Blogoir: January

Ed Miliband, 'climate secretary', declares war on climate change sceptics:

"I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there," he said.

"We know there's a physical effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to higher temperatures, that's a question of physics; we know CO₂ concentrations are at their highest for 6,000 years; we know there are observed increases in temperatures; and we know there are observed effects that point to the existence of human-made climate change. That's what the vast majority of scientists tell us."

Mashed potatoes.

The whole point, as he must be assumed to know, is not that there are consequences of human activity on the planet, but rather how dealing with them over long time periods is sensibly to be costed. In other words, is it better to adapt as we go along, or impose vast new controls and costs now 'just in case'?

The game is up. As more and more heavy lumps of nonsense fall from the IPCC and associated parts of the climate industrial complex with dull thuds, more and more voters are going to opt for adaption rather than mitigation. Since, given the manifold uncertainties and ambiguities (and yes sheer dishonesties) in this business now emerging every day, that is the smart thing to do.

And lo, our deadly enemy the meaningless precautionary principle (PP) promptly rears its evil head:

"There are a whole variety of people who are sceptical, but who they are is less important than what they are saying, and what they are saying is profoundly dangerous," he said.

"Every­thing we know about life is that we should obey the precautionary principle; to take what the sceptics say seriously would be a profound risk."

Simply not true.

Why? Because he applies the PP when it suits him - and ignores it when it doesn't.

He has not costed the 'risks' of adverse impacts of the policies he proposes, and of countless other mass calamities which are foreseeable but whose likelihood is impossible sensibly to calculate, and then tried to weigh all that against the risks he chooses to champion.

Or as someone wrote a while back:

All this bureaucratic rubbish stemming from twisted versions of PP is part of a deep process of self-inflicted Stupidisation. What is scary is that it is like a malignant virus infecting the deepest parts of the operational public policy process in all sorts of unpredictable and unexpected and ultimately irrational ways.

Why? Because let's be honest. Of course we need to think about what we do. But in the process of weighing options and trying to choose a reasonable way forward, over-focus on PP tends to empower those with high-energy neurotic anxieties and/or bizarrely lurid busybody imaginations, and compels taxpayers to waste astonishing sums of money accordingly.

Whatever.

Let's just stop worrying about all these Marxist Milbandish imponderables and instead rely on the ineffable wisdom of Dr Rajenda Pachauri, Climate Guru Supreme, who has graced the planet with a novel containing lots of smutty bits.

“Sanjay saw a shapely dark-skinned girl lying on Vinay’s bed. He was overcome by a lust that he had never known before … He removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts.”

Enough to melt your glaciers, that one.

Via the excellent Browser, here is a significant and subtle article by Lawrence Lessig about how changing technology creates unfathomable complications and difficulties for sorting out legal rights to books and films made decades ago under very different circumstances.

The key point is that for films especially, the array of private copyright rights and other procedural issues needing to be dealt with if old films are to be revived is so complex that the films themselves risk decaying and being lost for lack of anyone to grip the issue.

For books the issue is more straightforward, although as Google's attempts to put vast numbers of books online show, still not without all sorts of pitfalls.

Nothing more to be said by me on the subject. Just read it, and ponder what might be done to hack through all the legal undergrowth to reach a fair (enough) outcome. Is something like this the answer?

... why should copyright owners not be permitted to agree to whatever complicated system of access they want? It’s their property, isn’t it?

Here we come back to Property 101. The law has always set limits on the freedom of property owners to allocate their property as they want. Families in Britain wanted to control how estates passed down the family line.

At a certain point, their wants became way too complicated. The response was rules--such as the Rule Against Perpetuities -- designed to enhance the efficiency of the market by limiting the freedom of property owners to place conditions on their property, thus making it possible for property to move more simply.

That is precisely the impulse I wish to recommend here: that we limit the freedom of lawyers to craft infinitely complicated agreements governing culture, so that access to our culture can be preserved...

Here in full gush is our friend Johann Hari, this time bewailing the end of democracy in the USA:

For more than a century, the US has slowly put some limits – too few, too feeble – on how much corporations can bribe, bully or intimidate politicians. On Tuesday, they were burned away in one whoosh... 

It is this corruption that has prevented Barack Obama from achieving anything substantial in his first year in office. How do you re-regulate the banks, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street? How do you launch a rapid transition away from oil and coal to wind and solar, if the fossil fuel industry owns Congress? How do you break with a grab-the-oil foreign policy if Big Oil provides the invitation that gets you into the party of American politics?

... Yet the corporations that caused this crisis are now being given yet more power. Bizarrely, the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are "persons", so they have the "right" to speak during elections.

But corporations are not people. Should they have the right to bear arms, or to vote? It would make as much sense. They are a legal fiction, invented by the state – and they can be fairly regulated to stop them devouring their creator.

