Blogoir

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.

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.

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.

Is it money you have now plus money you know you'll have, or are sure you'll have?

Is it costs you have now plus costs you know you'll have or are sure you'll have?

What about expected costs which don't in fact arise or are deferred? How to account for that 'saving'?

What if you spend that 'saving', then persuade yourself that you can make a similar saving next month and spend that too?

Which time period 'counts'? Is it OK to run up unaffordable debts in Period A, then simply roll them over into Period B and proclaim budget discipline?

Welcome to the dark world of 'gaming the budget window', a core feature of Obamacare. And a purposeful further step down the Road to Ruin?

As usual, Keith Hennessey explains.

Over at the latest Crawford Diplomatic Despatch:

It all boils down to a profound infantilisation of public life. Government has turned into feckless dim-witted parents who treat their children like spoiled brats. The children themselves duly morph into something neurotic, angry and sly.

To win the public’s loathsome brattish affections and get re-elected, the parents offer endless sweeties, only to be aghast when the brats start to think that this is how things must be – even when there is no more money for sweets, and their own teeth start to rot from all that sugar.

The door-bell rings. It’s the bailiff:

Nice islands you have over there. Pity you can’t afford them any more…

I have just given a short interview to Radio Free Europe in Sarajevo about the Ganic problem.

The interviewer asked a question about the abuse of UK courts for political purposes. I pointed out that there are two completely different issues here, which may (understandably) be merging into one in the public mind:

• extradition requests filed by other states, which may or may not involve foreign leaders (Ganic situation): these are played out under the relevant detailed Extradition legislation
• private prosecutions (eg for war crimes) of visiting foreign leaders attempted by UK-based 'activists' as politically motivated lawfare. See the recent Israel episode. That was what Gordon Brown has written about today. 

I also pointed out that HM Government took war crimes issues very seriously - see eg the first action in Bosnia by NATO to round up ICTY indictees in 1997, which had been fatuously denounced in Sarajevo as a pro-Serb ploy even though the SAS killed a leading Bosnia Serb indictee in the process.

So (I said) it was not surprising that a British court confronted with some evidence that the Bosnian leader concerned had played a direct part in the killing of up to 40 people in a UN convoy might take the case very seriously. If it went to substantive hearings a rare battle would ensue, with top lawyers arguing the extradition case on its merits. I added that it remained to be seen whether the Bosnian application for Mr Ganic's extradition would help or hinder his case - were they really going to present him as a war-crimes suspect..? 

Update: Balkan media are reporting this afternoon that Ganic's request to be released on bail has been refused by the court in London.

B92 says that he may remain detained until 14 March when the deadline for submitting relevant documents expires, but wonders whether there may be a problem with Belgrade sending in all the paperwork...

* * * * *

Dnevni Avaz in Sarajevo reports today that Sanela Jenkins ("a Sarajevo woman married to a rich British banker") has paid over £200,000 as bail to secure Ejup Ganic's release from prison, expected later today.

Also that the BH Prosecutor has now sent an extradition request to the British authorities asking that Ganic be transferred to Bosnia: The Prosecutor considers itself solely competent for processing war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina for which BH citizens are suspected.

Fascinating. If this one gets into a full court case, how will Serbia and BH each argue the case that (a) Dobrovoljacka Street was a suspected war crime, and (b) that Ganic needs to be prosecuted for it, and (c) that he needs to be extradited accordingly?

Is this a wise move by the Bosnians? Can not Serbia use it to argue that the BH application is a smokescreen to enable Ganic to escape any serious investigation of the crime, since otherwise why have the Bosnians done nothing about it in nearly 20 years?

The Daily Telegraph weighs in on Ejup Ganic:

Bosnia has demanded his release and supporters claimed Britain had allowed itself to be used as pawn in the long-running battle between the two former Yugoslav nations.

