, said Bill Burton, Obama’s press secretary. “He was clearly shocked by the economic disparity he saw in Pakistan. He couldn’t get over the sight of rural peasants bowing to the wealthy landowners they worked for as they passed,” says Margot Mifflin, who makes a brief appearance in Obama’s memoir.

When Obama arrived in New York, he already knew Siddiqi - a friend of Chandoo’s and Hamid’s from Karachi who had visited Los Angeles. Looking back, Siddiqi acknowledges that he and Obama were an odd couple. Siddiqi would mock Obama’s idealism - he just wanted to make a lot of money and buy things, while Obama wanted to help the poor. “At that age, I thought he was a saint and a square, and he took himself too seriously,” Siddiqi said. “I would ask him why he was so serious. He was genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor. He’d give me lectures, which I found very boring. He must have found me very irritating.”

Siddiqi offered the most expansive account of Obama as a young man. “We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay,” said Siddiqi, who at the time worked as a waiter and as a salesman at a boutique… In about 1982, Siddiqi and Obama got an apartment at a sixth-floor walkup on East 94th Street. Siddiqi managed to get the apartment thanks to subterfuge. “We didn’t have a chance in hell of getting this apartment unless we fabricated the lease application,” Siddiqi said. Siddiqi fudged his credentials, saying he had a high-paying job at a catering company, but Obama “wanted no part of it. He put down the truth.”

The apartment was “a slum of a place” in a drug-ridden neighborhood filled with gunshots, he said. “It wasn’t a comfortable existence. We were slumming it.” What little furniture they had was found on the street, and guests would have to hold their dinner plates in their laps. While Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine during high school in Hawaii, he writes in the memoir that he stopped using soon after his arrival in New York. His roommate had no such scruples. But Siddiqi says that during their time together here, Obama always refused his offers of drugs.

…Siddiqi said his female friends thought Obama was “a hunk.” “We were always competing,” he said. “You know how it is. You go to a bar and you try hitting on the girls. He had a lot more success. I wouldn’t out-compete him in picking up girls, that’s for sure.” Obama was a tolerant roommate. Siddiqi’s mother, who had never been around a black man, came to visit and she was rude; Obama was nothing but polite. Siddiqi himself could be intemperate - he called Obama an Uncle Tom, but “he was really patient. I’m surprised he suffered me.” Finally, their relationship started to fray. “I was partying all the time. I was disrupting his studies,” Siddiqi said. Obama moved out.

… Neither Hamid nor Chandoo would be interviewed for this story; Hamid is now a top executive at Pepsico in New York, and Chandoo is a self-employed financial consultant in the New York area. Both have each contributed the maximum $2,300 to Obama’s campaign, and records indicate each has joined an Asian-American council that supports his run for president. Both also are listed on Obama’s campaign Web site as being among his top fundraisers, each bringing in between $100,000 and $200,000 in contributions from their networks of friends. Both also attended Obama’s wedding in 1992, according to published reports and other friends.

Thummalapally has stayed in contact with Obama, too, visiting him in New York, attending his wedding in 1992 and joining him in Springfield, Illinois., for the Feb. 10, 2007, announcement of Obama’s run for the White House. President of a CD and DVD manufacturing company in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Thummalapally also is listed as a top fundraiser on the campaign Web site.

Siddiqi has not kept in touch. His has been a difficult road; years after his time with Obama, Siddiqi says, he became addicted to cocaine and lost his business. But when he needed help during his recovery, Obama - the roommate he drove away with his partying, the man he always suspected of looking down at him - gave him a job reference. So yes, he’s an Obama man, too. Witness the message on his answering machine: “My name is Hal Siddiqi, and I approve of this message. Vote for peace, vote for hope, vote for change, and vote for Obama.”

But the most interesting account, even more interesting than the yarn about Hal Siddiqi comes from Barack Obama himself, in his book Dreams from My Father...

Persepolis

Just saw Marjane Satrapi's feature-length cartoon coming of age story about growing up as a Persian emigre on Netflix...very relevant to today. I'm sorry I didn't see it when it came out in 2007. I don't know why it didn't win the Academy award for best foreign film. Catherine Deneuve plays the mother's voice. Five stars!

Plus, it explains what's going on with Iran right now: What's Past is indeed Prologue...

