Home

Oh dear.

I have achieved media prominence of a sort in Malta today, becoming a leading story in the Malta Star.

This publication does not like the current Malta government.

Its article boldly asserts that I am the Maltese Prime Minister's new 'Spin Doctor', brought in to help the PM 'deal with the problems within the nationalist party parliamentary group'.

More: Crawford was the person who recommended to Dr Gonzi to give his disgruntled backbenchers an apprenticeship with various Government Ministries, and pay them from public funds...

He also states repeatedly on his blog http://www.charlescrawford.biz that he is a euro-sceptic. This means that the Leader of the Nationalist Party is now taking advice from a prominent euro-sceptic after years leading his party’s electoral campaigns with a stance of of anti-euro-scepticism...

Charles Crawford has in fact become so involved in the Nationalist Party’s internal organisation that he has, on various occasions, quoted blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia in his own blog.

Another article (seemingly referring to this first one) says that some officials within the Nationalist Party are shocked that an external spin doctor has been brought in to help the Prime Minister.

Malta! Here are the facts. NB No-one in Malta including the Malta Star has been in touch with me to ask about them.

• I left the FCO in late 2007 to start a new career, part of which has turned out to be senior training of different sorts
• Last year I was asked by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official in Malta to give some officials diplomatic communications training
• Which I duly did, drawing on training work I have previously done for the FCO in London as well as for one other EU member state and for the European Commission in Brussels
• The training in Malta as elsewhere focused on writing and presenting good English for different official purposes
• My visit had nothing whatsoever to do with the Nationalist Party's internal affairs
• I will be pleased to come back to Malta to advise any party or organisation who wishes to pay for this training, including the Malta Star. Book early to avoid disappointment
• The article in the Malta Star seems to insinuate that I have been drawing on my mediation skills during the recent training in Valletta, to help one particular political party. Alas not - that is a separate course, which so far I have given only to EU officials in Brussels
• In short, I have made no recommendations to anyone in Malta other than to show some officials how to write and present brisk official English
• In particular I of course have NOT said or recommended anything to anyone about giving Parliamentarians paid roles in Government Ministries
• I am not a Spin Doctor. But if someone in Malta or anywhere else wants to pay me generously to be one, I'll be happy to have a go.

Finally, I have linked to the site of Daphne Caruana Galizia for my small but select readership, as its popularity in Malta seems to be a striking example of the impact blogging can have in smaller countries.

Maybe I'm wrong on that. Likewise if other Malta bloggers with different views are having a similar impact, I'll be delighted to link to them too. But I do not plan to let this blog be overwhelmed with things Maltese, gripping as they are.

Just to add that my first visit to beautiful Malta prompted me to write some general thoughts about democracy and participation for my own readers, who are unlikely to be familiar with the subject as it applies in Malta: here.

All clear now?

Sure?

Good. Thank you.

Always a pleasure to post a comment on Craig Murray’s site. His readers are so smart and droll in reply, giving excellent material for my rotating What The Critics Say box:

Having visited your blog i must say it doesnt surprise me. Your self-aggrandising careerist pomposity is quite breathtaking

I suspect Charles Crawford is arguing for an increase in pension or knighthood or both

You are a disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist. Your kind have destroyed the pride of the United Kingdom after Nazism was defeated by our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers. You and your peers are incapable of any strategy except lying. You have shredded the international justice embedded in the Geneva Convention. If you had the slightest understanding of the implications of your snotty drivel, you would be looking for a new identity in South America like your Nazi predecessors

Charles Crawford...the shallow, self-interested man's coward and toady

Magnificent. Now, let’s look at the substance.

In a posting about whether the British Government were ‘aware’ that the CIA was getting intelligence from torture, Craig linked to three FCO documents and said this:

The government knew the CIA was sending us intelligence from torture from at least November 2002, when I sent a diplomatic telegram to Jack Straw and others - including MI5 - informing them so. I repeated it in February 2003, and was called back to a meeting on March 7 2003 where I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law.

My Comment on this posting:

You keep serving up these documents as if they prove your case. Read them. They don't.

Where in those records or otherwise are the statements supporting your claim that "...I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law"?

I can't see them. Can anyone else?