Our hero, you recall, is the person who wrote a long review of Atlas Shrugged and got a key passage completely wrong. It seems that here again he has not done his minimal homework.

Mind you, in interpreting the Supreme Court's decision President Obama too (a lawyer withal) likewise erred on the side of inaccurate populist exaggeration in his SOTU speech, and has had to be corrected at Huffington Post no less:

There is "a century of law" restricting direct corporate contributions to candidates. Last week's decision didn't address that law.

While the logic of the opinion -- which says corporate speech is entitled to the same protection as individual speech -- calls into question the corporate contribution ban, it doesn't overturn it. And the Court has traditionally treated direct contributions differently from so-called "independent expenditures" -- ads that discuss candidates but financed by private parties without the candidate's help.

Those who oppose the Supreme Court's decision would make themselves a tad more credible if they acknowledged that the law the Court struck aside was oppressive and odious, and a threat to free speech as any normal person would understand it:

“Our argument in the case wasn’t complicated,” says Bossie. “It was about freedom, and it ended up hinging on a very simple question: If the FEC is comfortable banning political films, like Citizens United’s Hillary: The Movie, around election time, would it also be fine with banning political books financed by corporations? The Justice Department’s attorney answered yes, the government did have the power to prohibit the publication of a book. When they admitted that, everything changed.”

“I think that answer sent a chill through the Court,” says Bossie. “It was that moment that was a catalyst for us, and gave us the opportunity to win on much bigger constitutional grounds than we anticipated. It became apparent that the government believed that they could ban anything: movies, books, pamphlets, the Kindle, you name it. It was a shocking revelation.”

Roger Pilon at Cato:

Relax.  Half of our states, states like Virginia, have minimal campaign finance laws, and there’s no more corruption in those states than in states that strictly regulate.  And that’s because the real reason we have this campaign finance law is not, and never has been, to prevent corruption.  The dirty little secret — the real impetus for this law — is incumbency protection. 

Sounds plausible to me.

Noting this in passing I was struck by the title of the video link:

Nick Gillespie pwns Blond Health Nazi

What on earth is pwns? This.

Which takes one to the anarchic future of the English language, and maybe of others too.

From English Lit to English Leet.

The tragedy of getting old.

A friendly reader asks:

Thank you for producing such a thought-provoking and readable blog.

I thought you may be interested in this link to a press release from the Swedish MFA. They plan to close 6 Posts and open 10.

http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/12653/a/138250

Several of these post closures are in the EU. I would be interested in reading your view in the blog (if you have time) about their choices.

Do you think it is a good strategy to close EU posts or is it better to shrink them? Also now with the development of the European External Action Service, is it more important to have posts in EU capitals than outside the EU (not counting the US, China, etc)? 

Then a Member State can lobby in each EU capital to push for the EU to follow a foreign policy most likely to benefit that Member State's national interest.

Well.

It depends upon what each country believes its diplomacy is for.

In the UK's case, we are a major net contributor to the EU budget. Plus we have allowed all sorts of issues within the EU to be decided by 'qualified majority voting'. Which means that EU decisions we disagree with and which may cost us a lot of taxpayers' money to implement can be imposed on us by a majority vote.

So we have very good reasons to want to make sure that we have an effective diplomatic network around the EU, both (a) to work out what dire schemes are out there and (b) to lobby hard to get other governments to support us in blocking stupid measures intended to damage our competitiveness. See the heroic work by the Embassy in Warsaw to work with Poland to fend off the evil Working Time Directive.

This, by the way, is another reason why HMG Targets for the FCO as proclaimed by Brown/Miliband have been utterly malign.

It takes only one successful intervention by an Embassy in Europe to save the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds. Yet there is no way to make that calculation in the way the Brown/Treasury targets allocate the money to the FCO. Hence the FCO is now facing another round of heavy cuts, footling in overall terms but more than enough to create real risks to national interests. Madness.

We also have a strong diplomatic tradition far beyond Europe, which more than justifies itself in terms of giving the UK international impact and insight. The idea that we are 'punching above our weight' is annoying. Our collective British weight is substantial, and we should punch away, preferably below the belt now and again to show we mean it.

Meanwhile the EU External Action Service is creeping into the picture.

It is going to take a long time (say 10 years) for this new formation to acquire coherence and a clear role. Its own position within the EU system is still complex and not fully defined (eg what is it meant to be doing with and in eastern European countries covered by the Enlargement Commissioner?).

Yet slowly but surely it will take on some sort of shape on the ground. And member states diplomats will be seconded to it. Rumours suggest that a sizeable number of FCO staff have put their names forward for secondments, no doubt dismayed by the collapse of the FCO's morale and impressed by the higher salaries EAS offers.

