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I finally bit the bullet and started the weblog. I can’t guarantee it will be updated every day, but I will update it as frequently as possible.

Saturday 13th October

Update: the New York Times reports that the US government has received additional credible threats of imminent terror attacks against Americans inside the United States or overseas, possibly as early as Sunday. In Florida, five more people have been found to have been exposed to anthrax.

A second evelope containing anthrax has been found addressed to NBC. However, letters containing white powder sent to the New York Times from Florida did not contain anthrax.

Did a dozen of the September 11th hijackers not know they were on a suicide mission?

The bizarre story of the boy who said on 6th September that the World Trade Centre would not be there next week.

Perhaps the most admirable part of the response to the conflict that began on Sept. 11 has been a general reluctance to call it a religious war. Hmm. Not sure about that, not the way G.W. keeps going on about praying, not to mention his creepy reference to the evil one. Ah, I get to the second paragraph of this piece from the New York Times and I see the writer also has his doubts:

The religious dimension of this conflict is central to its meaning. The words of Osama bin Laden are saturated with religious argument and theological language. Whatever else the Taliban regime is in Afghanistan, it is fanatically religious. Although some Muslim leaders have criticized the terrorists, and even Saudi Arabia’s rulers have distanced themselves from the militants, other Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere have not denounced these acts, have been conspicuously silent or have indeed celebrated them. The terrorists’ strain of Islam is clearly not shared by most Muslims and is deeply unrepresentative of Islam’s glorious, civilized and peaceful past. But it surely represents a part of Islam — a radical, fundamentalist part — that simply cannot be ignored or denied.

In that sense, this surely is a religious war — but not of Islam versus Christianity and Judaism. Rather, it is a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity. This war even has far gentler echoes in America’s own religious conflicts — between newer, more virulent strands of Christian fundamentalism and mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism. These conflicts have ancient roots, but they seem to be gaining new force as modernity spreads and deepens. They are our new wars of religion — and their victims are in all likelihood going to mount with each passing year.

He goes on to talk of the dichotomy at the heart of Islam:

Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, writes of the dissonance within Islam: ‘’There is something in the religious culture of Islam which inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations. And yet, in moments of upheaval and disruption, when the deeper passions are stirred, this dignity and courtesy toward others can give way to an explosive mixture of rage and hatred which impels even the government of an ancient and civilized country — even the spokesman of a great spiritual and ethical religion — to espouse kidnapping and assassination, and try to find, in the life of their prophet, approval and indeed precedent for such actions.’’ Since Muhammad was, unlike many other religious leaders, not simply a sage or a prophet but a ruler in his own right, this exploitation of his politics is not as great a stretch as some would argue.

This is a fairly long article, but well worth reading. At one point, Sullivan warns this is only the beginning:

Perhaps the most important thing for us to realize today is that the defeat of each of these fundamentalisms required a long and arduous effort. The conflict with Islamic fundamentalism is likely to take as long. For unlike Europe’s religious wars, which taught Christians the futility of fighting to the death over something beyond human understanding and so immune to any definitive resolution, there has been no such educative conflict in the Muslim world. Only Iran and Afghanistan have experienced the full horror of revolutionary fundamentalism, and only Iran has so far seen reason to moderate to some extent. From everything we see, the lessons Europe learned in its bloody history have yet to be absorbed within the Muslim world. There, as in 16th-century Europe, the promise of purity and salvation seems far more enticing than the mundane allure of mere peace. That means that we are not at the end of this conflict but in its very early stages.

The US Senate has passed the antiterrorism bill (the "USA Act"). Wired.com puts it like this: Attempts to inject privacy safeguards into an anti-terrorism bill have been soundly rejected. The ACLU is much more direct: Most Americans do not recognize that Congress has just passed a bill that would give the government expanded power to invade our privacy, imprison people without due process and punish dissent. Let’s hope it doesn’t give Blunkett any ideas. Make that any more ideas.

I seriously worry about the mangled stuff that plops out of G.W.’s mouth. What the hell goes on inside his skull? Here’s a useful piece of advice to the American public:

You know, if you find a person that you’ve never seen before getting in a crop-duster that doesn’t belong to you, report it.

Surely this could have been better phrased:

And these murderers have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their evil deeds. And we cannot let it stand.

And surely this is a threat too far:

We’ve been active for a month. I intend to be giving you a briefing for as long as I am the president.

When I first saw Mozilla I thought: some nice ideas, unstable, chrome looks as though a kid drew it, slow as a very slow thing on diazepam. When Netscape 6.0 appeared, it sucked, and although the then-current build of Mozilla (whatever it was) was slightly better, it still couldn’t be used as the main browser of choice. Netscape 6.1 was an enormous improvement, and actually is good enough to be used all the time. Unlike 6.0, it had the full functionality of the Mozilla build it was based on. And the Mozilla builds are getting better. With 0.9.4 — no longer the current build, by the way — comes a wonderful feature. Unfortunately, it requires editing a pref file — but to be honest, that shouldn’t be a problem for anyone who is actually using Mozilla. What is this feature? A pop-up killer.

Mozilla is still not perfect, but the arrival of the pop-up killer feature fills one of the main holes IMHO. I am now using Mozilla all the time as a my standard browser. I’d like it a wee bit faster, but most of the time it’s fast enough; it renders pages beautifully (assuming they’re reasonably well-crafted, of course) and has some nice little features. Above all, it is stable.