And (to repeat) when the specific issue you raised (namely that HMG's possession of material known or suspected to have come from torture ipso facto amounted to 'complicity' in torture under the Convention) went to the House of Lords, the Law Lords flatly rejected your view.

Craig himself takes up two points made by a sensible commenter:

I am not sure whether you are arguing:

1) HMG was not knowingly receiving any information obtained from torture, and these documents report a completely hypothetical discussion as whether it would be legal; or

2) HMG was knowingly receiving information obtained under torture, and it is not illegal under international law to do so.

Craig fairly asks me: 

What do you think those documents do show? Presumably they do have some point, or the various authors would not have created them. What do you think it was that Jack Straw was agreeing with?

Let’s look at the documents as linked to by Craig. They are well worth a look at top-end formal FCO work in action.

They report a record by senior FCO official Linda Duffield of her conversation with Craig (joined by top FCO Legal Adviser, Michael Wood) which looked at one specific point he had raised, namely “that it was also an offence under the Torture Convention to receive or possess information obtained under torture”.

Michael said at the meeting that he did not think that that was the case under international law. His subsequent minute formally confirmed that view.

The minute from Jack Straw’s office compliments Linda Duffield on how she handled her meeting with the turbulent Craig (and by implication endorses the policy line she and Michael Wood put forward, which of course was later upheld by the House of Lords). It says nothing whatever which might be held against the Foreign Secretary.

So, I win an easy technical knockout. Craig was not ‘told’ on that occasion or otherwise that ‘as a matter of policy’ we were using intelligence from torture.

That does not settle the substance of Craig’s wider point. That we were receiving material probably drawn from torture. And that these documents somehow ‘show’ a cynical if not unlawful approach by the government and endorsed by Jack Straw personally.

Where Craig seems to me to go wrong is that he over-stretches the concept of ‘complicity’ to suit his argument. Craig determinedly supports those jurists such as Professor Sands who argue that merely using or receiving material known or suspected to have been obtained under torture in itself amounts to complicity in that torture.

An eloquent argument in favour of a strong point is not enough. Courts (and politicians, and the public) look also at eloquent arguments in the other direction, particularly in highly complex public policy areas where the role of the Executive to protect the public comes into play. This explains the sense of the House of Lords landmark decision:

• That it may be acceptable for the state's executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives) 
• But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals

So, to answer precisely (if long-windedly) the reasonable questions put by one of Craig’s readers:

I think it is fair to say that the British Government were receiving intelligence reports (via the CIA and maybe otherwise) some of which they reasonably could believe were based on information extracted from prisoners through abusive treatment which might well be deemed in a UK court to amount to torture. (Craig himself convincingly pressed the case that any report served up by the Uzbek intelligence agencies had to be suspect on this score.)

That is not in itself illegal under international law. ‘Complicity’ on the part of HMG requires a very close and direct link to the abusive treatment, which in the case of eg Uzbek intelligence was just not there.

Even if receiving such information is not illegal, is it ipso facto always immoral or wrong?

Craig I suspect says a loud Yes.

I won’t do that. I can not conclude that it would be right for Ministers to ignore an intelligence report which might cast light on a terrorist plot to murder British or other citizens - and perhaps allow us to prevent that or some other atrocity happening. I think that in this darkest of moral corners it is just not possible to give clear-cut winner-takes-all answers.

And I have Professor Sands on my side, to this extent (his comment to a Parliamentary Committee on Michael Wood’s minute):

What I say in my written evidence is that insofar as the letter seeks to address a very narrow question it is not formally inaccurate but it misses the bigger point which was addressed in the previous witness’s contribution, namely in what circumstances might the receipt of information obtained through torture constitute complicity within the meaning of article 4 of the convention

Exactly.

In some circumstances the mere receipt of information might (sic) amount to be complicity. In others it would not. In the middle are many grey areas.

And if thinking that makes me a self-aggrandising, careerist, disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist, shallow, self-interested coward and toady – so be it.

Once upon a time I was honoured to be noticed by the great Instapundit.

Readership shoots up fleetingly if the Professor links to you on his site, as his readers run into the hundreds of thousands. Ditto Guido.

An Iain Dale link too is much prized.

But to get a link from Daphne Caruana Galizia? Now you're talking!

Malta's population is something over 400,000 people.