Thus we have a perverse situation (or not, depending what you want). The EAS is deconstructing national diplomatic services in favour of some ambivalent European supranational formation. Taxpayers are seeing their national foreign services eroding for lack of funds, and this new organisation growing.

All of which rests on one profound Euro-collectivist premise: that in the EU 'national' foreign policies are on the whole a negative phenomenon.

So to answer (I hope) the questions.

Most EU member states' embassies in other EU countries these days are mainly symbolic or heavily focused on a tiny number of issues.

Only the larger member states' Embassies play a serious role in lobbying locally on foreign policy questions, since only the larger EU member states actually have foreign policies (ie positions matched to some resources for advancing them).

Those small/medium member states aspiring to wider diplomatic/political influence and impact beyond the EU lose little by scaling back their diplomatic presence in EU capitals. They just have to take their chances in Brussels with Voting; they can not deploy firepower of sufficient intensity to lobby much on internal EU issues in all those EU capitals.

Hence we see Sweden not unreasonably cutting back in EU Europe but redeploying in non-EU Europe and some places in Africa, where Swedish diplomacy can make a difference.

That would be unwise for the UK, as it would make us all the more vulnerable to fatuous EU decisions with dangerous implications for our national budget. Yet Brown/Beckett/Miliband have been busy for years doing just that.

One way to fend off Eurosceptics in the UK is to show that we almost always thwart the stupid aspects of EU integration, but that just can not be done by bickering between bureaucratic experts in capitals and last-minute haggling in Brussels alone.

You need a team of excellent energetic people (UK-based and Locals alike) on the ground too, to lobby for UK positions and to identify weak points in the positions and psychologies of others - just as I had in Warsaw.

Oh, and a government in Westminster which has not completely lost sight of common sense.

Anguished as he is by his belated discovery that FCO Legal Adviser Michael Wood had not 'stabbed him in the back' as per the foolish description in his book, Craig Murray slumps back into despair:

I felt that Michael had stabbed me in the back by refusing to back me in saying unequivocally that intelligence from torture was illegal.

I did not know that, exactly at that time, he was engaged in a heroic struggle to try to stop the war in Iraq on legal grounds, and that he had drawn the full fury of Blair and Straw. He could not afford to open a second front on extraordinary rendition.

I have been struggling ever since to come to terms with what I saw as his going along with torture. I misjudged him...

I am feeling so sad because different ways of trying to resist took us down different paths, and perhaps I am sad because I was harsher on some than they deserved.

Craig of course misjudged practically everyone else in the FCO too as he flailed against them in his book, but it may take him a while yet to grasp that his definition of honourable behaviour is not the only one out there.

Just to add that in his comment posted on my piece as linked above, Craig once again carefully avoids answering the question (my emphasis):

I don't understand the view that I am "misrepresenting" Michael when I have repeatedly published his letter in full and I recently published, as soon as the FCO released them, the minutes of the meeting at which he gave the advice.

HIs advice and what precisely it meant was discussed by me and by Prof Phillippe Sands before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights in very careful and measured terms.

I was and remain disappointed that Michael did not give me more support on the torture issue. I now know, which I did not at the time, that at that precise time (March 7 to 14 2003) Michael was under incredible pressure over his attempts to prevent an illegal war. He couldn't open a second front on extraordinary rendition.

To which one says, piffle.

Since the whole point of Craig's fight with the FCO at that point, namely March 2003, was nothing to do with extraordinary rendition. Rather it was all about the way he had been publicly attacking the Uzbek regime over its human rights abuses. The extraordinary rendition issue appears in his book only much later, namely p 362.

The core of Craig's case as put by him to the FCO at that point (and described in his book) was that the Uzbek regime was breaking international law and that HMG were breaking international law by using intelligence information from Uzbekistan which they had good reason to think had been extracted under torture.

This was the argument he put in a Top Secret telegram sent in late 2002 (Murder in Samarkand, p 138), namely that by 'obtaining' this intelligence on a regular basis HMG were 'undoubtedly' in breach of Article 4 of the UN Convention on Torture which banned 'complicity' in torture.

And this was the issue which was tackled head-on in Craig's disastrous (for him) meeting at the FCO with Michael Wood. Michael said that he did not agree with Craig: possessing or indeed using information obtained under torture did not amount to complicity under the Convention. However, Article 15 did rule out the use of such material in any legal proceedings ("except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made").

Craig in MiS records his dismay. Shock! Michael was not agreeing with some of his human rights lawyer friends!

Michael then wrote a minute to confirm the position in writing. This is the famous document so often cited by Craig on his site as evidence for HMG's evil-doing.

And, as previously noted, Michael is a good enough lawyer to have judged this point accurately. The House of Lords later upheld his view in a landmark judgement. The fact that Philippe Sands QC and Craig happen to think that the law in this area ought to be something else does not mean anything that matters.