One reader commented that I had put an enormous amount of links up on this weblog, particularly in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. Well, at one point in preparing one of those early updates to the weblog I went to the Tasks menu and discovered I had nineteen browser windows open. Nineteen! I haven’t come across another browser that would have been capable of that. I’m impressed.

I’ve used the previews of iCab, and I like it; I’d been thinking of using it as my main browser once the final release appears (at the moment it still can’t handle CSS positioning). Now, I’m inclined to think I’ll stick with Mozilla.

Here’s an interesting idea. One of the worst things about the Web today is the incredibly long URL. Often they make it difficult to figure out where a link will take you — there may be a clearly visible domain name, but the series of characters really stuns the eye. This is a fairly long URL, but it’s not too bad:

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/
news/2001/10/07/wbin07.xml&sSheet=
/news/2001/10/07/ixhome.html

At least you can see that you are going to the Telegraph site, but the problem is that if you cut-and-paste this into an email a line break will probably cause problems for at least some of the recipients. That’s bad enough. Take a look at this URL:

http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/
RTGAMArticleHTMLTemplate/C/20011005/
wcras0510?hub=homeBN&tf=tgam/realtime/
fullstory.html&cf=tgam/realtime/
config-neutral&vg=BigAdVariableGenerator
&slug=wcras0510&date=20011005&archive=
RTGAM&site=Front&ad_page_name=
breakingnews

It’s just an overwhelming jumble! What’s more, this is so long that trying to cut and past into an anchor tag in an HTML editor or into an e-mail will probably not work, giving only a partial URL. This sucks.

But now there is a solution. MakeAShorterLink takes the long URL and produces a shorter one. If it works properly, that last URL can be reached using this one: http://makeashorterlink.com/?S6291541. It is not completely transparent: before going to the destination page you get shown a transitional page which says You will shortly be redirected to: the original URL so that the user can decide if that is where they want to go. Not perfect, but not a bad idea. The one downside is that until you get to the transitional age you have no idea where you are going to end up. Am I being overly cynical for thinking that porn sites will probably use this to trick people into going to them?

And about time too! A sensible idea to deal with worms like Nimda — ban Outlook: Outlook is vulnerable by design. If you want all that power to trade data and code with other Microsoft programs like Excel and Word, security is the price you pay. Even when good users and administrators patch their software, this only closes the barn door after the horses have fled.

Polaroid, unable to compete with the twin competition of 24 hour developing and digital cameras has filed for bankruptcy. The FT says Polaroid proved incapable of making the transformation into a consumer products group. A few years ago, shares in the company were over $40 each. When trading in its shares was suspended this week, they were valued at 28¢.

Internet rumour — well, hoax, really — gives birth to Internet humour. TouristOfDeath.com.

On the other hand: Internet humour gives rise to, well, news. I saw several emails and stuff on Web pages talking about Bert appearing on a poster with Osama bin Laden, all of which mystified me because I haven’t a clue who Bert is. Something to do with Sesame Street, it seems. Anyway, Bert is Evil, the site from which the original image of Bert and Osama bin Laden was lifted by the Dakha protestor, is dead. Overreaction or what?

Tuesday 9th October

Vandals! Philistines! Bashibazouks and barbarians! What do you do with an ancient sacred site when you’re not the Taleban? You’d look after it, wouldn’t you think? Not HMG, English Heritage and the National Trust, who would put a bloody road through it!

The FBI has taken charge of investigating the two cases of anthrax which have occurred in workers at a Boca Raton tabloid. There are rumours of a connection with a package containing a powdery substance and a Star of David charm The FBI say that is not being investigated as a plausible lead. B. anthracis has been found on a computer keyboard used by Bob Stevens, who died on Friday.

State epidemiologist Steven Wiersma said that none of the 18 cases of anthrax in the 20th Century were caused by exposure to spores in an office building. In other words, if investigators conclude the Boca Raton building was the source of Stevens’ exposure, it would be a first in U.S. history. Florida’s senior senator said he had been told by federal health officials yesterday that human intervention had to be involved.

Doctors in Virginia are confident that a man with flu-like symptoms does not have anthrax.

Bugger anthrax, what if terrorists get hold of nuclear material? And no, it doesn’t have to be weapons-grade.

After Afghanistan, where will the US look next? Could it be — Sudan? Yemen? Syria? They’re certainly buying the maps.

Four men, three Lybian and one Algerian, have been arrested in Dublin as part of a Garda investigation into international terrorism.

A government adviser has apologised for a memo she sent on September 11th saying that this was a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Indeed — although not necessarily as a result of that memo — some controversial stuff has been done over the past few weeks: increased payments to councillors; the appointment of a Labour supporter as BBC Chairman (with an already present Labour-supporting DG); the dumping of the planned Picketts Lock Stadium (why have the words "piss-up" and "brewery" just wandered into my mind?); the approval of the new MOX plant at Sellafield; and, of course, the euthanasia of Railtrack.

One bereaved relative is understandably upset — this is basically burying bad news of a fairly insignificant kind under the bodies of 6,500 people— and other parties are making much of it.