The Telegraph quotes both an unnamed spokesman for Lady Thatcher and Robin Harris, her former speechwriter:

"She is deeply concerned. It is a mark of her regard for him that he is one of the relatively limited number of people she has met recently. She is worried about the precedents that these arrest warrants represent to visiting statesmen to London and absolutely urges a quick resolution."

Robin Harris, Lady Thatcher's former speech writer, said: "The idea that Serbia can now just actually indict and seek the extradition to Serbia of people who were, in fact, of course defending the local population against Serb-inspired aggression as long ago as 1992 on Bosnian rather than Serbian territory; and that actually such a request should be even given any kind of proper consideration at all by the British courts is to me quite astonishing,"

They also cite me(!) as saying that Ganic would joke "that his career was doomed because he had been born in Serbia". Which of course is not what I have said: how could I, when he was a leading member of the Bosnian Presidency and having an evidently undoomed career?

Idiots. Sigh.

The big policy question raised by Lady Thatcher is a good one. What are the limits of freedom?

On the one hand, we want to be open to foreigners (including political leaders) visiting here both as tourists and on business.

On the other, we do not want foreigners coming here to escape justice when they are wanted in their own countries for alleged crimes.

Plus we do not want unjust regimes to insist that foreigners on UK soil be sent back home to face trumped-up charges.

Plus we do not want to annoy generally friendly foreign states whose ideas of democracy are, hem, less sophisticated than ours by implying that they are incapable of running a fair trial.

Plus we do not want to be the world's default option for anyone wanting a job and free benefits and claiming to be an asylum seeker.

Nor do we want our legal system to be abused through politically motivated 'lawfare' by 'activists' issuing arrest warrants for foreign leaders they don't like.

Oh, and we also want to see all war crimes suspects brought to justice.

And we do not want to waste our time trying to fathom out in nano-level which countries are capable of running a fair trial or not, in general and in particular cases. Since almost none are (we suspect).

Which is why we want to make it fairly easy to extradite people to especially trustworthy international state partners in the EU and beyond, whose motives and ability to dispense justice are deemed (by us) to be (more or less) above suspicion. That means you, Serbia - and Bosnia and Herzegovina too!

Not to forget that we want to keep politics out of the courts.

Except that we do not want the courts taking decisions for tedious narrow legal reasons which could screw us in our international dealings.

Hence we have an odd hybrid system with detailed rules laid down for how extraditions are to be run by the courts but with ultimate authority lying with the Home Secretary (whose own criteria for stopping an extradition approved by the courts are tightly defined).

And did I mention the Human Rights Act?

Phew. Does anyone care to rank these policy considerations in priority order?

No. I thought not.

Mr Ganic's case ticks a number of these boxes simultaneously, which is why the line coming from Robin Harris is open to question.

Plus huffing and puffing that it is wrong to look at extraditing someone 'who was only defending his country' is a perverse reading of what happened, namely an attack on a convoy including UN vehicles which was trying to leave Sarajevo under a deal agreed by the Bosnian leadership including Mr Ganic himself. Watch the videos.

This one falls clearly within the war crime - case to answer category. A point not lost on Bakir Izetbegovic (son of former Bosnian President Izetbegovic who himself was in that convoy). Here he is quoted on B92 from Belgrade:

Neki zločin se tamo jeste desio, al' ga sasvim sigurno nije učinio Ganić, niti je odgovoran Ejup Ganić za njega. Jeste tamo bilo stradanja ljudi, ali će tužilac svoje reći...

Some sort of crime did happen there, but for sure Ganic did not commit it, nor is Ejup Ganic responsible for it. Yes people were massacred there, but the prosecutor will have his say...

Meanwhile as expected the question quickly appears of how far BH-level institutions might weigh in on Ganic's behalf if there is no consensus on the issue.

Republika Srpska leader Dodik has argued that it is 'unacceptable' for BH official money to be made available to help get Ganic out on bail, and has accused the BH Prosecutor's office of ignoring the Dobrovoljacka St massacre and other crimes against Serbs for political reasons.