All of this is absurdly described in MiS thus: "Torture by proxy for intelligence purposes was legal".

Simply. Not. True.

Craig now breezily brushes aside as 'casuistry' anything which spells out his obvious errors and inconsistencies, and keeps trying to cash in on his erstwhile junior Ambassador status to boost his claim to know what was 'really' going on.

Maybe his trivial failure not to let the truth stand in the way of a loud argument was one reason why he crashed from the FCO - and won no sympathy at all from senior colleagues who shared many of his reservations about the policy but maintained professional discipline.

All eyes on Tony Blair, now giving evidence.

A further couple of observations on the deep legal angles, drawing on my own conversations with someone very close to all this.

First, the legal arguments finally used by the Attorney General to justify the intervention (drawing on the implicit and explicit interpretation of various UN Security Council resolutions, including the negotiating history) are (I am assured) respectable and solid.

In other words, Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst did not serve themselves or us well by sniffily dismissing them when they gave evidence. Their blunt analysis of the justifications for military action did not do justice to a lot of real-life operational nuances, and struck an oddly absolutist tone in terms of what lawyers are properly meant to do (and often do do) in these situations.

Second, Elizabeth Wilmshurst won some nice populist praise for herself by saying when she closed her evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry that the process leading up to the Iraq intervention had been "lamentable".

This does not wash. She and Michael Wood were the process.

Michael Wood's statement to the Inquiry concludes (my emphasis) with some important words:

35. The lesson I would draw is that on matters such as this it is important that Ministers seek legal advice, where necessary from the Attorney General, in a timely manner. Where the use of force is under consideration, this probably means throughout the process of policy formation.

Basically, it is not up to the AG to give a view without being invited to do so. And it is not up to Ministers alone to seek such advice - the FCO Legal Advisers themselves are well placed to do just that.

In this case it is not clear from what Michael Wood said in his evidence just why the FCO lawyers, seeing a dangerous and problematic situation hurtling towards them, did not formally ask the AG for a view and insist that he give one at an early enough stage. Copying various memos to the AG's office is not the same as asking for a view.

Michael's own evidence - see the transcript at p 40 - is elusive on this vital point, and unfortunately the Inquiry did not drill down quite deep enough to find out what was going on between the key lawyers involved. 

Back to the Big Picture.

Here is Stephen Glover railing against assorted timid and self-serving mandarins:

Ms Wilmshurst's resignation caused tremors. Had Sir Michael gone too, and other senior servants followed suit, the dishonesty and manipulation of the Government would have been exposed.

I know, I know. Politicians are elected, civil servants are not. We can't have civil servants bringing down a government every time they disagree with it.

But if intelligence chiefs realised that Tony Blair was wilfully exaggerating the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and if Foreign Office mandarins knew the Government was exerting pressure so as to get the war declared legal, weren't they duty bound to bring such constitutional abuses to the notice of their fellow citizens?

Tendentious though his article of course is, it does hit some important issues at the heart of the ethics of public life in a democracy.

When does a hard decision tip over into becoming a 'constitutional abuse'? Who decides? When should civil servants closely involved in supporting a fairly elected government decide that enough is enough, and either resign or try to block a policy pursued by Ministers?

Maybe this is a no-brainer: when that policy looks likely to lead to a war which has at best uncertain legal cover?

But what about the wider aspects? Is it really so wrong to be part of a policy process which intervenes to topple a murderous leader who has killed and tortured on a world-class scale, and who has defied international law so determinedly for so long? William Shawcross:

Despite the continuing vicious attacks of suicide bombers, Iraq is now bravely inching towards a much more open society. Indeed, on many measures it is one of the freest countries in the Arab world.

Michael Wood's statement again:

36. Another issue is the strength of the legal case that should be required before the Government goes to war. Is a ‘reasonable’ legal case sufficient? A ‘respectable’ case? An ‘arguable’ case? Or should there be a higher degree of legal certainty? This is ultimately a policy question, and one that perhaps cannot be answered in the abstract.

Which is indeed why the evidence given by Michael/Elizabeth suggesting that in fact the issue was clear-cut against intervention is, ultimately, not satisfactory.

And why the claim that there was a constitutional abuse in this case is not as simple as its vociferous proponents say. Not to forget that both in the House of Commons and at the ballot-box the Blair policy was endorsed by clear majorities.

All of which said, would some sort of Cosmic Supreme Judge, invited in by Earth to give a view on these issues, look at the clever legal arguments used by Tony Blair and the AG and pronounce that they fall into the category of Nice Try - but not Enough?

Perhaps.