However, the Register makes the sensible point that the email was sent out at a time when the two towers were still standing, it was not at all clear what precisely had happened, the appalling death toll was not yet known (and, indeed, had largely not taken place). Politicians and their advisers are supposed to keep their head in a crisis, after all. [More…]

America has not troubled to learn enough about the shape of the world — an understatement if ever there was one. Hugo Young breaks the consensus and faces some uncomfortable facts:

The two myths about this war are that it is not about America and not about Islam. Political correctness allows no other analysis. And the war, it’s true, is about more than those totemic powers. America is not the only society threatened by world terrorism. Muslims are not inevitable enemies of the world America dominates.… But we also need to face squarely the fact that traits embodied by America and Islam are what have brought the world to its gravest crisis since Moscow put missiles into Cuba 40 years ago.…

… The unforgivable act against humanity sprang from a version of Islam that only Islam can set about repudiating, so that among people of goodwill there can be no shred of misunderstanding. On the other hand, the context in which it happened, the target it was aimed at, is the residue of a history that America needs to recognise.

What is it with journalists and IT? You’d think they’d try to print the truth, but even when it’s spelt out to them they get it wrong — you’d think they had an agenda.…

Ten days after the WTC/Pentagon attacks, the Washington Post published an article entitled To Attacks’ Tool Add a Programmer’s Grief. The programmer in question is Phil Zimmerman, inventor of PGP.

The Post crowed: People warned Zimmermann back then that he could be putting powerful technology into the wrong hands.

It went on to say the "government" — I assume that is meant to indicate the FBI or the NSA, but the vagueness of the noun does raise doubts straight away about the reliability of the story — was investigating whether PGP or something similar was used to plan and coordinate the attacks, and said: U.S. lawmakers are calling for new restrictions on the use and distribution of the technology.

It then quoted Zimmerman:

In a telephone interview from his home in Burlingame, Calif., Zimmermann said he doesn’t regret posting the encryption program on the Internet. Yet he has trouble dealing with the reality that his software was likely used for evil.

"The intellectual side of me is satisfied with the decision, but the pain that we all feel because of all the deaths mixes with this," he said. "It has been a horrific few days."

The article’s second paragraph described him as crying every day since last week’s terrorist attacks. He has been overwhelmed with feelings of guilt.

Except that he hasn’t:

The Friday September 21st Washington Post carried an article by Ariana Cha that I feel misrepresents my views on the role of PGP encryption software in the September 11th terrorist attacks. She interviewed me on Monday September 17th, and we talked about how I felt about the possibility that the terrorists might have used PGP in planning their attack. The article states that as the inventor of PGP, I was "overwhelmed with feelings of guilt". I never implied that in the interview, and specifically went out of my way to emphasize to her that that was not the case, and made her repeat back to me this point so that she would not get it wrong in the article. This misrepresentation is serious, because it implies that under the duress of terrorism I have changed my principles on the importance of cryptography for protecting privacy and civil liberties in the information age.

Because of the political sensitivity of how my views were to be expressed, Ms. Cha read to me most of the article by phone before she submitted it to her editors, and the article had no such statement or implication when she read it to me. The article that appeared in the Post was significantly shorter than the original, and had the abovementioned crucial change in wording. I can only speculate that her editors must have taken some inappropriate liberties in abbreviating my feelings to such an inaccurate soundbite.

In the interview six days after the attack, we talked about the fact that I had cried over the heartbreaking tragedy, as everyone else did. But the tears were not because of guilt over the fact that I developed PGP, they were over the human tragedy of it all. I also told her about some hate mail I received that blamed me for developing a technology that could be used by terrorists. I told her that I felt bad about the possibility of terrorists using PGP, but that I also felt that this was outweighed by the fact that PGP was a tool for human rights around the world, which was my original intent in developing it ten years ago. It appears that this nuance of reasoning was lost on someone at the Washington Post. I imagine this may be caused by this newspaper’s staff being stretched to their limits last week.

In these emotional times, we in the crypto community find ourselves having to defend our technology from well-intentioned but misguided efforts by politicians to impose new regulations on the use of strong cryptography. I do not want to give ammunition to these efforts by appearing to cave in on my principles. I think the article correctly showed that I’m not an ideologue when faced with a tragedy of this magnitude. Did I re-examine my principles in the wake of this tragedy? Of course I did. But the outcome of this re-examination was the same as it was during the years of public debate, that strong cryptography does more good for a democratic society than harm, even if it can be used by terrorists. Read my lips: I have no regrets about developing PGP.

The question of whether strong cryptography should be restricted by the government was debated all through the 1990’s. This debate had the participation of the White House, the NSA, the FBI, the courts, the Congress, the computer industry, civilian academia, and the press. This debate fully took into account the question of terrorists using strong crypto, and in fact, that was one of the core issues of the debate. Nonetheless, society’s collective decision (over the FBI’s objections) was that on the whole, we would be better off with strong crypto, unencumbered with government back doors. The export controls were lifted and no domestic controls were imposed. I feel this was a good decision, because we took the time and had such broad expert participation. Under the present emotional pressure, if we make a rash decision to reverse such a careful decision, it will only lead to terrible mistakes that will not only hurt our democracy, but will also increase the vulnerability of our national information infrastructure.

PGP users should rest assured that I would still not acquiesce to any back doors in PGP.

It is noteworthy that I had only received a single piece of hate mail on this subject. Because of all the press interviews I was dealing with, I did not have time to quietly compose a carefully worded reply to the hate mail, so I did not send a reply at all. After the article appeared, I received hundreds of supportive emails, flooding in at two or three per minute on the day of the article.

I have always enjoyed good relations with the press over the past decade, especially with the Washington Post. I’m sure they will get it right next time.

The article in question appears at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/
A1234-2001Sep20.html

He’s more magnanimous than I think I would be in the same circumstances.