Daphne's readership is said to be close to 100,000 per day.

Can that be right? If so, that means that almost every person in Malta is either looking at her blog at least once a week or talking to someone about it.

She has achieved a national readership of utterly awesome proportions.

Why?

For posts like this.

I hear that Malta still has the offence of criminal libel and that some people may be trying to get Daphne convicted under that heading.

Seems a bit unlikely to succeed with her ratings at that galactic level?

Who'd want to be the person applying the handcuffs?

Just to be 200% clear. I have no idea what she is talking about. Maltese politics and personalities are a subject about which I know nothing.

It's the phenomenon I'm interested in here.

A quite new form of democracy is evolving under our noses.

RFE/RL is an excellent resource for all sorts of detail about what is happening in the former Soviet Union. See especially The Power Vertical, a blog written especially for Russia wonks and obsessive Kremlin watchers.

Try these pieces:

One about new popular protests against price rises and corruption (even if the 'tide of protests engulfs more Russian cities' title is ridiculous):

Tatyana, a 50-year-old preschool teacher in the central Russian city of Penza, must now spend 5,000 rubles ($168) per month on water, gas, and electricity. This leaves her with just 2,300 rubles ($77) to feed her two teenage children and her husband, an invalid whose health problems prevent him from working

Garry Kasparov always has interesting things to say:

Because sticking to the current form of governance, which is to say guaranteeing the survival of Putin's regime, will necessarily lead to the demise of Russia within its present borders.

The Far East and Eastern Siberia are already developing according to a Chinese scenario, the full scope of which will be revealed in the near future. In the next 10 to 15 years, a lot of Russian territories will become at least de facto Chinese. This will change the situation in Russia fundamentally...

And the (maybe a bit overwritten?) Online Petition against Vladimir Putin:

Bubbling away nicely?

Or just minor hiccups in all that vast space, which as ever changes very slowly in its own very Russian way?

You're a great leader. You make speeches.

In our Tower of Babel world, is it better to keep hammering away on the same themes (and often using the same words and phrases) to get your message across?

Maybe.

But don't overdo the clichés.

Or people will start listening to you for all the wrong reasons.

Former Bosnia Presidency member Ejup Ganic has been released on bail, albeit subject to some strict conditions. Serbia has to continue mustering evidence for the process to move forward.

In the end current BH Bosniac Presidency member Haris Silajdzic did not visit him in jail, but instead remonstrated with David Miliband about the whole business.

The British Government are sticking to the line that this is a purely legal matter with no (no) political connotations in any way whatsoever either for the present or in terms of any view of what happened in the past. See HM Ambassador in Sarajevo, Michael Tatham, on his blog (in Bosnian!).

That position, of course, is exactly what critics of the whole affair are attacking:

Please. Be serious. How can the fact that you have arrested a former senior Bosniac on war crimes charges emanating from a Serbia which refuses to hand over Mladic be 'solely' a legal matter?

Fair enough. But that's today's Europe. Better to tackle complex questions by stuffing all concerned with the Porridge of Procedure than through ethnic cleansing and the rest?

So on it all trundles. As things now stand, it is hard to imagine that the Serbia side will not assemble enough material to persuade a judge that prima facie the issue deserves a substantive hearing (unless, that is, the Bosniac side knock down the extradition application on jurisdictional or other procedural grounds).

Is a British court in due course to pore over the origins of the Bosnian conflict and the Dobrovoljacka St shootings back in 1992 and try to reach a conclusion?

"It seems to me, Jeeves, that the ceremony may be one fraught with considerable interest."

“Yes, sir.”

“What, in your opinion, will the harvest be?”

“One finds it difficult to hazard a conjecture, sir.”

“You mean imagination boggles?”

“Yes, sir.”

I inspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled.

Here's a handy list of outlandish racist statements. Can you guess which fine people made them?

Thus:

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.

This:

I'm not going to use the federal government's authority deliberately to circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods. . . . I have nothing against a community that's made up of people who are Polish or Czechoslovakian or French-Canadian or blacks who are trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods.

Or this:

Anyone who has traveled to the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results. . .

This:

I mean, you got the first mainstream African American [Barack Obama] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy.