Ann Coulter on the Times Square Bomb Plot

From AnnCoulter.com:

Even after the NYPD de-wired the smoking car bomb, produced enough information to identify the bomb-maker, and handed it all to federal law enforcement authorities tied up in a bow, the federal government's crack "no-fly" list failed to stop Shahzad from boarding a plane to Dubai.

To be fair, at Emirates Airlines, being on a "no-fly" list makes you eligible for pre-boarding.

Perhaps the Department of Homeland Security should consider creating a "Really, REALLY No-Fly" list.

Contrary to the wild excuses being made for the federal government on all the TV networks Monday night, it's now clear that this was not a wily plan of federal investigators to allow Shahzad to board the plane in order to nab his co-conspirators. It was a flub that nearly allowed Shahzad to escape.

Meanwhile, on that same Monday at JFK airport, approximately 100,000 passengers took off their shoes, coats, belts and sunglasses for airport security.

But the "highly trained federal force" The New York Times promised us on Oct. 28, 2001, when the paper demanded that airport security be federalized, failed to stop the only guy they needed to stop at JFK last Monday -- the one who planted a bomb in the middle of Times Square days earlier.

So why were 100,000 other passengers harassed and annoyed by the TSA?

The federal government didn't stop the diaper bomber from nearly detonating a bomb over Detroit. It didn't stop a guy on the "No Fly" list from boarding a plane and coming minutes away from getting out of the country.

If our only defense to terrorism is counting on alert civilians, how about not bothering them before they board airplanes, instead of harassing them with useless airport "security" procedures?

Both of the attempted bombers who sailed through airport security, I note, were young males of the Islamic faith. I wonder if we could develop a security plan based on that information?

And speaking of a "highly trained federal force," who's working at the INS these days? Who on earth made the decision to allow Shahzad the unparalleled privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen last year?

WSJ: Pakistan's Historical Jihad

Sadanand Dhume explains:

In attempting to explain why so many attacks—abortive and successful—can be traced back to a single country, analysts tend to dwell on the 1980s, when Pakistan acted as a staging ground for the successful American and Saudi-funded jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But while the anti-Soviet campaign undoubtedly accelerated Pakistan's emergence as a jihadist haven, to truly understand the country it's important to go back further, to its creation.

Pakistan was carved out of the Muslim-majority areas of British India in 1947, the world's first modern nation based solely on Islam. The country's name means "Land of the Pure." The capital city is Islamabad. The national flag carries the Islamic crescent and star. The cricket team wears green.

From the start, the new country was touched by the messianic zeal of pan-Islamism. The Quranic scholar Muhammad Asad—an Austrian Jew born Leopold Weiss—became an early Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations. The Egyptian Said Ramadan, son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, made Pakistan a second home of sorts and collaborated with Pakistan's leading Islamist ideologue, the Jamaat-e-Islami's Abul Ala Maududi. In 1949, Pakistan established the world's first transnational Islamic organization, the World Muslim Congress. Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the virulently anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed president.

Through alternating periods of civilian and military rule, one thing about Pakistan has remained constant—the central place of Islam in national life. In the 1960s, Pakistan launched a war against India in an attempt to seize control of Kashmir, the country's only Muslim-majority province, one that most Pakistanis believe ought to be theirs by right.

In the 1970s the Pakistani army carried out what Bangladeshis call a genocide in Bangladesh; non-Muslims suffered disproportionately. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto boasted about creating an "Islamic bomb." (The father of Pakistan's nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, would later export nuclear technology to the revolutionary regime in Iran.) In the 1980s Pakistan welcomed Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Palestinian theorist of global jihad Abdullah Azzam.

In the 1990s, armed with expertise and confidence gained fighting the Soviets, the army's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spawned the Taliban to take over Afghanistan, and a plethora of terrorist groups to challenge India in Kashmir. Even after 9/11, and despite about $18 billion of American aid, Pakistan has found it hard to reform its instincts.

Pakistan's history of pan-Islamism does not mean that all Pakistanis, much less everyone of Pakistani origin, hold extremist views. But it does explain why a larger percentage of Pakistanis than, say, Indonesians or Tunisians, are likely to see the world through the narrow prism of their faith. The ISI's reluctance to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism—training camps, a web of ultra-orthodox madrassas that preach violence, and terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba—ensure that Pakistan remains a magnet for any Muslim with a grudge against the world and the urge to do something violent about it.