Now the once-great Times is at it, misquoting programmers — and possibly for dubious ends. The Times reported that the terrorists may have used steganography, techniques of hiding information in the background of either digital images or MP3 audio files. It quoted Ross Anderson of Cambridge University, though, as saying that it was highly unlikely that the terrorists who launched attacks on the United States used steganography. It was more likely that they sent thousands of innocent messages along with their live orders, so that the secret information was missed.

Except that isn’t what he said:

A journalist called me from the Times and told me he’d had a briefing from the security service on steganography. He had a lot of strange ideas, and I spent maybe 30 minutes trying to explain the sort of things that are common knowledge to members of this list. In particular, all we appear to know so far is that the bad guys used plaintext emails, and this is precisely what one expects a competent opponent to do: you do not want to draw attention to yourself by being among the few users of an exotic confidentiality or anonymity service, and in any case normal emails are hidden in just the same way as a pebble on brighton beach.…

The comments ascribed to me in the article in question are simply wrong. I did not at any time suggest that the bad guys would generate cover traffic themselves, merely hide their own emails in the huge volumes of email that exist anyway.

The Times also — along with other papers, such as USA Today — also said that bin Laden had hidden secret messages in porn pictures on the Net. Steganography seems to be the buzz word of the moment. Wired.com, though quotes a former NSA analyst as saying I think it’s baloney. They come out with this stuff. I think it’s all contrived — it’s perception management.

Ross Anderson comments:

It is unclear what national interest is served by security agencies propagating this lurid urban myth. Perhaps the goal is to manufacture an excuse for the failure to anticipate the events of November 11th. Perhaps it is preparaing the ground for an attempt at bureaucratic empire-building via Internet regulation, as a diversionary activity from the much harder and less pleasant task of going after al-Qaida. Perhaps the vision of bin Laden as cryptic pornographer is being spun to create a subconscious link, in the public mind, with the scare stories about child pornography that were used before September 11th to justify government plans for greater Internet regulation.

Ooh-er! Man who invented term hypertext says the Web isn’t hypertext.

We are using a degenerate form of it that has been standardised by people who, I think, do not understand the real problems.

Eh?

Q: So this isn’t hypertext? The ability to read a bit of text — for instance before this interview, I was reading a bit of a biography of you and I came across hypertext and I clicked on it and I was winged away to a background on hypertext - that’s not your idea?

A: That’s a trivial case of it. But I define hypertext as non-sequential writing — so of course it’s hypertext but it is the most trivial form. The World Wide Web is not what we were trying to create. The links only go one way. There’s no permanent publishing. There is no way you can write a marginal note that other people can see on what’s in front of you. There is no way that you can quote freely.

To be able to collage freely is one of my objectives. So that you can just gather material in a new document, comment on it, annotate it, overlay it anyway you like and yet within the copyright law — since we are not going to escape from copyright law — in a feasible copyright system that allows this and that is what I have always tried to do.

Love the way he dismissed everything to do with the way the Web works as trivial. He complains that links only go one way from a page, outwards, there’s no way to have links coming in which can be seen from that page. Maybe I’m dense, but I don’t exactly see the point of that. After all, links out should be links the page’s creator(s) see as being relevant; links in may be much less so. Plus, a really popular page may have millions of links in — how can that be presented in a way that is at all manageable. Ivory tower theoretician v. real world, anyone?

Spin On This (news minus spin equals comedy): more humour reappearing on the Web. Some headlines:

• AT LAST! WORLD’S RICHEST COUNTRIES BOMB STARVING CHILDREN
• BLAIR: ‘IF I TELL YOU — I KILL YOU’
• THATCHER: ‘TIME FOR SURGICAL STRIKE?’
• BLAIR: ‘TRULY, I AM THE SON OF GOD’
• KIDS: ‘HELP US NAME THIS WAR!’

The pieces are short, separated by one-liners such as Railtrack shareholders say they’ve been left out of pocket and treated like dirt — so at least now they know how the passengers feel and New Labour’s conference has been cut short: ‘but you can hear all our policies again at next week’s Tory conference.’

My favourite, though, is the first one my eyes fell on:

BUSH: READING AGE IMPROVING
President Bush’s advisers say his reading age has dramatically improved since the ‘war on everything’ began. Ari Fleischer explained "obviously before the horrendous events of 11 September, President Bush was a half-witted redneck who could barely read a beer mat. Now, according to our calculations and thanks to hard study and dedication, he’s achieved an autocue reading age of 11." It’s not clear Bush actually understands the words he reads out, but as Fleischer quips "hey guys, one thing at a time — Afghanistan wasn’t bombed in a day!"

Monday 8th October

A second night of air strikes against the Taleban has begun. Violent protests have resulted in deaths in Pakistan, but the government continues to back the coalition.

The Taleban, predictably, have described the attacks as attacks on sacred soil where were a terrible violation and a terrorist act … not only on the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, but … on the whole Muslim world. They are backing calls to declare a jihad.

The BBC’s John Simpson is not sure the Taleban have control over bin Laden. Simpson also presented a Panorama programme about Afghanistan last night, basically showing how we got from the end of the Soviet invasion to here, and what brutal, ignorant thugs the Taliban are. It can be seen over the Net (using RealPlayer), or you can read the transcript.

George Bush has sworn in his new Chief of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge.

Here’s that link to the live streamed news from the BBC again.

A second case of anthrax in Florida, in someone who worked with the man who died of the disease recently. CNN reports the building where they worked has been closed down following the discovery of Bacillus anthracis in the building.