Back in Sarajevo Bosniac and Bosnian Croat politicians are variously calling the whole business a scandal if not unfriendly act by Belgrade, and demanding that Belgrade focus on arresting General Mladic rather than prosecuting Ganic (Note: good point).

And Ganic's daughter is claiming that the British authorities are abusing her father's human rights by denying him contact with his family and the Bosnian Ambassador in London.

In short, a gripping foreign policy gužva.

Dnevni Avaz reports that now the Bosnian authorities are considering weighing in and sending an extradition request to London, asking that former Bosnian leader Ejup Ganic be extradited to Sarajevo rather than Belgrade!

This looks to be an attempt to create new legaL complications based on the proposition that Ganic is a BH citizen and so must be prosecuted for alleged war crimes in Bosnia rather than Serbia, as a bilteral agreement between Bosnia and Serbia reportedly lays down.

But it rather goes against the previous Sarajevo political line that any charges against Ganic are contrived. Is Sarajevo prepared to argue in the London courts that the Dobrovoljacka St shootings of 1992 were after all a possible war crime committed by the Bosniac side, and that Ganic has to answer for them?

Maybe this idea in fact will go nowhere as any extradition request to the UK has to come from the BH state level and the Bosnian Serb representatives at the BH level are unlikely to approve it?

This morning's Dnevni Avaz newspaper in Sarajevo has plenty on the Ejup Ganic story. Here.

For those of you unfortunate enough not to read Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, some of the interesting points in the article as yet unreported in the UK media - British scoop, right here:

• Mr Ganic's son Emir is reported as saying that Mrs Thatcher, a 'very close friend' of Mr Ganic, has sent her lawyers to help him - they represented him yesterday in court in London
• Action is in hand to raise £200,000 bail money
• Ganic is being held not under some sort of Interpol or other arrest warrant but under the 2002 UK/Serbia extradition agreement
• Which opens a 'key question': is Ganic a Serbian citizen and so subject to this agreement, or not?
• Son Emir says that his father was born in Serbia and had a Yugoslav passport when Yugoslavia broke up, but he never applied for a Serbian one, so he does not have Serbian citizenship
• British Ambassador in Sarajevo Michael Tatham has said that this situation represents no form of political or diplomatic statement by the British government about past events 
• Bosniac BH Presidency member Silajdzic is insisting that events in Sarajevo in 1992 are solely the responsibility of Bosnia and that BH and Serbia have signed an agreement to that effect - experts from his office are en route to London to help Ganic
• Serb BH Presidency member Radmanovic is saying that the arrest of Ganic shows that international legal processes are working as they should

The whole issue may turn on the issue of how Serbian citizenship is defined.

Yugoslav citizens had Yugoslav passports, and many continued using them long after Yugoslavia itself collapsed (they finally expire at the end of this year). They were also 'citizens' of their native republic.

Serbia for legal purposes was agreed to be the 'continuation' of Yugoslavia. So if a former Yugoslav citizen did not make the positive step to renounce his Yugoslav/Serbian citizenship, did it continue on paper even though that citizen had acquired a new citizenship of another former republic? Can citizenship in that part of the world lapse through desuetude?

Interesting formal point, since of course many Bosnian Serbs and Croats also have citizenship (and passports) of Serbia and Croatia respectively - a galling fact for Bosniac Bosnians who find themselves subject to different visa regimes when they travel. See also the convoluted issue of Serbian passports and people living in Kosovo.

Did Mr Ganic somehow positively do enough to keep his citizenship options open?

A Serbia claim that any former Yugoslav citizen who did not take formal steps to renounce Yugoslav/Serbia citizenship remains a Serbian citizen would lead to the bizarre result that anyone from former Yugoslavia could be subject to an extradition request emanating from Belgrade - not an outcome likely to appeal to international courts. 

Malta is a fascinating place for looking at some underlying issues of democracy and government.