William McGurn: First Amendment a Right, Not a Privilege

In today's Wall Street Journal, William McGurn reflects on the implications for bloggers of the Apple v Gizmodo iPhone Case:

Steve Simpson, a lawyer for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, puts it this way: "Once the government gets in the business of deciding who can speak based on identity, it will then necessarily be involved in deciding what viewpoints get heard."

The classic view of the First Amendment holds all Americans are entitled to its rights by virtue of citizenship. These days, alas, too many journalists and politicians assume that a free press should mean special privileges for a designated class. The further we travel in this direction, the more the government will end up deciding which Americans qualify and which do not.

It's not just Mr. Chen. Two weeks ago in New Jersey, a state appeals court ruled that a hockey mom who blogs is not a journalist for the purposes of protecting her sources. The woman was being sued for derogatory comments she posted on a message board about a company that supplies software for the porn industry. At the federal level, meanwhile, a "shield law" protecting journalists from revealing their sources remains bogged down in Congress as legislators are forced to define who is legitimately a journalist and who is not.

IMHO, "shield laws" are a bad idea--undemocratic, unconstitutional, and unfair...unlike the First Amendment.

Huffington Post: Lesson of Times Square Bomb Attempt--Try Terror Suspects in Manhattan!

IMHO, this analysis by Dan Collins, NY editor of the Huffington Post, is correct:

If I could offer a lesson, I'd be counter-intuitive. We should have let the federal government try the 9/11 terror sheik in Manhattan. It would have been inconvenient, although not necessarily as inconvenient as the police department led us to believe. But it would have been taking a stand. New Yorkers against the crazy people, most of whom fail. And the one who succeeds is never the one you suspect.

So we should work as hard as we can to protect against the unforeseeable. But in the meantime, we should be brave, and united, and supremely ticked off.

Connecticut Post: State Home for Terrorists

According to the Stratford, Connecticut Post, terrorists have been in the state for years. A couple of recent past links to terror in the land of steady habits:

Spring 2001 -- Four of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers meet with a Jordanian national living in Bridgeport who later was arrested for providing false identification cards to illegal aliens. The four are identified as Hani S.H. Hanjour, Nawaf Alzhami, Ahmed Alghamdi and Majed M. GH. Moqed was living at the Fairfield Motor Inn. Hanjour piloted the American Air Lines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon. The Bridgeport contact, identified as Eyad M. Alrababah , is arrested by authorities in New Jersey for providing false identification cards and driver's licenses.

April 3, 2009 -- Hassan Abujihaad, a former U.S. Navy signalman aboard the U.S.S. Benson, is sentenced to 10 years in prison by a federal judge in New Haven for disclosing ship movements via e-mails to Azzam Publications in London. Azzam operated an Internet site through OLM, LLC., a Trumbull-based web hosting firm. Two members of Azzam, Syehed Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad, who sought people to fight and fund the Jihad over the website, are challenging their extradition from London to Connecticut to stand trial on federal terrorism charges.

The Connecticut paper also published information on the alleged source of the car used in Times Square:

The Connecticut license plate on the explosives-packed Nissan Pathfinder was found to have been taken from a Ford pickup truck recently sent for repair to Kramer's Used Auto Parts on Old South Avenue in Stratford. Several sources said a vehicle identification number found on a replacement part on the Pathfinder was also from a vehicle last tracked to Kramer's.

Federal, New York state and New York City investigators went to the Norwalk home of Norman LeBlanc shortly after 3 a.m. Sunday, a police source said, adding that LeBlanc, whose family has owned Kramer's and other area auto parts businesses, then took the investigators to the Stratford junkyard.

It could not immediately be learned what, if any, material was taken from the business.

A few hours later Sunday morning, about a dozen police vehicles -- local police and FBI and NYPD -- were still outside Kramer's, which is off Access Road. The business is surrounded by an old chain-link fence with signs saying, "used cars bought and sold" and "auto and truck parts." There are dozens of used and junked cars on the lot.

Wayne LeBlanc is listed as president and CEO of the Stratford business. A reporter was turned away from his Flax Hill Road home in Norwalk without comment Sunday night.