Only 18 inhalation cases in the United States were documented in the 20th century, the most recent in 1976 in California. State records show the last anthrax case in Florida was in 1974.

There are damn few on the left who are as coherent and as thought-provoking as Noam Chomsky. A few days ago he took part in an online chat session on MSNBC. There’s also been "discussion" on the Net — handbags at dawn, really — between Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens following the latter’s article in The Nation:

I was apprehensive from the first moment about the sort of masochistic e-mail traffic that might start circulating from the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter, and I was not to be disappointed. With all due thanks to these worthy comrades, I know already that the people of Palestine and Iraq are victims of a depraved and callous Western statecraft. And I think I can claim to have been among the first to point out that Clinton’s rocketing of Khartoum—supported by most liberals—was a gross war crime, which would certainly have entitled the Sudanese government to mount reprisals under international law.… But there is no sense in which the events of September 11 can be held to constitute such a reprisal, either legally or morally.

…But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there’s no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don’t like and can’t defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content.

Chomksy comes back with:

What Hitchens is saying in those articles, to the extent that I understand them (I frankly don’t understand them, they’re unintelligible), but what he appears to be saying, is that you shouldn’t look for the reason, because that’s a justification. It’s not a justification. If Britain asks what lies behind the IRA bombings and says, "Well, let’s do something about Northern Ireland," that’s not justifying them. That’s being sane, and trying to reduce the level of violence. To object to that is to say, "Okay, fine, let’s commit ourselves to tribal warfare. Let’s become like the hard men in Northern Ireland, Who just want to kill everyone on the other side and not ask why."

Hitchens:

Only the stoicism of men like Jeremy Glick and Thomas Burnett prevented some such outcome; only those who chose who die fighting rather than allow such a profanity, and such a further toll in lives, stood between us and the fourth death squad. One iota of such innate fortitude is worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky, who coldly compared the plan of September 11 to a stupid and cruel and cynical raid by Bill Clinton on Khartoum in August 1998.

Chomsky:

When we estimate the human toll of a crime, we count not only those who were literally murdered on the spot but those who died as a result, the course we adopt reflexively, and properly, when we consider the crimes of official enemies—Stalin, Hitler and Mao, to mention the most extreme cases. If we are even pretending to be serious, we apply the same standards to ourselves: In the case of Sudan, we count the number who died as a direct consequence of the crime, not just those killed by cruise missiles.

Since there is one person who does not appear to understand, I will add a few quotes from the mainstream press, to clarify.

A year after the attack, "without the lifesaving medicine [the destroyed facilities] produced, Sudan’s death toll from the bombing has continued, quietly, to rise.... Thus, tens of thousands of people--many of them children—have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases...."

Hitchens:

In short, as I put it, several times and in several different ways, "only one person was killed in the rocketing of Sudan. But many more have died, and will die, because an impoverished country has lost its chief source of medicines and pesticides." As I also phrased it, the President had "acted with caprice and brutality and with a complete disregard for international law, and perhaps counted on the indifference of the press and public to a negligible society like that of Sudan."

…The clear intention of the September 11 death squads was to maximize civilian deaths in an area renowned for its cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic character.… The malicious premeditation is very evident and manifest: The toll was intended to be very much higher than it was. And I believe I have already pointed out that the cruise missiles fired at Sudan were not crammed with terrified civilian kidnap victims. I do not therefore think it can be argued that the hasty, politicized and wicked decision to hit the Al Shifa plant can be characterized as directly homicidal in quite the same way. And I don’t think anyone will be able to accuse me of euphemizing the matter.

And Chomsky:

[Hitchens] begins by placing his question "before the house": "Can the attacks of September 11 be compared to an earlier outrage committed by Americans? And should they be so compared?" NB: His question. If he wants to consider that question, fine, but I didn’t raise it or discuss it, nor will I now. Recall that his series of denunciations takes off from a single sentence in a composite response to journalists in which I said, accurately, that the toll of the "horrendous atrocities" of September 11 might be comparable to the toll of the destruction of half the pharmaceutical supplies of Sudan. The rest is the product of his imagination.

And Hitchens:

[Bin Laden] doesn’t only oppose the entire Jewish presence in Palestine; he opposes the Jewish presence in America. He is the spoiled-brat son of one of our preferred despotisms and the proud beneficiary of the export of violence. Why, then, do so many fools consider him as the interpreter of their "concerns," let alone seek to appoint their ignorant selves as the medium for his?

One on the left who is about as coherent is Tariq Ali, who gives a Q&A session at ZMag. He notes American think-tanks till a few months ago were talking of using the Taliban to further destabilize the Central Asian Republics! Now the US and Pakistan are waging war to topple a regime they created. Who said that history had ceased to be ironical?

About the Taleban, he says:

[The Taliban’s Islamism] is a virulent, sectarian, ultra-puritanical strain heavily influenced by Wahhabism—the official state religion of Saudi Arabia. It was Saudi religious instructors who trained the Taliban. They believe in a permanent jihad against infidels and other Muslims (especially the Shias). Bin Laden, too, is a staunch Wahhabi. They would like a return to what they imagine was Islam in the 7th century, during the leadership of Mohammed. What they don’t understand is that Mohammed was a very flexible prophet-politician …

Censorship in the USA, part 114b: The Daily Californian, a student-run newspaper, ran this cartoon on 18/9/01; it shows two turbanned figures, one of whom is looking forward to the joys of paradise while the other is tapping him on the shoulder to tell him they are actually in Hell. Fair enough, you might think. Quite similar, in fact, to an Onion story about the same time.