And a bonus:

The Republican Party committed a great public crime when it gave the right of suffrage to the blacks. . . . So long as the Fifteenth Amendment stands, the menace of the rule of the blacks will impend, and the safeguards against it must be maintained

Useful.

Over at Business and Politics.

Thus:

Remember the Bible parable of the Prodigal Son? He squandered his fortune but saw the error of his ways and crept back home. He was warmly welcomed by his father, who explained the significance of his repentance to an older brother unimpressed by the precedent being set:

This brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

The moral core of this story turns on the fact of his sincere repentance – and an unambiguous willingness by the wastrel to work hard to put things right.

The Bible does not say that the wastrel is ‘entitled’ to carry on sponging off his relatives indefinitely – that they have to show him limitless ‘solidarity’.

As we look at Greece’s manoeuvres to persuade partners and markets to lend them yet more money to help stave off self-induced Disaster, the issues boil down to this:

• Is Greece serious about repenting its erstwhile wasteful ways?

• Is Greece capable of sustaining the sort of brisk standards now being set by Poland?

Indeed. So what are the answers?

Nick Hogan has been released, in an interesting example of Blogger Power (of sorts).

Anna Raccoon helped lead the charge - well done her and Old Holborn. Some of the detail on the case as they report it is striking.

I don't smoke and don't like being in smoke-filled places. But I dislike even more the idea that a privately owned pub or even a private club such as the Travellers is being treated by the state as a 'public' place.

No! Go away!

Imagine you run a toyshop. You have to sell a consignment  of 'white' Barbie dolls and 'black' Barbie dolls.

Should you price them at the same rate under all circumstances to show that all races are equal?

Does selling the black one at a cheaper price send a bad racial signal?

Or does it encourage white parents to buy black Barbies for their offspring, spreading racial harmony?

Does selling the black one at a higher price when you suspect you would do better by selling it cheaper send a signal that you do not care about poorer black customers?

Aaargh.

Update:

Let's explore some of the issues.

What if you as toyshop owner thought that selling the black dolls cheaper might prompt some consumers to complain about racism and/or offend some people (but not all)?

How should you start to measure the gain which more purchasers at the cheaper price would enjoy against the gloom caused (or self-induced?) among others?

Is there any sensible way other than the price mechanism to measure the weight of rival views view on the subject? If ten people complain but 900 do not, is there any issue? Is a good enough answer to those offended along the lines of 'shop somewhere else'?

In law we have the 'eggshell skull' rule: if you do something tortious (not tortoise - that's a hard shell) and one victim just happens to be prone to incur much greater damage as a result, too bad for you when the damages claim appears.

So if something you do happens to upset a category of people (who are prone to froth themselves to be upset at such things), should the law come down against you accordingly?

Or is that a blank cheque for the most neurotic to rule the rest of us? See also those cutesy Danish cartoons.

A lot in those Barbie dolls... 

Is one argument against using unmanned predators to attack enemy targets that they are just too accurate?

How about this other one: if eg the USA does not have to go through battle processes by putting troops in danger on the ground as in medievel times, that is either unfair or makes it too 'easy' for the USA to wage war?

Suggesting, however sophisticated the language, that superior intellects understand that “we” need to have more American GIs killed, or at risk, in order to reach the efficient equilibrium of incentives and disincentives to violence is not a winning argument.

I also think, however, that the folks inclined to make this kind of argument cannot restrain themselves from making it, because it lies at the heart of what they truly think, while also confirming both their morally superior position of “neutrality” and their intellectual superiority, too, and all the rest is merely a minor add-on.  If I sound offended by it, I am.

Me too.

Under the Lisbon Treaty the European Union has a new External Action Service, led by Baroness Ashton.

And as expected, it is struggling to trundle out of the hangar and get on the runway.

The main issue in the arguments over setting up the EAS is not all about how the EU might best throw its weight around in the world.

No! Much more important matters principles are at stake. Namely:

• who gets which top jobs?
• who decides?

In one early and much criticised power-play, probably the most important overseas job in the EAS went to ... a close colleague of Commission President Barroso, who was bundled through by Barroso before the EAS was properly set up. Many Europhiles see this as at best unseemly:

The fear is that the appointment of a Portuguese official, formerly Barroso’s chef de cabinet smacks of patronage and inappropriate influence. 

Not an inspired move, if the aim is to make the EU effective?