Richarrd Fredette, chairman of Stratford's Board of Zoning Appeals and former owner of Elite Auto Body, said LeBlanc bought Kramer's from Nick Kramer, now deceased, about 15 years ago.

Hail to the Street Vendors Who Saved New York, Lance Horton & Duane Jackson!

The NY Daily News has the story:

They saw something and they said something.

Two Times Square street vendors - and Vietnam veterans - alerted cops that there was something fishy about the dark-colored SUV, officials said.

T-shirt hawker Lance Orton flagged down hero officer Wayne Rhatigan, 46, who was patrolling Times Square on horseback Saturday night.

"I'm not a celebrity, I'm just an average Joe," Orton said Sunday night, a towel wrapped around his waist in his Bronx apartment. "It's nice, but I'm not a glory hound."

Handbag vendor Duane Jackson also noticed the Nissan Pathfinder, and was immediately suspicious.

"Why is this knucklehead parked in the bus lane?" Jackson, 58, of Buchanan, Westchester County, said he asked himself after spotting the Nissan Pathfinder in a No Standing zone just as cops alerted by Orton were responding.

A cop shined a flashlight through the tinted windows.

What Jackson saw next really scared him.

"Smoke started coming out of it, then the pops began - five or six of them," Jackson said. "They sounded like firecrackers," he said. "That's when everyone started running."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/05/02/2010-05-02_times_square_vendors_duane_jackson_lance_horton_alerted_cops_to_smoking_car_bomb.html#ixzz0msLMCB00

Here's a link to a facebook page asking Mayor Bloomberg to take the street vendors out to dinner.

Nick Clegg v David Cameron v Gordon Brown

For those following the British election debates, the BBC has a good aggregator of election news, here.

UPDATE: There's also a Facebook Democracy UK page...

Florida Congressman Wants Chechens Added to Terror List

So far, the State Department has said: "No." Despite the fact that the group has officially declared war on the United States, as well as masterminding terror attacks in Russia. On this issue, IMHO, Congressman Alcee Hastings (D-FL) is right, and Hillary Clinton is wrong:

HASTINGS CALLS FOR CAUCASUS EMIRATE TO BE ON TERRORIST LIST
Group Claimed Responsibility for Moscow Subway Bombing

WASHINGTON--U.S. Congressman Alcee L. Hastings (D-FL), Co-Chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (U.S. Helsinki Commission), introduced legislation today urging the State Department to formally designate the Caucasus Emirate as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

The State Department’s 2009 Country Reports on Terrorism is not expected to include the Caucasus Emirate in its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations despite the group's recent attacks on the Moscow subway that killed at least 38 people and the fact the group is behind more than 60 acts of terrorism in Russia’s North Caucasus in the past three months and trained 20 suicide bombers in 2009.

“We have a policy of zero-tolerance towards terrorism of any kind directed against anyone anywhere in the world,” Hastings said. “The Caucasus Emirate cooperates with al-Qaeda and has declared jihad on the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Israel. This organization is a threat to our national security and that of our allies. This resolution urges the Administration to officially acknowledge that reality.”

Shamil Basaev, who was the leader of the predecessor organization to the Caucasus Emirate until his assassination by Russian commandos in 2006, trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Khost, Afghanistan in 1994. The group’s Web site has included articles from an author connected to perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and the 2009 Fort Hood, Texas shootings with rhetorical attacks on the United States calling for American Muslims to wage holy war against the United States.

“President Obama has made historic improvements in U.S.-Russian relations,” Hastings continued. “The United States and Russia must stand together in this ongoing struggle against violent fanatics. In this fight there is no room for double standards, we must be consistent."

Charles Crawford on Pope-gate, Cont'd...

Charles Crawford, Britain's former man in Warsaw, wants answers to some questions about the latest Foreign and Commonwealth Office anti-Papist memorandum:

The Heresiarch links to my thoughts on the FCO and its Popegate scandal, but wonders if I have it right - maybe the causes are ... even deeper:

It's easy enough to blame New Labour, with its love of targets and hatred of anything traditional or elitist, for this sort of tosh, but I suspect the Blair administration has been as much the symptom as the cause of it.

Other, profounder, causes have been at play: a loss of nerve on the part of the old elites, the complete ascendency of the media and the news cycle, a generalised and growing distrust of institutions - most powerful when internalised by those who themselves run those institutions - a truncation of attention-spans and an hysterical neophilia.