Perhaps too that Judge would go on to say that even though the carry-through of the policy was flawed, the moral case for ending the Saddam regime and giving Iraq some chance of a decent future was a powerful mitigating circumstance? 

In most Western countries, there aren’t enough working people engaged in genuine wealth creation to pay for a society organized on the human right to endlessly deferred adulthood—and, as Signor Casagrande discovered, eventually someone has to.

But, more to the point, a society in which it becomes the norm for 40-year-olds to climb the stairs every night to their childhood bedroom, the same one that once had the teddy-bear wallpaper and the Thomas the Tank Engine coverlet, will not merely be a land that fails to produce the innovators necessary to create such wealth, it will be a world that does not make men, or women, in any meaningful sense of those terms.

Who else but Mark Steyn on infantilised KIPPERS:

Functioning adulthood is that ever-shrinking space between adolescence and retirement.

It's almost as if on some vast instinctive level we are just finding it all too much and want to creep under the warm duvet so that the big bad world fades away.

Headlines pouring out over what Sir Michael Wood said this morning to the Chilcot Inquiry:

Straw rejected advice that Iraq invasion was 'unlawful'

Let me give you my potted view of this as a lawyer by training but not practice.

The various FCO and other documents (some formerly SECRET) now published on the Inquiry website go into this question with great clarity.

In one corner were Sir M Wood and other FCO Legal Advisers arguing that the issue was really quite simple, namely that the various familiar conditions available for using force under international law had not been met. See eg here.

And see too this heavyweight Wood memo pointing out the risks to Ministers, officials and soldiers of action under domestic civil and criminal law of the UK taking unlawful action at the international law level.

In the other corner was Jack Straw, showing a lively and close interest in the legal aspects of this, and no doubt behind him PM Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown. Their argument was more complex and subtle, but not trivial:

• that Iraq had been threatened by the UNSC with the most serious measures if it did comply with UN Security Council resolutions
• that it was clear that Iraq had not so complied, ie was in 'material (ie serious) breach of its international legal obligations
• that (crucially) it was implicit on the face of the relevant resolutions (and quite clear from the negotiating history) that in such circumstances military action against Iraq could follow lawfully without further UNSC resolutions
• but also that in the inevitable haggling this had been left deliberately 'ambiguous' in the key UNSC resolution, as the price paid by those favouring and opposing action against Iraq alike to get the resolution passed  
• in short, that there was a clear if perhaps not obvious line of legal authority justifying what the UK's duly elected leaders saw as the right policy

Heady stuff. It is just remarkable to see original documents of this frankness and high-level sensitivity made public in this way.

Do the enemies of democracy round the world look on all this in nervous amazement at the confident strength of our beliefs and principles?

Or do they lick their lips, (a) smirking that exercises such as this show that the UK has totally lost the plot, and (b) rejoicing that no future UK leader for a long time to come will dare take robust action against sickening dictatorships which defy international opinion and kill their own people for years on end?

Still, amidst all the furious debate, one happy ending.

Law is one thing. Justice is (sometimes) another.

Adam Jasser (Polish, Reuters journalist-turned-pundit, good egg) argues that the grim problems besetting Greece and its public finances could lead to the Eurozone getting even stronger:

In all the talk about the pain inflicted on countries in the Eurozone which fail to run their affairs sensibly it is overlooked that that pain is the WHOLE POINT.

Because there is no ready way to bail out profligate countries, and because a wide single multilingual/multicultural currency zone has stickiness in terms of the way people move about (ie it is quite unlike the USA), the threat of that horrible pain is what is meant to compel slack members to reform their ways.

Which is why Adam is dead right here:

The EU is therefore right to begin pondering how to enhance policy coordination and strengthen the community’s ability to fine tune individual economies. Convergence criteria will most likely have to evolve to include a limit on current account balances and an enforcement mechanism for sticking with the rules will have to be put in the hands of the Commission. 

But all of that falls short of what is really required. What the euro is clandestinely working towards (like a sleeper planted by the EU “federalists”) is a far-reaching unification of the social and economic models that today function in the EU.  The existence of variously efficient pension systems, labour market rules, business environments and tax regulations are the root cause of the imbalances inside the euro zone...

In short, the Euro will work properly only if national economic decision-making can be superseded by ruthless EU-level decision-making to 'fine-tune' a national economy if a country gets too far out of order.

Lots (lots) more harmonisation towards a 'federal' Europe, where Germany calls the ultimate shots.

Maybe some countries will think this is just too high a price to pay for 'integration', and either retreat gracefully from the Eurozone in due course or crash painfully out of it.

Either event could be quite a good outcome, paving the way for a quite new set of variable geometry relations between all EU member states and eg Turkey/Ukraine too, which, being based on experience of how such 'deep' integration works (and has to work) in practice, will be all the more acceptable to the various populations of our happy continent.