Since then there has been the long anticipated three-way struggle between member states (keen to get EAS defined and run in such a way as to pose no threat to national foreign ministries), the European Parliament (ever scheming to extend its power) and the Commission (having hundreds of people previously serving at Commission 'representations' overseas who need placing).

Behind all that are key European policy competences. Who leads and sets the overall agenda? The Commission, the Parliament, or Member States?

Zzzz.

Meanwhile Cathy Ashton too is being attacked openly from various quarters (including France) for being 'just not up to the job'. Although some of the examples cited are a bit strange:

... some experienced EU officials say she would have done better to have waited two months in order to learn the ropes from Mr Solana and his team.

“She hasn’t had the tools she needs. When Haiti hit, she did not even have a television in her office,” said Alexander Stubb, Finland’s foreign minister.

Huh?

Good. The last thing she needs is tedious 24/7 media propaganda flickering away distractingly in the corner.

Nor should she have rushed to Haiti to 'see for herself' the earthquake devastation there. Trips like that are basically do-something resource-intensive self-indulgence by the leaders concerned.

Maybe patiently plodding along is the inglorious but overall best available approach.

In short, all going just as I predicted.

Sarajevo's Dnevni Avaz reports that the Bosniac member of the three-person Bosnian collective state Presidency, Haris Silajdzic, is travelling to London to visit Ejup Ganic tomorrow - presumably in jail. The office of the Serb member of the Presidency Nebojsa Radmanovic mournfully complains that he still has not been informed.

This (if it happens) has to be an extraordinary first in the Diplomatic History of the Universe - a head of state visiting another state specifically to meet a prisoner from his country held in that state's prison on an extradition charge.

Come on, British media, DO SOMETHING ON THIS STORY! Don't leave it to me to report this first! I'm just a humble blogger.

Meanwhile legal challenges to the court decision not to release Ganic on bail continue, as do moves by the BH side to muster arguments on the substance of Serbia's extradition request. Serbia is still pulling together the documents it says it needs to support its case.

Ganic's renewed bail application may be heard later this week. 

Background over at Balkan Insight on Ganic's high-powered defence team, including Clare Montgomery who was part of Pinochet's defence team.

Is hosted by Mr Eugenides.

Linking to a lot of UK political stuff, plus this good piece about how the proliferation of new media outlets create closed sub-cultures:

The internet is an extension of the telephone network, and as such it's a two-way communication medium rather than a one-way broadcast medium. The internet allows people to answer back, in ways that the church pulpit and books and newspapers and TV and radio never allowed, or only residually allowed.

And this changes everything. It changes the game completely.

A fine article at Devil's Kitchen reminding us how New Zealand slashed socialism in a series of bold, strong moves (emphasis added):

It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well.

The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration.

Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else.

We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school.

We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day...

It will happen here too.

One day. When we decide to drive back government to sensible levels.

Bring it on.

A reader argues that I am underestimating the impact of Fox News in the USA:

Thus the numbers of people 'reached' in America are not the paltry 2.8 million you purport, but rather 80% of the total viewership for the day, 18,166,000, (again ridiculous, 20% of 18 million people did not tune into FOX news yesterday and spend the entire day watching it)...

So obviously many more people were one time show watchers tuning into an original program they wished to view, rather than spending their entire day watching a news channel on a non-news day.

I did not 'purport' anything. The figures I quoted were clearly describing 'prime time' viewership alone. That said, the ratings over a longer period of course stack up for Fox as for everyone else.

The media term for this is the cume. See how Arbitron defines it:

Major ratings products include cume (the cumulative number of unique listeners over a period), average quarter hour (AQH - the average number of people listening every 15 minutes), time spent listening, (TSL), and market breakdowns by demographic.

It is important to understand that the CUME only counts a listener once, whereas the AQH can count the same person multiple times, this is how to determine the TSL. For example, if you looked into a room and saw Fred and Jane, then 15 minutes later saw Fred with Sara. The Cume would be 3 (Fred, Jane, Sara) and the AQH would be 2. (an average of two people in the room in a given 15 minute period)

Which is why in fact CNN claim that their cume is greater than Fox's.

The point of my posting was to look at the sense behind the claim of a senior Democrat that four times as many viewers watch Fox as watch CNN. If the total numbers for both are relatively small, why if at all does that matter?