The best word for it is infantilisation. Britain, and probably most other western countries as well, is regressing to a state of toddlerism, or at best arrested adolescence.

I could not agree more.

See how the FCO is responding to this self-made disaster. By sending the offenders back to school:

The civil servant in charge of the Pope’s visit to Britain has been suspended and is to be investigated for misconduct after a memo lampooning the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church was leaked to the press.

All the staff involved in producing the memo are to be sent on “urgent diversity training” and will have nothing further to do with organising the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain in September.

Please excuse me while I leave the desk to emit a high-pitched scream.

Goes offstage

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Returns

This is not a problem requiring 'diversity training', where the wretched victims sit listlessly staring out of the window, trying their best not to listen to some or other humourless harpy intoning on their need to 'respect' minorities and examine their 'unconscious prejudices'.

This is not a technical problem at all, capable of being sorted by some extra 'training'.

Indeed, the key problem is the very fact that the FCO apppears to think that lack of 'training' is the problem, and that more training is the answer.

Wrong!

It's all about structure and professional attitude.

What was happening across the organisation to create a culture and command structure in which a significant non-junior diplomat could produce and circulate around Whitehall such drivel? (Note: when the story broke I contacted the FCO myself and was assured that the offending officer was 'junior'. This was at the least highly misleading.)

Come on Fleet Street, ask the the FCO the right questions:

-who was Mr Noorani's line manager?
-what instructions were given to him and by whom?
-what internal expertise was being drawn upon to advise on the Pope's visit?
-why were these ideas circulated without HM Ambassador to the Vatican clearing them first?
-who is running this part of the FCO whelk stall?

Answers please, from people in the know.

The New Republic on Human Rights Watch's Jihad

Benjamin Birnbaum writes:

As [Robert] Bernstein and his allies saw it, Whitson and others in MENA consistently ignored the context of Israeli actions—context that might have created a more accurate picture. That was the overriding complaint in a letter Edith Everett wrote to HRW in June 2008, outlining her dissatisfaction with the way the organization was treating Israel. HRW had repeatedly called for Israel to lift its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Everett pointed out that “the original contravention of human rights lies with Hamas and these terrorist organizations and if they were to stop their unprovoked attacks on Israeli civilians there would be no restrictions on the flow of goods into Gaza.”

That month, Bernstein made a presentation at a meeting of the executive committee of HRW’s board. After asking HRW staffers to leave the room, he told the assembled something they already knew—that he had concerns about MENA’s Israel work—and something they did not: “I told them, from then on, they couldn’t assume that I would remain silent to the public.”

Ken Roth was absent from the meeting—his daughter was graduating from high school that day—but he was furious when he found out. He immediately e-mailed Bernstein’s son Bill, a classmate from Brown, lamenting how unfortunate he found it that a man who had spent his life championing human rights had become an apologist for Israel. He appealed to the younger Bernstein to intervene, warning that his father would do great harm to the organization and to his own reputation.

Not everyone at HRW, however, was eager to keep Bernstein in the fold. His persistent questions had become a never-ending source of annoyance to Whitson. “It just came to this point where we would have countless meetings with him explaining things over and over,” Whitson says. “And then, he would just ask the same question as if you’d never had the conversation before. And you’re like, ‘But did you actually read the report? Did you actually see what it said? Because it answers your question, and we’ve discussed this, like, eighteen times.’” Her attitude toward Bernstein’s threat was one of indifference. “You’re like, ‘OK, just go public and get it over with.’”

At the time, however, Bernstein was still unsure of himself. He had begun consulting prominent outsiders, among them just war philosopher Michael Walzer and Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, a friend of his son Tom. Zakaria spoke to Bernstein at length—first in a face-to-face meeting, then in a series of phone calls. Bernstein had already started putting his thoughts to paper—thousands of words’ worth—but felt he was getting nowhere and urged Zakaria to take up the cause instead. Zakaria demurred. “My advice to him,” Zakaria says, “was that, if he felt as strongly as he did, then he needed to speak out because the impact of the founder of Human Rights Watch talking about his disillusionment with the organization was going to be far greater than an outsider who had no historical association with the organization.”