Malta is 201st in the world’s list of countries by physical size, its area of 316km2 (one fifth the size of Greater London) just ahead of the Maldives and just behind Grenada. Its population (some 420,000 people) is comparable to that of Manchester, making it 171st in the world’s population rankings

The fascinating thing about Malta’s political life is that there is just so much of it. Voluntary participation in general elections soars to giddy heights of 95% or even more – the highest in the free world. Elections are won on national majorities of a few thousand votes, with two main parties slugging it out, the Labour Party and the currently ruling Nationalist Party. Party loyalty is very strong. If you are born into a Nationalist or Labour family, that helps shape your personal dentity. 

Hence you do not need much by way of maths to realise that if only several thousand people do decide to change their vote, the election results can be very different.

Which makes for vivid public life. Examples:

• If a voter is unhappy with the government’s work, s/he may gather together voting slips of other disgruntled friends and family members and dump them unceremoniously on a Minister’s desk as a sign of withdrawing support: “We have been waiting months for that planning application to go through. Where is it?” Since a typical Maltese extended family may have well over a hundred people, this dramatic gesture tends to focus Ministerial minds on helping that unhappy voter in a very practical way – a few more family ‘swings’ like that could literally lose the next election.
• As every Maltese citizen is likely to be firmly associated with one or other of the main political tendencies (and known to be so), ideas of loyalty and professional neutrality within the civil service are not what we in the much larger UK expect. Ministers have to think hard about best to work with their own Ministries, as officials from the ‘other side’ may be seen (fairly or unfairly) as likely leakers.
• A lot of Western political thought is built on the idea of the ‘separation of powers’ – parliament, government, judiciary, police, local administrations all having clearly defined roles ands responsibilities. Fine when it works. But how far can it work in the classic sense in a much smaller polity where everyone knows everyone else’s business and large family networks linked to political loyalty are so dominant?
• Likewise public appointments and official tenders. Opportunities for patronage and ‘clientelism’ are pervasive. Not that other, bigger polities necessarily do better.

All this and much more combine to make Malta an intriguing example of micro-accountability. Nonetheless, even on such a small island there is plenty of scope for things to go on in a less than clear way. Now lively local bloggers like journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia are hard at work bringing some new transparency to procedures which previously appear to have been less than satisfactory:

Malta is tiny and its judiciary is far from numerous. Yet in the last few years we have had this track record: one appeals court judge and a chief justice jailed for bribery, one failed attempt to impeach a magistrate (Labour refused to cooperate), one failed attempt to impeach a judge (Labour refused to cooperate), at least two magistrates who appear to have been relieved of most of their duties because of personal problems, one of which is said to involve alcoholism, and now the latest shenanigans involving Magistrate Herrera - though quite frankly, there is nothing ‘now’ about it at all.

That’s very impressive.

It’s quite clear from this mess that the entire system needs a rigorous overhaul. The first thing to go should be the discretionary approach to the appointment of magistrates and judges. Nominations for these positions should be made public and subject to public scrutiny.

Malta. Never a dull moment.

My earlier piece on Hamas and the 'cloned' passports has been picked up by Spy Blog, who watches like a hawk everything to do with UK government surveillance and other technologies.

He adds some useful expert points on just how difficult it is to come up with any foolproof scheme for catching people travelling under false identities:

Charles Crawford's points apply equally well to the older non-biometric Passports, which were apparently used in Dubai, as well as to the newer International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) compliant "biometric" ones, since these only currently contain a digitised image of the passport photograph and what is written on the face of the passport, and do not yet contain any fingerprint or iris scan biometric identifiers.

Facial Recognition is pretty useless at a passport control checkpoint, where there are lots of variations in ambient lighting etc. The UK Passport Service and some other foreign government equivalents do try to use it on their centralised digitised Passport Photo databases (which is why there are stupid rules on the size of such photos, in which you are now forbidden to smile), to try to spot obvious multiple applications in different names, but this is hardly an infallible automatic system, which needs plenty of experienced human facial recognition effort as well.