Not fair enough, apparently, for some members of ASUC. The Daily Californian is an independent paper which rents office space from the ASUC, so as well as an apology and a condemnation from the ASUC senate, those complaining want ASUC to review the office space arrangements and possibly base future rent on the paper’s actions to rectify its complete insensitivity to the needs of the campus. The justification for the complaint is that the cartoon promotes the kind of harmful stereotyping that has led to the murder of Sikhs and Muslims across the country.

Not only is this taking place in "the land of the free" and a country where the right to free speech is enshrined in the Constitution, but if you look at ASUC’s home page you see this:

One of those making the demands for a front page apology denies that this is anything to do with free speech: We want an apology for using bad judgment, not having that opinion — which only goes to show that he doesn’t know what free speech means.

The paper says the cartoon is meant to caricature the terrorist hijackers and Osama bin Laden. Pretty obvious, and pretty depressing that anyone at a university can’t grasp that simple fact.

More on the W3C’s patent proposals: Charles Cooper fears the W3C may be about to sell out Tim Berners-Lee’s heritage:

These folks, who have heretofore relied upon the body’s judgment as a fair arbiter, fear they’re about to get sold down the river. To be sure, software patents are increasing in tandem with the growth of the Web. The W3C finds itself under pressure from some quarters to help them by assessing so-called Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND) practices for incorporating W3C software patents.

…Suppose there’s a terrific new W3C-sanctioned Web technology that’s up for grabs at $20,000 a license. No problem if you’re talking about a Microsoft but bad news if that approximates the size of your "IT budget."

Could be that I’m exceptionally thick, but the term "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" strikes me as the mother of all oxymorons. If you’re a developer who can’t afford the license, then I guess you can’t incorporate that standard in your technology. I’ve tried to see the other side of the argument but I’m still at a loss to understand how any of this is going to advance the "common good."

In what would probably have been front page news a month ago, the Kursk is being raised — apart, that is, from the bow section. The report says, The disaster has remained unexplained to this day. Well, the BBC’s Horizon did a pretty impressive job of explaining it two months ago (to the day) in a special called "What sank the Kursk?" Basically, the hypothesis the programme favoured was that the oxidant used by the Kursk’s torpedoes, hydrogen peroxide, was at the root of the disaster.

This idea has its roots in the sinking of HMS Sidon in 1955, when an experimental torpedo, code-named "Fancy", exploded:

NARRATOR: After the torpedo had been loaded, but before the submarine left harbour, disaster struck. Inside the Sidon the casing of the Fancy torpedo exploded.

MAURICE STRADLING (Torpedo designer): The effects were absolutely devastating. The front half of the torpedo shot out through the closed front door of the torpedo tube allowing the sea to flow in.

NARRATOR: Although the torpedo warhead itself never exploded, the submarine sank. Most of the crew were rescued, but 13 men died. An inquiry into the disaster was called to try to discover what had gone wrong. When they examined the wreck of the submarine the investigators noticed one key thing about the Fancy. Inside the torpedo a stainless steel pipe containing HTP [hydrogen peroxide] had burst and the enquiry concluded that this was what had caused the accident, that somehow the normally safe HTP must have been responsible for the explosion, but they could not work out precisely how. The report was published without solving the mystery.

However, hydrogen peroxide, a normally quite stable compound, reacts violently with some metals to produce oxygen and water:

When certain metals, like copper and brass, come into contact with HTP they sever the atomic links holding the chemical together. This breaks the liquid down into oxygen and steam which is not in itself dangerous, but in doing this something extraordinary happens. When it becomes hot gas HTP expands in volume an astonishing 5,000 times and this is what may have caused the tragedy of the Sidon. Stradling concluded that inside the Fancy when the stainless steel pipe containing HTP had burst it sprayed the liquid around the inside of the torpedo casing and then the one dangerous thing that could happen happened. The HTP splashed over reactive metals — in the case of the Fancy components made from copper and brass.

Why would the pipe burst? If the torpedo motor were started when the torpedo was not in the water, the speed of the engine would be uncontrolled; the over-revving engine would have led to the pipe bursting with catastrophic results.

This, they suggest, is what may have happened in the Kursk — and it is backed up by seismic data. This shows a huge explosion underwater — the detonation of the mass of torpedo warheads in the forward compartment of the Kursk. It also shows a much smaller event just over two minutes earlier. This is about a hundredth of the size of the main signal, but shape of the two signals is identical — meaning they are both the same type of event. The first seismic signal is also an underwater explosion. Too small, though, to be caused by a torpedo warhead.

What they think happened: peroxide splashed on metal when a pipe burst inside the torpedo; the torpedo casing explodes, creating a fireball as the fuel mixes with oxygen. The resulting fire led after two minutes and fifteen seconds to the detonation of the torpedo warheads, ripping open the front of the submarine.

Of course, to confirm this, the bow of the Kursk would have to be examined.…

This business of American cops and doughnuts — I always thought it was somethng of a myth. Apparently not. They really love their doughnuts.

Sunday 7th October 2001

Update: Attacks on Afghanistan begin. US and UK forces began attacking targets within Afghanistan shortly before 6pm BST. Thunderous explosions were heard in Kabul. Live streamed news from the BBC [needs RealPlayer].