Bernstein also raised some of his concerns with then-HRW board member Richard Goldstone, who would go on to write the U.N.’s much-maligned report on the Gaza war. There are few more reviled figures in Israel right now than Goldstone, but even he sympathized with Bernstein on certain points, such as the politicized nature of the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, after being created in 2006, had directed its first nine condemnations at Israel. In March 2008, barely a year before he accepted UNHRC’s mandate to investigate the Gaza war, he told Bernstein that he thought the body’s performance had been hopeless and expressed ambivalence as to whether HRW should continue appearing before it. He also agreed with Bernstein that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s increasingly aggressive anti-Israel rhetoric, in combination with his threatening policies, was an issue worthy of HRW’s attention. Goldstone pushed Roth to address it, but to no avail. (When I asked Roth in a February interview at his office about HRW’s refusal to take a position on Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel, including his famous call for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” Roth quibbled about the way the statement had been translated in the West—“there was a real question as to whether he actually said that”—then told me that it was not HRW’s place to render judgments on such rhetoric: “Let’s assume it is a military threat. We don’t take on governments’ military threats just as we don’t take on aggression, per se. We look at how they behave. So, we wouldn’t condemn a military threat just as we wouldn’t condemn an invasion—we would look at how the government wages the war.” Whitson, who sat in on the interview, offered her two cents: “You know, that statement was also matched by Hillary Clinton saying that the Iranian regime should be destroyed or wiped off the map. Again, so, very similar statements, side by side, close in time.” For his part, Goldstone told TNR that he eventually came around to the view this was not an issue HRW should take up.)

Bernstein was becoming steadily more frustrated—and two of his closest allies at the organization were soon on their way out. In early 2009, Whitson informed Steve Apkon that, if he wished to serve another term on the MENA advisory committee, he would be expected to make a contribution in the $10,000 range. Apkon was livid. He dashed off a sharply worded letter to advisory committee chair Shibley Telhami. “An organization that was founded to protect the most basic of human rights—freedom of speech—seeing it as the canary in the coal mine in regards to everything else, seems to have created within its own organization a disregard and intolerance for open dialogue,” he wrote. His membership was not renewed. (HRW denies that Apkon’s removal had anything to do with his criticisms, attributing it primarily to his failure to make an acceptable contribution.)

Shortly thereafter, Edith Everett was gone. At a MENA advisory committee meeting in March 2009, two months after the war in Gaza, she raised the subject of human shields with HRW senior military analyst Marc Garlasco, who was on hand to discuss the issues he and his fellow researchers were planning to write about: “I said, ‘I hope when you talk about the Palestinians in Gaza that you speak about their use of the population as human shields,’ and he was beginning to respond to that when Sarah Leah Whitson wouldn’t let him speak. She just put an end to that conversation. She said, ‘Well, in summation, I think we have to move on,’ or something, and I said, ‘This is ridiculous,’ you know?” Everett immediately tendered her resignation from both the HRW board and the MENA advisory committee.

At the end of that month, Bernstein sent a long e-mail to the board of HRW. “While I realize that HRW is doing a lot of valuable work, to me the mishandling of the Israel-Palestine situation is like a cancer,” he wrote. “After my twenty-one years as chair, I still care deeply about the direction of HRW, and my inability to bring change bothers me.”

NJ Court Rules Blogger Not "Journalist"

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PA Consulting Produced Joke Afghanistan Strategy Powerpoint

Clearly stated on page 31 of the Pentagon Powerpoint slide from "Dynamic Planning for COIN in Afghanistan" titled "Afghanistan Stability / COIN Dynamics" (p.22 of 31) mocked on page one of the New York Times is the author:

"© PA Knowledge Limited 2009."

Some questions:

1. Why is a contractor allowed to copyright a US government document paid for by taxpayers?

2. Who awarded this contract to PA Knowledge Limited?

3. How much was PA Knowledge Limited paid for this PowerPoint presentation?

4. Why wasn't PA Knowledge Limited mentioned in Elisabeth Bumiller's April 26, 2010 front-page NY Times story about the PowerPoint scandal?