Spy Blog links all this to unconvincing official claims that UK ID cards would reduce 'identity theft'. He makes an interesting point about the impact on intelligence work if robust identity identification technology (linking names to identifiable individual people) were actually set up everywhere:

If biometric fingerprint Passports ever do work and centralised computer linked biometric readers ever do become universally installed at every border post, then where does that leave British or other intelligence agents, undercover policemen or special forces personnel ?

It may be possible to officially fake the UK National identity Register database entries and issue them with a genuine UK Passport and / or ID Card, under their cover name alias, but if they have ever crossed a foreign border in the past, perhaps when on holiday or business before they were recruited into a secret role, and had their fingerprint biometrics scanned, then, in theory, the mis-match in names using different Passports, should automatically be flagged up on the foreign government system.

Read it. Complicated. But fascinating.

Yesterday in London I was on the stage at the Polish Cultural Centre in West London for a discussion about Solidarity - Thirty Years After.

Others on the panel were Wladyslaw Frasyniuk (former top Solidarity activist and former political prisoner turned politician) - someone whose lively intelligence has left him an influential but quixotic player in Polish politics.

And Dougie Rooney, current President of the Trades Union Congress and a strong supporter of nuclear power.

Wiktor Moszczynski, press officer for the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, presided.

In my own remarks I shamelessly grabbed the opportunity to tease Dougie Rooney and remind the audience, not that most of the people there needed reminding, how the rise of the Solidarnosc movement in Poland in the 1980s had been a ghastly embarrassment for the British Left in general and the TUC in particular.

For many years senior Labour Party and trades unionists had been trooping to Moscow to ask for unobtrusive support from the Soviet leadership in their class struggles in the UK. In an epic act of national betrayal, Edward Kennedy too had travelled to Moscow in the mid-1980s secretly to ask for Moscow's help in defeating Ronald Reagan.

Not to mention that further back in 1920 assorted trades unions in England had mobilised to stop the British government sending weapons and supplies to newly independent Poland, then under attack from the Red Army whose avowed aim was to conquer Poland then move on to Berlin, Paris and London.

"Hands off Russia" had been the progressive cry, just when revolutionary Marxist Russia was greedily laying its own hands on as many territories as it could.

So, I said, there was a long tradition of both useless Useful Idiots and dangerous Useful Idiots in the Labour Movement, who had hated the fact that Polish workers were having the temerity to stand up for freedom against the Soviet empire, and so were threatening 'detente'.

Such attitudes ran deep in British society by the 1980s. By then Soviet Communism was like the weather - it was just there, for better or worse. I had had a problem in the FCO for echoing the Evil Empire language of Ronald Reagan in a speech I had drafted for Sir Geoffrey Howe. All sorts of people popped up pompously to intone that that sort of inflammatory rhetoric was likely to be 'destabilizing'.

Yet the Soviet Union was an empire, and it was (more or less) evil.

Luckily the arrival of Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had created a far-sighted vision for looking at Soviet Communism which created new realities on the ground far beyond these limp official cluckings.

In Reagan's wonderful phrase, "My idea of the Cold War is that we win, they lose." Which was what had happened.

I said that it was not surprising that the British Left had been hopelessly confused on the whole question. Run a Google search now and you see all sorts of squabbles still echoing on between the social-democratic Left, the Communist Left, the Trotskyist Left and the Really Trotskyist Left over who did what to whom back then.

And how appalling it had been for all of them that Margaret Thatcher was greeted by huge crowds of cheering Polish workers in Gdansk after defeating the Miners here in the UK.  

John Prescott (who knows a few things about British socialist and union politics) had found it all very hard to take, as he told me on one of his visits to Warsaw a few years back. Not only had many Poles seen Margaret Thatcher as a vision of hope. Much worse, the new Solidarity members coming to UK for fraternal consultations had all been pointy-head academics, not a real shipworker among them! 