This piece supports my position, noting that back in 1969 the main evening US news channels would reach 40 million people (at a time when the US population was a lot smaller):

There's a growing perception that opinion news outlets like Fox and MSNBC drive the news agenda. Do they?

No. The state of the economy, the war in Afghanistan, whether swine flu is going to turn more deadly--these things drive the news. That perception may be there, but cable news is still a niche medium.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly has around 3.5 million people watching each night, or about 1% of American adults. That would get you canceled on broadcast television. The three nightly newscasts have about 20 million viewers, not 3.5 million.

What Fox clearly does is reinforce the sympathies and energies of a smallish number of conservative Americans. So what? It's a free country! Most other cable and network channels push in a more 'liberal' direction, far outnumbering Fox.

Where US conservatives do have an edge is with Talk Radio, with Rush Limbaugh reaching some 13.5 million listeners a week. But again, that is only two million per day on average.

The basic fact is that with the huge expansion of TV channels and Internet-based entertainment and information of the past couple of decades, fairly few Americans now watch TV for news and current affairs. Newspaper circulations are falling too.

Hence the vicious circle of those programmes (and newspapers) cutting reporters and so getting more and more shallow or even solely 'opinion-based' (ie making a loud and often silly noise) to try to keep up their ratings.

That trend is evident here in the UK too. See for example how the BBC lost my vote back in 1993 with its scandalously poor assessment of the attempted coup against President Yeltsin, which I watched at the Embassy in Moscow with gunfire echoing round the city in the background:

When I subsequently took up with a senior BBC personality the BBC's dismal, dishonest reporting at the height of the crisis he just shrugged, saying that that sort of dramatic reporting boosted ratings and was what people wanted to hear these days.

In short, if the Democrats want to blame something for their woes, maybe the right target is not Fox News but rather their own policies?

A bracing visionary view at Edge of how the Internet is transforming everything, by David Gelernter.

Interesting intro:

Take a look at the photos from the recent Edge annual dinner and you will find the people who are re-writing global culture, and also changing your business, and, your head.

What do Evan Williams (Twitter), Larry Page (Google), Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium), Sergey Brin (Google), Bill Joy (Sun), Salar Kamangar (Google), Keith Coleman (Google Gmail), Marissa Mayer (Google), Lori Park (Google), W. Daniel Hillis (Applied Minds), Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures), Dave Morin (formerly Facebook), Michael Tchao (Apple iPad), Tony Fadell (Apple/iPod), Jeff Skoll (formerly eBay), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have in common?

All are software engineers or scientists.

So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code.

Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization...

Gelernter:

Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world.

The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon.

Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike.

... As I wrote at the start of this piece, no moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than "now." As we learn more about now, we know less about then.

The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all.  (Some scientists talk about artificially increasing the power of minds and memories — but then they are no longer talking about human beings. They are discussing some new species we know nothing about. And in this field, we would be fools to doubt our own ignorance.)  

The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past...

Read the whole thing. Clever.

Here is what looks like the original British Arrest Warrant for Ejup Ganic (click on the Arrest Warrant.jpg link)

It contains a seeming serious error (emphasis added), saying that Ganic is accused in a category 2 territory, namely Serbia of the commission of an offence the conduct of which occurred in that territory ...

Is this a mistake of some sort based on the information Serbia has put forward?

Or have bemused Brits in the Westminster Magistrates Court failed to grasp some of the basic points of the collapse of Yugoslavia - annoying but possibly justifiable?

Or is Serbia deliberately claiming (to get its jurisdictional credentials established) that at that point the independence of Bosnia had not been generally recognised by the international community (Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the UN only on 22 May 1992 - my birthday), and so Sarajevo was still part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and thus within a single legal space, of which Serbia is now the sole remaining heir (insofar as there is one)?

Or is there some Serbia implicit link to the Karadzicistic idea that Sarajevo by that stage already had been divided into two parts, ie 'Serb Sarajevo' and the rest?

If either of the latter two, blimey.

If (more likely?) it is some sort of footling mistake, I would not suspect that the nature of the mistake would make the whole arrest to be so improper as to derail the extradition request, if (if) the issue of where the alleged crimes took place is not in itself a substantive issue (eg for jurisdictional reasons)

Meanwhile here I am on Radio Free Europe talking about the case, as translated into Bosnian/Serbian.