Some interesting information from the PA Consulting website raise one more question about how this scandal originated:

1. PA Knowledge Limited is a subsidiary of PA Consulting--a British company:

Corporate headquaters
123 Buckingham Palace Road
London SW1W 9SR
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7333 5865
Fax: +44 20 7333 5050

QUESTION: Why is US strategy in Afghanistan being interpreted for PowerPoint presentations for the Pentagon by a foreign (although allied) company? Isn't there anyone in the Pentagon who can do this without a contract? Contracting out your strategy is a sure loser--that's a no brainer...

Isn't there anyone in Congress who could hold a hearing? Obviously someone leaked this to the press for a reason. Perhaps PA Consulting should be held liable for the problems with America's Counterinsurgency Strategy in Afghanistan?

The PA Consulting website describes the contract but unfortunately doesn't disclose the amount of money US taxpayers have wasted to date on this contract:

Counterinsurgency and strategies for effective ‘whole of government’ approaches to influence unstable regions

Developing tailored causal maps of key drivers of stability in regions and countries of interest, drawing on a library of analyses of regions across the world, we help give senior decision makers and their teams a shared ‘big picture view’ and a more structured way to help inform options for intervention.

Time to call PA executives to testify before Congress about their responsibility for America's problems in Afghanistan--as Goldman, Sachs brass just did.

President Obama Visits Ottumwa, Iowa

According to the Ottumwa Courier, the President has just been in Ottumwa, Iowa.I was there at Thanksgiving with someone I know and a friend. It's an interesting town. Hometown to Edna Ferber, author of "Showboat". Site of "Meat Solutions" (a slaughterhouse). Industrial. Union. We had a "loose meat" sandwich at "Canteen Lunch in the Alley" and saw the beautiful mural of Chief Ottumwa over the bar in the Tom-Tom-Tap at the Hotel Ottumwa. Then watched a magnificent prairie sunset. Next time you find yourself in Iowa, follow the lead of President Obama...and drop by Ottumwa. Here's an excerpt from the Ottumwa Courier report:

President Barack Obama on Tuesday sought to bolster both health care and regulatory reform during a historic visit to Ottumwa, saying his administration wants to “restore a sense of security to the middle class.”

“Visits like this remind you that when you get out into the heartland and you talk to folks, there is a lot to learn from rural America,” Obama said to a packed house at the Hellyer Student Life Center on the Indian Hills Community College campus. “It’s towns like this that give America its heartbeat.”

After a warm welcome, Obama received a standing ovation for the passage of health care reform, emphasizing popular angles on the legislation, like putting an end to bans for pre-existing conditions and help for senior citizens. He touted the reform package as the single biggest deficit reduction action since the 1970s, though he admitted it will mean larger deficits in the short term.

A similar ovation followed comments on regulatory reform for business. Obama focused on responsibilities, trying to create a connection between obligations met by families and those failed by corporate and political America. He drew distinctions between the behavior of Americans who struggle to pay their debts and behave according to social norms and corporations who don’t bother to try.

“Even before this last crisis it felt like it was slipping away. Folks like you are living up to your responsibilities. People in Washington and Wall Street are not living up to theirs,” he said.

And here's the video of the President' Town Hall from the White House website:

What Did Billy Graham Say to President Obama?

According to Christian Web News, among other things, topics included Franklin Graham's blacklisting by the Pentagon...

President Obama made the short drive from Asheville, where he spent the weekend, to Montreat, to see the 91-year-old Graham and son Franklin, also an evangelist.

The visit only lasted about 30 minutes, and included aides and advisers to both men. Obama had a private prayer and conversation with Billy Graham. Graham gave two bibles to Obama, one for him, and the other for the first lady, Graham spokesman Larry Ross said, according to the Associated Press.

Obama was “extraordinarily gratified that he took the time to meet with him” White House spokesman Bill Burton said.

According to Franklin Graham, his dad and Obama's conversation was “very cordial, very nice.” He said, “When the president got ready to leave, the president prayed for my father, my father prayed for him.”

According to Graham, his father prayed for the nation and that God would give Obama wisdom in his decisions. Franklin Graham said in his prayer, the president thanked God for Billy Graham's life.

Franklin Graham said he and Obama talked for a short time about the Pentagon Prayer Service ordeal. Graham said that the activists with an agenda were trying to pull all religion out of the military.

Franklin Graham said, “I wanted to make him aware of that. He said he would look into to it.”

BTW, I couldn't find an account--or a photo--on the White House website (but maybe I missed something).