The Pakistan government expressed the hope that the campaign would be brief and civilians would be spared but said the Taleban had brought this upon themselves.

In videotape released today bin Laden said America was full of fear and thanked god for that. He said, The least you can say about these people is that they are sinners. They have helped evil triumph over good. He claimed that the US had declared war on Islam.

End of update.

Scumbag. That’s probably the most polite word I can come up with for Lou Sheldon. He’s an ordained minister, but there’s nothing reverend about him. In fact, he rather makes me feel all warm and fuzzy towards Falwell. Well, not really, but it is a shock to see that there is worse than Jerry Fuckwit out there. He’s the founder of something called the Traditional Values Coalition — from the name alone you just know Hitler would approve of his Kinder und Küche values. Relief organisations should prioritise aid on the basis of adherence to the standard of one man and one woman in a marital relationship. He claims gay rights organisations are taking advantage of the national tragedy to advance their cause. I can’t put it better than Matt Foreman does:

"The Traditional Values Coalition has demonstrated a lack of any values, let alone traditional ones. Any group that purports to be Christian and says relief shouldn’t go to people who need it is perverting religion in the same way as Osama bin Laden."

A target, if made available to Muslims by the grace of God, is every American man. He is an enemy of ours whether he fights us directly or merely pays his taxes.

That is Osama bin Laden speaking, in an interview with al Jazeera television in 1998, reproduced in the Telegraph. Anyone with any doubts about bin Laden’s aims should read this. some quotes:

Q: Some newspapers say that you seek to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. How true are these reports?

OBL: We are seeking to drive them [the US] out of our Islamic nations and prevent them from dominating us. We believe that this right to defend oneself is the right of all human beings. At a time when Israel stocks hundreds of nuclear warheads and when the Western crusaders control a large percentage of this weapon, we do not consider this an accusation but a right and we reject anyone who accuses us of this.

We congratulated the Pakistani people when they achieved this nuclear weapon and we consider it the right of all Muslims to do so.

And:

What is true is that God granted the chance of jihad in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia and we are assured that we can wage a jihad against the enemies of Islam, in particular against the greater external enemy — the crusader-Jewish alliance.

Those who carried out the jihad in Afghanistan did more than was expected of them because with very meagre capacities they destroyed the largest military force [the Soviet army] and in doing so removed from our minds this notion of stronger nations.

We believe that America is weaker than Russia and from what we have heard from our brothers who waged jihad in Somalia, they found to their greatest surprise the weakness, frailness and cowardliness of the American soldier. When only eight of them were killed they packed up in the darkness of night and escaped without looking back.

And:

Every Muslim the minute he can start differentiating, carries hate towards Americans, Jews and Christians, this is part of our ideology.

Ever since I can recall I felt at war with the Americans and had feelings of animosity and hate towards them. So what they say happened between them and myself is out of the question.

One of the things I got from reading this was confirmation of a thought I — and I know some others also — had had in the wake of the WTC attacks.

Bin Laden believes that Americans are cowards; this is understandable — there is little bravery involved in dropping munitions from aircraft flying high above the range of a foe’s anti-aircraft defences, and since Vietnam it has been clear that America can’t really stomach the idea of its boys being sent home in body bags.

But every occasion American troops have been deployed since Korea there have significant questions over what America was doing involved in a conflict where there might not obviously be a direct interest; however, attack America itself, kill thousands of Americans on their home soil — that is a different matter, and he’s going to find that American troops will be enthusiastic and brave, and the American public will accept casualties as a price to pay to get the perpetrators. At least, providing they can be convinced the war is being won.

Bin Laden, by the way, is reported to use doubles to confuse Western intelligence agencies.

"I was amazed at the intensity of his anti-American rhetoric. It was as if bin Laden had a psychotic hatred of anything American. He simply wanted to kill Americans for being American."

Another view of bin Laden: the Saudi ambassador in London talks about his incredulity at the path bin Laden’s life has taken.

The USA launches a spy satellite — to monitor Afghanistan? Tony Blair and George Bush warn the Taleban that their time is running out:

Bush said: ‘Full warning has been given. For those nations that stand with the terrorists, there will be a heavy price.’

… Bush’s comments were echoed by Tony Blair, who was even more outspoken in suggesting that an outbreak of hostilities was imminent. He told journalists accompanying him as he returned from three days of whirlwind diplomacy in Russia, Pakistan and India: ‘We are ready to go. Everything is in place.’

The Sunday Times reveals "two key pieces" of the evidence against bin Laden which were not disclosed last week:

[Muhammed] Atef is one of the closest allies of Osama Bin Laden. He is also, it emerged this weekend, one of the key links between the terrorist chief and the suicide attacks in America on September 11.

Following the attacks on the USA, the CIA is addressing some of the intelligence flaws which were exploited by the terrorists:

In hindsight, it is becoming clear that the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other agencies had significant fragments of information that, under ideal circumstances, could have provided some warning if they had all been pieced together and shared rapidly.

"It has been called to my attention that if you go back and sift through the intelligence reporting that was there before Sept. 11, that it is now clear that there are some things that should have rung bells a little bit louder," a senior intelligence official said. "There are a few fragmentary reports. But they are really only significant in hindsight. I wish we had paid more attention."

The Independent reports that the Northern Alliance is building an airbase at breakneck speed to be used by the coalition forces to funnel military supplies to their troops, which are already engaging the Taleban.