If you don't speak that, forget using the Google Translate button to get it into English - you'll still have no idea what I said! It seems to think I discussing pilgrims.

At the risk of boring everyone, here is an excellent interview with Jovan Divjak about the Dobrovoljacka St killings and the politics of it all now.

It's in Bosnian/Serbian (not as Google says Croatian), but if you use the Google Translate button you'll get more than enough of it in somewhat strangled English to get the essence of what he is saying.

Key points:

• Divjak insists that there was no formally organised attack, but rather attacks from a number of different units with unfortunately no central command possible - a certain chaos
• But (Note: as an honest soldier) he accepts that whereas the Bosniacs were defending themselves, there were 'proceedings' not in accordance with the Geneva Convention.
• "Of course you ask yourself, who did the shooting?. It's known who did it" (Note: the Google translation gets this key point 100% wrong!)
• Ganic at the time was indeed substituting Izetbegovic as the most senior Bosniac commander. But who precisely ordered what should be determined by the Prosecutor's Office, not the media.
• As and when the whole affair comes to trial, Divjak's own statements will be judged to show how far and in what respects he himself bore responsibility  
• Tensions between Bosnia and now Serbi are as high now as they were when the war ended, with Serbia in particular unable to face up to the way Karadzic was supported from Belgrade. Facts clearly established at the Hague Tribunal are being ignored for propaganda purposes.
• But the Bosniacs too are unwilling to accept massacres committed by their side.
• Politicians on all sides have an interest in keeping up tension as the only way to advance their own plans; see for example former Serbian PM Kostunica on TV blaming the Muslims for everything which happened

Gripping stuff, for those of us able and willing to follow all these Balkan tensions in any detail...

The wider point is this.

With the possible exception of Slovenia, a tricky case in itself for reasons going back deep into WW2, no former Yugoslav republic has found a way to strike a way between defensive exclusivist 'national'/nationalist/ethnic politics and a different inclusive pluralism.

Put to one side the fascinating sociological fact that this is the dismal result of decades of intense central communist propaganda in favour of Brotherhood and Unity - something those insisting on 'ever-closer union' within the EU might want to think about.

The simple fact is that all the different communities across former Yugoslavia can not imagine ethnic disarmament - moving to a situation where issues are looked at on their merits, rather than in terms of which community 'somehow' will gain an edge.

In fact this problem has a lot of disarmament game theory in it:

Of course we are ready to disarm - we are good Europeans! But given our long history of being brutalised, it is only fair that the other sides have to put down some weapons first to show their sincerity

Haha. A typical banal Balkan trick. They are saying that we should put some weapons down to make it easier for them to attack us again. They must be planning new attacks. Let's get a few more weapons, just in case

See?! We told you so. We make a fair offer aimed at achieving disarmament - and they start getting new weapons! How can we trust them?

There appears to be no way out of this centuries-long psychological and immoral, suspicicious morass. One name for it is the Sakic-Milosevic Syndrome.

Is the problem especially acute in Serbia? Arguably yes.

The good news there is that as much the largest former Yugoslav republic Serbia necessarily has a different, 'larger' sort of democracy and democratic potential, which has to incorporate different ethnic communities and does so pretty well for day-to-day purposes.

However, at the level of state policy there is an unhappy tension between lumpen 'nationalist' ambition and modern pluralism. A fine article by Srdja Popovic describes how that confusion affects the main force for change in Serbia, the Democratic Party (emphasis added):

... when I saw their program, I realized that it incorporated two contradictory parts. The first part advocated widely defined democratic values, freedoms, civil rights, market economy, and the other part was nationalism in its darkest form. I would sign the first part in an instant, and the second part I wouldn’t even dream of signing.

And now, looking back, I see how even then they were impressed by the success of the Right and of Milosevic’s supposedly leftist party which pursued right-wing policies. So they realized that they would remain isolated and alone if they too didn’t give their contribution to nationalism. 

The party was constantly being divided by this built-in contradiction, and the result is Tadic’s slogan – both Kosovo and Europe. He is responding to the contradictory demands which they themselves made at the very beginning.