One of the pleasures of writing this website is that new e-friends appear, usually people who know all sorts of things I don't know.

Thus I am pleased to share with you this interesting contribution about Google/China and US/Switzerland as sent to me from a reader who closely follows IT security questions and knows how things work:

Google/China
An intelligence operation sophisticated enough to author successful targeted attacks on infrastructures of high tech companies is incapable of hiding its tracks.  Oh really?  Trying to sell the Chinese as "dumb" might work in the US, but I have an other angle of sight.  Big question, this one.
 
"You are hacking us so we want to stop censorship!"  Huh?  I can't quite connect the two..
 
Google is not doing well at all in China, but it can't just pull out without some sort of explanation (keep that in your head for a moment)
 
Google founders have announced they intend to sell shares.  News of failure to beat the competition in one of the biggest markets will affect the price of those shares.  Ah, how interesting.  A motive to camouflage item (3).  How?  Well..
 
Any company in China is likely to have a couple of insiders.  Of course, that makes it easy to "discover" them and start yelling about being hacked.  However, bizarrely nobody called the Chinese police.  But the screeching unleashed a couple of other things like statements that "China is never a safe place to do business or to keep things and IP safe" - which must have given Apple a shock as they have been using Chinese assembly and manufacturing for ages.  See the back of any iPhone..
 
Google was initially quite happy to go along with censorship.  What changed?  As for Human Rights, privacy is also a Human Right, yet Google is trying to ignore that in countries like Japan and Switzerland.
 
In my opinion, this whole storm was kicked up by Google to camouflage its flagging Chinese performance to keep share prices afloat - no news there, although I'm impressed by the sheer arrogance of Google of trying to force a whole sovereign nation into letting it do something that is disallowed by local law.  That is about as ambitious as an ant climbing an elephant's leg with rape in mind.  It was disappointing (though not surprising) that this resulted in politicians trying to ride the publicity, upfront Mrs Hilary Clinton who appears to have forgotten the global effort that has very large golf balls spread all over the world, the UK location of which is Menwith Hill.  Yes, Echelon, the SIGINT setup that the UK gets tiny snippets from if they ask nicely..  

Oh, and for spying on the locals the US appears to do better than the Chinese as well, as a recent report into FBI PATRIOT activities revealed on page 45 that in some cases the formal authorisation was .. a Post-It note.  It's not that I'm defending the Chinese, but a bit of honesty and level headedness would have gone a long way.  But that would not provided the cover for Google.  It could also have yielded the annoying observation that practically all Internet censorship is actually performed by US companies with US equipment - and we all know a US company needs to seek permission before it can supply high tech to China.  Oops..
 
Google are now claiming they want to stay, but not censor, knowing well that isn't going to happen.   I reckon it'll bumble along for another month, and then they will either "reach an agreement" (read: censorship is back) or they'll bail out, claiming " loss of trust" or something.  Most certainly not "we could push our competitor off the market".
 
US versus Switzerland
 
That other war, US vs Switzerland, is also heating up again. As the Swiss court recently came to the conclusion that handing bank client data to the US was illegal without specific claims ("John Doe" fishing expeditions are not permitted under Swiss law) it threw somewhat of a spanner into the "agreement" reached with the US (it was simply blackmail, but let's call it an "agreement").  A couple of interesting facts have since emerged:

-   it appears no details were handed over yet

-   the US "agreement" details a total number of 10'000 IRS cases for the terms to be satisfied.  As it so happens, a total of 14'700 have reported to the IRS, so if 10'000 of those were UBS, Switzerland could effectively tell the US it has delivered, and close shop as the voters want it to.  That the US simply ignored the existing agreements (appears to be a habit) has not gone down well with the population and has lead to US Citizens become virtual banking pariahs.  Most Swiss banks with sensible management were already pulling out of the US market, and have gratefully used the UBS affair to accelerate their risk reduction programmes.  It's even so bad that someone living and working in Switzerland but with a US passport has trouble keeping even a current account open - there are few banks left that allow it.
 
There is a very ugly side effect that the US hasn't quite "banked" on yet: Switzerland is where all the stable, "old" money goes, partly because it also has stable currency.  No Swiss banks in the US means no access to Swiss held funds for the US economy, and that will eventually hurt.  Not yet, I give it another year.  It will also probably not manage blackmailing Switzerland again, not only are law changes planned, but the new president of Switzerland, Doris Leuthard, is quite a different animal to Merz.  Under that good exterior is, amongst others, a high grade, Swiss precision steel spine, and she's a lawyer as well..
 
Fascinating what goes on. And what seems to be going on. And what goes on even though it seems not to be going on.

Craig Murray's vanity knows no bounds. His 'story' is soon to be dramatised on the BBC! If I can bear to listen I'll do so and give you a full and fair review.