I made one other point which perhaps was less comfortable to Polish ears.

Namely that on the one hand Poland rightly prided itself now on the huge sense of national unity and democratic but disciplined Christian principles which Solidarity came to represent. See eg this meeting itself.

But that mythic representation of Solidarity sat uneasily with the fact that millions of Poles had been more or less loyal to the Communist regime, whose agents and informers had penetrated to the top of Solidarity and indeed the Catholic Church. 

Hence continuing bitter feuding today over the 'deal' done with the Communists in the late 1980s.

Did Solidarity under malevolent influence of senior traitors within its own ranks pull its punches and let the Communists tip-toe away far too easily? And even if that was the case, did Poles now want to force through the final unmasking of all those double-agents in Solidarity and Church ranks?

This prompted shouts of Yes! from a small but noisy contingent of younger Poles in the audience, who appeared to blame Frasyniuk and other Solidarity veterans for the fact that so many young Poles still did not have jobs in Poland, and suspected that Lech Walesa had been a double agent...

* * * * *

It is all 30 years ago now. Ancient History.

Lech Walesa himself is still only 67. All being well he'll be around for Solidarity's 50th birthday party in 2030.  

It is not easy (for me at least) to work out exactly what is said to have happened with the passports used by the group alleged to have murdered Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month.

Were they 'cloned' or fraudulent?

Let's put possible options on the table.

1  Real blank passports, misused:  in secure British government locations in the UK and overseas are piles of 'blank' passports in serial number order, waiting to be issued. Procedures are in place to check regularly that the stocks of blank passports match the lists of passports printed and despatched to each location to await issue. 

I have done some of these checks myself in Embassy strong-rooms. It would be relatively easy for a corrupt UK official to steal a few of these blanks to pass on to gangsters/KGB/Mossad, but the risk of detection would be very high since sooner or later it would be spotted that issuing numbers were out of sequence with stock-lists and production/despatch-lists.

2  Real passports of real people, misused: the killers could have managed to get hold of real, properly issued passports of real people and alter and then use them for their own purposes. This would have to be done very well for it not to be detected, although having observed for myself the meticulously microscopic and ingenious efforts of teenage boys to alter dob on ID cards to win under-age access to Warsaw nightclubs, that presumably is no problem. The original owners would have to be left with an almost perfect copy of their passports to avoid suspicion. Too complicated?

3  Fake passports of real people, original identities kept: the killers borrowed a number of real passports of real people, then copied and altered them for their own purposes but retained the purported identity of the original owners. If that was done in this case, why would the serial numbers be incorrect?

A day after Dubai police announced the names of the Irish suspects as Gail Folliard, Evan Dennings and Kevin Daveron, a spokesman for Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs said: "We are unable to identify any of those three individuals as being genuine Irish citizens.

"Ireland has issued no passports in those names."

The passport numbers had the wrong number of digits and did not contain letters as authentic passports do, he added.

4  Fake passports of real people, new identities: the killers took a number of real passports of real people, then copied and altered them for their own purposes but added new names and manipulated the photographs to create new identities.

Some combination of 1-4 above: maybe this was done for operational reasons (a hurried job, and/or the killers could not acquire enough passports in any one category and/or wanted to mix 'n' match to reduce the risk of detection and/or later muddy the waters).

Was the operation a rushed and bungled Mossad job but then deliberately presented as being rushed and bungled to point the finger of suspicion elsewhere?

These Middle East waters will swirl and churn for a few days, but then revert to their normal deeply muddy state:

Officials in Dubai have confirmed that the Gulf state is now considering rescinding the 11 international arrest warrants issued on Tuesday, including the six British citizens initially named as suspects ...

Police declined to comment today on reports that the two Palestinians being held in the emirate were extradited from Jordan last week and include a security official from the Palestinian group Fatah, Hamas’s fierce rival in the occupied territories. The Palestinian Authority has denied the report.