The Taleban claim to have moved 8,000 troops to the Uzbekistan border. The BBC is reporting that Yvonne Ridley has been released. Now will the media please stop paying attention to her mother, whose grasp of political realities is distinctly slippery:

Ms Ridley’s mother … thanked everyone who had supported her family and Mullah Omar, for being "so understanding".

She said military action against the Taleban should now be scrapped and direct communication should start with its leaders.

Pakistan: a radical religious leader who has called for the seizure of military bases which might be used by the USA has been placed under house arrest.

The USA is studying how chemical and biological agents disperse — very interesting piece in the LA Times.

Britain can only extradite suspected terrorists to the USA if the Americans will not sentence them to death. This might piss off the Americans, but HMG has no choice: the ECHR prohibits extraditions where capital punishment could be applied.

And quite right: if a criminal is brutal and evil, it does not follow that a society should descend to barbarity in its judicial punishments. A civilisation shuld be judged not by how it treats its best citizens, but its worst. The existence of the death penalty is not the only thing wrong with the American justice system, but it certainly is the one which most calls into question America’s right to describe itself as a civilised country.

If Tony Blair could stand for US president, he’d get the vote of almost half the US population, according to a Telegraph poll. If only he could… we could get rid of the oleaginous bugger. He’d have to take Mandy too, though, or no deal.

James Naughtie is unsettled at the high visibility of the PM in the USA:

The sight of Tony Blair springing from the front pages of the American newspapers is unsettling. People here are not supposed to know who the British Prime Minister might be, holding in their minds only a ghostly image of Margaret Thatcher’s handbag, like a fading sepia print from bygone times. Yet there he is, everywhere. When a Washington barman tells you that he enjoyed the speech to the Labour Party conference you know things are getting serious.

N.B. – That opening paragraph is followed by a great chunk of material from a completely different article; the Naughtie article continues with the paragraph beginning Nobody in Washington can remember a speech by any foreign leader …

Joan Smith wishes Blair would talk more politics and less religion:

[N]owhere in the Prime Minister’s 54-minute speech did he acknowledge the existence of a modern, secular world. The most Gladstonian aspect of his speech was the absence of non-believers – both from his remarks, and apparently from the World Trade Centre, where "the blood of innocent Muslims was shed along with those of the Christian, Jewish and other faiths".

France: the police officers and magistrates investigating the Toulouse explosion are convinced the cause was accidental:

Les policiers et magistrats chargés de l’enquête sont convaincus que le drame a une origine accidentelle.… Les enquêteurs, qui dénoncent les "rumeurs", jugent "policièrement morte" la piste islamiste.…

Une fois de plus, estiment les experts, la certitude que l’explosion a eu lieu au centre de la masse des 300 tonnes de nitrate rend peu plausible la thèse d’un acte intentionnel. Selon La Dépêche du midi, du 6 octobre, c’est un mélange d’acide sulfurique, de chaux et de soude, entreposés avec les nitrates, qui pourrait être à l’origine de la déflagration. De plus, 20 à 30 tonnes d’ammonitrates enrobés d’un produit organique ont été acheminés dans le bâtiment la veille du drame.

[English]

Rumour Central: as Stephen O’Leary acknowledges, the Net often becomes a breeding ground for rumours and conspiracy theories. He cites this list:

Stories that almost any regular user of e-mail is likely to have encountered in the past few weeks include the following:

• a Nostradamus prophecy anticipated the attack on the World Trade Center;
• a coded message predicting the attack can be found in a Microsoft "Wingdings" graphics font designed long before the recent events;
• 4000 Jews were warned against going to the World Trade Center on the day of the attack;
• filmed footage of Palestinians celebrating the attacks on the streets of Jerusalem was actually ten-year-old CNN stock footage of the Intifada;
• photos of the burning buildings reveal the face of Satan in clouds of smoke;
• another wave of terrorist attacks was planned for September 22;
• a man caught in the explosion of one of the WTC towers rode bits of the falling building down to safety; and
• an unburned Bible was found in the smoldering wreckage of the Pentagon.

Aided by the lightning-fast technology of the Internet, these rumors (all of them subsequently proven false) proliferated at an astounding rate.

Indeed, there’s only one of that list which I haven’t encountered over the past few weeks — the one about the Bible (which wouldn’t be all that impressive anyway).

But O’Leary points out that the social functions of rumour are indistinguishable from those of real news. The types of stories that spread in the wake of this catastrophe tell us something about what people wanted and needed to hear.

And talking of rumours: not the first time I’ve heard that media-organised recounts have shown that Gore won Florida, and decisively — but the media are covering it up:

While the precise numbers are still unavailable, a New York Times journalist who was involved in the project told one of his former companions that Gore won by a sufficient margin to create "major trouble for the Bush presidency if this ever gets out".

If true, this is bad for Bush, bad for American "democracy", and bad for the media, not least the New York Times.

Malcolm Rifkind describes IDS’s shadow cabinet as surprising and disturbing — oddly, a description I’d happily apply to Rifkind himself.

Talking about IDS, the Times reports that his literary efforts are much talked about:

His first novel, Ithaca, a thriller which he claims is “about power and deception”, has become a running joke in the publishing world in the past year. Among the many rejection letters he has received is one from the London literary agent Gillon Aitken, a copy of which has been seen by The Times.…

“I feel you have chosen too superficial a style, and in a way too undemanding a story, to stimulate a wide readership for the book,” he wrote.

Since when is it a job requirement for either Leader of the Opposition or Prime Minister that one can write better than Jeffrey Archer?