Meanwhile he launches another misguided missile at the role of the government's Law Officers.

He appears to understand nothing about how it all works in practice, a surprising failing in someone self-proclaimed to have had a 'brilliant career'.

What I strongly object to is his renewed propagandistic traducing in that posting of Michael Wood, former FCO Legal Adviser.

Here is what I have posted on Craig's site (note: correcting three typos which I overlooked when posting the comment - my bad):

Craig,

You write:

"Sir Michael Wood has perhaps been best known to a wider public as the man that the FCO wheeled in to tell me that it was perfectly legal to obtain intelligence from torture, as long as somebody else did the torture."

It may indeed be the case that Michael has become known to 'a wider public' through your book. What is more than unfortunate is that in the book and here on this website you shamelessly and repeatedly misrepresent what he actually said to you.

In MiS (pp 160-164 in my copy) you described the events leading up to your meeting with Michael and Linda Duffield. You argued the case to them that, based on your research, it was illegal under the Convention to use or even possess material based on torture.

Michael told you that this was not the legal position, a view he subsequently put in writing. And, since as you say he is a masterful international lawyer, he was right. His view was later upheld by the House of Lords in a key decision you praise in the book (p. 367).

In the book you characterised what Michael said to you as "So there we had it. Torture by proxy for intelligence purposes was legal". This is a trivial misreading of Michael's minute and position, based on your complete misunderstanding of the law.

Now you repeat this nonsense again in the posting above:

"...it was perfectly legal to obtain intelligence from torture, as long as somebody else did the torture."

You time and again make great play of Michael's minute of 13 March 2003 as if it supports your position. It doesn't. Try reading it.

As for your wider point, you don't understand the way the AG's office works, as Jane18 patiently pointed out. It is reasonable for the government to have a central pool of top legal advice rather than rely solely on the legal advice from one department of state.

Craig is either dimmer than he claims to be or he is being dishonest. It is blindingly obvious that there are a great number of different questions (and answers) concerning the torture issue which he runs together as and when it suits him.

Thus, for example:

• is torture legal under international law?
• is it lawful for one government to act on information supplied by another government and suspected to have been extracted by torture?
• what sort of actions might fairly be described as being 'complicit in torture' committed by others?
• can evidence possibly extracted under torture be used in court? 

It is a great pity that anyone takes Craig seriously when he is unable to write accurately about these subjects.

To be clear. I do not think that the fact that he makes a number of strong policy points with considerable passion is enough.

Craig creates a considerable media noise and no doubt makes some money by claiming to derive validation from the fact that he lived up to the very highest professional ethics of senior civil servants and paid a price for doing so, unlike (he asserts) a large number of his former colleagues.

Fine. We all have to make tough choices, and reasonable people may come down on different sides.

But let's at least agree that those professional ethics are based on unrelenting accuracy and integrity, and an ability to identify (and act on) fine distinctions of logic and meaning.

In this new posting once again Craig falls well short of that simple standard. 

Update:  here is Michael Wood's statement to the Chilcot Inquiry which blows away everything Craig says about relations between the FCO and Attorney General - and describes in meticulous detail Michael's views on the (il)legality of the Iraq intervention. 

Some of you may have read my paper on the idea of Amazon Space. If not, please do so.

The simple idea is that in a world divided between large areas of lawfulness and diminishing but significant spaces defined by their unlawfulness, new doctrines are needed for protecting the networks from which all benefit.

Thus:

Although Amazon Space has an intrinsic strength arising from the breadth and depth of its own networked nature, it relies upon a real-life equipment (power-generators, communications cables, data storage computers) to function. Such facilities can be attacked by terrorists or saboteurs.

Who protects those facilities?

In principle it is for each state to protect those facilities sited on its own territory. But what if a state is too weak to do that, and/or allows terrorists and sophisticated criminals to use its territory as a base for plotting attacks on key Amazon Space installations?

If a country wants to enjoy the manifold benefits of belonging to Amazon Space, does it in turn have to accept an implicit obligation to take responsibility for defending Amazon Space pro-actively and vigorously against those who for whatever reason want to wreck it?

And if it is unable or unwilling to take the action needed to deal with such people, can it complain if other Amazon Space powers acting under a new version of the doctrine of collective self-defence step in to do that job instead?

Hence the emerging reliance on the technology of drones rather than full-scale invasions. We are moving away from the idea of all-out war to ruthless measures by remote control against system-threatening terrorist/criminal gangs where the local authorities are too weak to take meaningful action themselves.

Liberal voices are (of course) heard bewailing this trend as megalomaniac US military doctrine of 'Full Spectrum Dominance' – and the fantasy of absolute domination through technological supremacy that goes with it...