More on academic Amy Bishop who 'allegedly' starting firing at her colleagues in a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama, killing three:

A family source said Bishop, a mother of four children - the youngest a third-grade boy - was a far-left political extremist who was “obsessed” with President Obama to the point of being off-putting.

But Mercedes Paz, a Brookline biochemist who also oversaw Bishop’s work in 1993, described her as a friend and a likable woman.

A fascinating sub-plot (or maybe it IS the plot) in the Greece/Eurozone debacle is the role played by über-bankers Goldman Sachs, as bailed out by the US government. Whose people and former people pop up everywhere.

Baseline Scenario is hot on the case. It looks as if Mario Draghi's hopes of becoming ECB president are in steep decline. He has some searching questions to answer.

Will the last guinea pig on the Titanic please switch off the lights?

One of the very hardest things for a newly elected leader is to move into a new frame of mind - and give organisational expression to it.

Above all, how best to deploy the people who have slaved away to achieve victory and now expect a role in Power?

The problem is that running a government is completely different from running an election campaign. Will the people did such a fine job in the latter in fact be any good at the former?

And in ways which are impossible to explain to outsiders or even to insiders, it all starts and ends right at the very top. The tone of voice, the air of authority, the confidence and courtesy and wisdom of the people immediately around the Leader all combine to send positive signals through the government system as a whole.

Which also works the other way. Ill-temper, discourtesy, disorganisation, indecisiveness and so on at the very top spread downwards and outwards very fast.

My own classic example of this was when John Major visited Moscow as PM. He made a good personal impression when talking to people. But there was just no Authority. He did well at a press conference, but as he came back-stage afterwards his question to his team was a sort of uneasy "How was I?".

Not: "They nailed me on that one - kick the sorry asses of the people who wrote that brief, and let's get it right next time!"

In short there was a baffling lack of self-confidence right at the top, which led to the sense of doomed 'greyness' of the people around him - they could not be more bright and positive than the PM was. And that permeated the government as a whole.

Whereas with Tony Blair there was the opposite phenomenon, which also has been disastrous - a breezy instinct for charming spin, 'winging it' from the sofa without doing the work, getting away with just what is needed and no more, avoiding confrontation, politics by bubble.

And let's not mention Gordon Brown's calamitous team.

All of which leads us to various hard-edged looks in the USA at where President Obama has been going wrong. They do not make pretty reading.

He looks to have given too much power to a tiny core of trusted people whose ambition and vanity has got far out of control. Much to the detriment of good advice and steady policy-making:

... needed advice from a broader range of advisers "is getting twisted either in the rough-and-tumble of a team of rivals operation that is not working, or is being distorted by the Chicago political gang's tactical advice that is seducing Obama towards a course that has not only violated deals he made with those who voted him into office, but which is failing to hit any of the major strategic targets by which the administration will be historically measured."

Memo to Next Leader:

Start thinking now about how you are going to bring into your close, most trusted circles people you never may have met, but who will be vital to delivering the right results - and how you are going to nudge some of your current most trusted people away from the policy roles they so fervently expect.

Otherwise you'll just make a hash of a huge opportunity - as Obama is doing.

Lord Krebs from Jesus College Oxford lays it on the line about scientists' human frailties:

First, scientists, just like every other trade — bus drivers, lawyers and bricklayers — are a mix. Most are pretty average, a few are geniuses, some are a bit thick, and some dishonest.

Glad that's cleared up! Maybe the BBC can help us by putting its various scientists in the right category when they appear on TV or radio.

Scepticism is fine but science is not a free-for-all. Whether or not you accept the sceptics’ view should depend on careful weighing of the evidence.

Fair enough.

Is not the problem here a deep one of Method?

I was at Harvard when the Y2K scare was at its scariest. Various experts told us that computing is built on layer after layer of coding, some of which is now old and buried so deep in the programs that it is for all practical purposes undiscoverable.