This explains the historical reconciliation narrative, because they now want to reconcile the two irreconcilable parts of their program. They want to do it on a personal level, on a governmental level, on the state level.

... But it can’t get us anywhere, it is self-paralyzing, because it is confined by the two conflicting forces which it contains. It is a void, and this void is wasting the precious little reformatory energy this society has.

All that spills over into Bosnia too, whose self-absorbed leaders (admittedly operating in a bizarre constitutional framework imposed by Dick Holbrooke) have blown their opportunity to build a successful modern economy.

Which is why I am sitting here today writing about a dirty little massacre 18 years ago, one squalid episode in a far wider series of horrors which few if any leaders in the region really want to accept as a whole.

Robin Harris, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, lambasts at NRO the way judicial processes are being used and (he says) abused in the UK for foreign or other political purposes:

The British authorities allowed themselves to become dupes of judicial manipulation, and it will be hard to claw back towards common sense. Serbia is a signatory to the European Convention on Extradition. This should mean — but does not — that its courts conduct their business fairly. No one, knowing the circumstances, could imagine that Ganic would receive a fair trial in Belgrade. Yet Britain has limited its own options, by legislation passed in 2003 that reduces the scope for ministers to intervene to stop such cases.

Any present or former politician, high official, or soldier from any of the countries involved in the wars accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia is now at risk of arrest on a politically fabricated charge if he or she comes to Britain. But one cannot stop there. Leading figures from many Western countries have also been involved in Yugoslavia’s wars, particularly in Kosovo in 1999. A Serbian court could issue warrants against these figures, too, and the British police will, as we have seen, unquestioningly act on them.

So Gordon Brown’s assurances are less than reassuring. It is not only private groups that manipulate international justice. So can states with ill-functioning judicial systems and little respect for veracity or equity.

The abuses inherent in universal jurisdiction will, therefore, continue to manifest themselves in acute form in Britain, unless radical reform is undertaken. In the meantime, Heathrow arrival gates could usefully be marked: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

Fine (more or less), except that it does not take us far.

Either we make extradition arrangements or we don't.

If we do, there are three general choices:

• let the courts decide, according to firm criteria which respect human rights and as far as possible common sense (ie as far as possible 'neutral' and unpolitical decisions)
• let Ministers decide, ditto (ie as far as possible reasonable decisions which weigh the UK public interest in an openly political way, and for which Ministers are publicly accountable)
• some sort of messy hybrid (what we now have)

Then there is a quite separate list of questions:

• Do we have 'easier' extradition arrangements for countries we regard as capable of running a fair trial (ie relatively few)?
• If we do, how much easier should they be? Is the aim to get foreign feuding out of our courts asap?
• How far if at all should we (courts or Ministers) look at the substance of the request and the background circumstances?
• Do we have no extradition arrangments with countries abusing human rights (ie most of them)?

The problem with having easier extradition arrangements for some ostensibly respectable countries (including EU and would-be EU partners) is that even they may allow political murky considerations to drive extradition requests. See this Ganic case. 

The problem with having no extradition arrangements with 'bad' countries is that any gangster or corrupt oligarch from that country can make a beeline to the UK and hide behind those laws and/or 'human rights.

No clearly good answer here, in either theory or practice. Reasonable people will disagree as to which extradition requests (and processes and principles) are well founded, and which are a scandal.

Robin Harris appears to advocate some sort of reserve trump card for Ministers to step in and stop any extradition or other such proceedings they dislike for foreign or other policy reasons.

That's one way of doing it. But it opens another risk, namely that decisions made by Ministers in such circumstances will be politically motivated and capricious and therefore open to legal challenge - hard to maintain any sort of consistent principle one way or the other.

In any case, there looks to be no way to stop the UK courts having full-blown legal battles over the politics of other countries. Since even if we have a 'let Ministers decide' rule, decisions will be challenged in the courts on any number of procedural and substantive grounds. See the Pinochet cases - nice earners for the lawyers involved, all at UK taxpayers' expense.

As for Ejup Ganic, it may all be over next week if the Serbian government fail to put together a convincing dossier which establishes enough of a case to answer to force the matter into a substantive extradition process.

If they do produce enough evidence to achieve that outcome, the whole saga could become really very complicated. If not dramatic.