Which was why the world was about to grind to a halt when the year 2000 dawned. Buried deep in our myriad computer programs was long-lost or inaccessible code which would not recognise the new year's 00 format, and this would cause everything to stop working.

Luckily we saw that one coming. And life went on.

So when different people try to assess what areas of activity of human activity are (a) causing significant climate changes where (b) such changes are evidently negative, and (c) advise us all on what to do about it, the issue stands or falls on the issue of measurement.

Voluminous quantities of data need to be gathered from all round the world for sustained periods, and then aggregated to try to see what trends and patterns might be found.

Of course it looks convincing when all that data is added to the computer and elegant hockey-stick graphs pop out from the printer.

But, crucially, the results are only as good as the assumptions factored in to the computer programs which have spewed them out, and the accuracy of the computer programs themselves in reflecting those assumptions in the ensuing calculations.

Small errors buried deep in assumptions may create an impression of trends stretching far into the future where this is just not so. And/or an impression of accuracy and precision about issues which is just not correct and fair.

Which is why the rigour of the scientific principles and outcomes described by Lord Krebs in fact can be tested not so much by other scientists who are experts in their field, but only by the geeks clever and able enough to confirm that the underlying data processing by the computers themselves has been done to tip-top accuracy.

Hence the work being done by Bishop Hill and others to explore that angle. Try this for size:

Now to get the station error, ε_i, the three error components are joined together by quadrature as follows:

Just as I expected.

Which is why the Climate Change argument is going nowhere, for better or worse, until not only the data but also the underlying computer coding is made available so that it can be independently checked.

We expect new drugs to have the most stringent tests before it is marketed. Not to mention new cars.

That same rigour has to be applied to all this Climate science. And the best if not only way to do that is via 100% transparency about data and programing alike.

Update: see also this excellent Guardian piece on this very subject, where Professor Darrel Ince is ruthless:

... if you are publishing research articles that use computer programs, if you want to claim that you are engaging in science, the programs are in your possession and you will not release them then I would not regard you as a scientist; I would also regard any papers based on the software as null and void.

Phew.

No good the house looking terrific if the foundations are rotten.

Here at The Monkey Cage is an interesting post on why so many countries which sign the Convention against Torture are themselves high on the list of practising torture.

Could they be ... hypocrites? Is it because they want to ingratiate themselves with the West?

Or is it rather to send a signal to their own people that they are even more evil than their hapless populations expected:

"See? Our depravity knows no limits. We're going to torture you more because we have signed the Convention, and we have signed the Convention because we're going to torture you more.

Tricky? Ha ha!

Now. Get back in line while I recharge this cattle-prodder..."

I'd be interested in Craig Murray's considered views on this conundrum, as he served in a country (Uzbekistan) where torture was horrendous and widespread. It exemplifies the problems we have in dealing with these places, not least at the UN where (apparently) we have to sit placidly as undemocratic countries lecture us on human rights.

And, yes, we can claim the moral high ground only if we deserve it.

But even if we do not always reach the loftiest pinnacles of the Moral High Ground, we usually sit a damn sight closer to them than those regimes who live in the deep dark Chasm of Brutality.

And enjoy the way the screams echo off the steep stone cliffs.

Following Swedish developments closely as one must, I found this story linking my team Tottenham to an individual example of Swedish bandy extremism.

And is some furtive ethnic cleansing busily under way in Malmo? 

It is always difficult to work out when something is just an idiotic if unpleasant episode of local and no wider significance, and when something is part of a wider, really worrying trend.

Partly because this is just not easy to prove anyway with scientific confidence even when all the facts are clear, as they never are.

And partly because each side of the argument will tend to play up evidence it likes and downplay evidence it does not like.

Not to mention media and politicians making whatever noise suits their immediate purposes.

So is anti-semitism on the rise in Sweden?

If so, is it nonetheless still a marginal and at worst nasty phenomenon?

How would we tell?