But how else to deal with terrorists exploiting the institutional weakness of Non-Amazon Space to plan from far away to use our technology to kill us, other than by using our technology to kill them first if possible?

This WSJ piece commends Hillary Clinton for looking hard at how IT ploys of different shapes and sizes might be used to promote pluralism and chip away at tyranny. Mrs Clinton also indirectly makes the point I have made:

"In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation's networks can be an attack on all."

Quite.

Mrs Clinton called for Three Internet Freedoms:

More on her speech here at the Technology Liberation Front:

... she’s right: Plenty of foreign government are still aggressively attempting to censor the Net and to repress digital technologies every second of the day. To put things in perspective, just yesterday, the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) reported that more than half a billion Internet users are being filtered worldwide.

And if you want a country-by-country synopsis of just how bad things are, check out the amazing report, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, which is compiled by several scholars involved in the ONI project.

Here from euobserver is a detailed account of the goings-on behind the EU scenes, as everyone tries to work out how the new EU External Action Service will be structured.

And who will get which jobs, since that will have a huge influence on the way it all works (or not) in practice, not to mention the opportunities for dispensing patronage.

Here is another euobserver article on the shape of the EU's future representation overseas.

Lo and behold, up my droll friend James Morrison has popp'd up as the head of Baroness Ashton's cabinet. She is in good hands.

Never underestimate the grinding unrelenting power of the EU machinery and the pooled wealth behind it. Key points to look out for as the discussions continue:

• where in all this fit member states and their diplomats
• how EU positions will be articulated at the UN
• what if any oversight and associated 'control' is grabbed by the European Parliament

Member states face a dilemma. The Lisbon Treaty strengthens their role in EU foreign policy at the coalface since it makes provision for member states diplomats to be seconded to EU missions.

But whom to send? The best, the worst, or the average?

Sending the best people takes them away from national foreign policy roles and boosts the long-term legitimacy of the EAS. Send the worst or the average - if others send the best - reduces the likely impact they are likely to have within EAS deliberations.

Most member states will want to cherry-pick, lobbying furiously for a certain number of key Ambassadorships and Deputies for their nationals as the price for getting the whole thing going. Within the member states there will be ruthless knifing as 'new' member states jostle for position against 'old' member states:

One thorny little bramble for Ms Ashton will be ensuring that new member states get a satisfactory share of senior appointments.

The EU Council and the commission, which will furnish two-thirds of EEAS personnel, are currently dominated by people from old member states. Out of the commission's 1,657 foreign relations officials, 117 are from the 12 countries that joined the union after 2004. Just one of them, Hungarian diplomat Janos Herman in the commission's Norway embassy, holds a top-level post.

"The Brussels mafia has made sure that our dirty moustaches are kept out of this," one Polish-origin EU official said.

And all this in turn will provoke intense sulking within the Commission as people who have dreamed of heading their own EU mission get trumped near the finishing line by smug member states diplomats keen to show that they are the real thing.

This is only the very start of a process which will last years if not decades. There are bound to be all sorts of difficulties working out the new structures, let alone doing anything with them.

Here in the UK we have the prosepct of regime change this year, so a Conservative government led by a team not exactly oozing Europhilia will need to look hard at what D Miliband has done in the twlight days of his rule and see if they want to unscramble any of it.

The Ever-Closer the Union, the Much Harder the property settlement if there is ever a Divorce?

Here via a reader is a neat glimpse at how every ten years for a hundred years the world has changed in quite unexpected new directions. Have a look.

It brings out just how difficult it is to be 'strategic'. The more so when there is a whirring positive feedback loop going on with Creativity - the cheaper the IT, the more people can do things, the more new processes get invented, the faster everything happens, the cheaper the IT gets ... and so on.

This means that within almost a matter of a few hundred weeks, the planet has brought in to the global means of production of ideas anything up to a billion people.

The transformative implications of this, for better or worse, quite outstrip the capacity of governments to plan ahead, since planning per se requires a lot of things to be relatively static or at least developing in a steady way, not exponentially.

Which is the real reason why the sort of cumbersome, bossy government structures as evolved in Europe and the 'West' are creaking at the seams. The sheer complexity of the task they now face is overwhelming them. Though admittedly the Brown Labour government here in the UK looks to be in a class of its own for sheer dysfunctionality.

As described eloquently in the fine book Seeing Like a State, a great deal of government activity has been centred on measurement.

Why? Because without measurement things can not be put in the countless arbitrary categories governments need for their own purposes, above all tracking down people to get money from them.

And once governments have set up measurement and categories, they also have a requirement to dish out government processes 'equally'. Hence ever-increasing standardisation eg of schools and so on - one-size-fits-all in the state sector, since anything else would be unfair.

Which sounds fine, but in fact is 100% incompatible with the innovation and creativity needed to cope with pell-mell Change.

So, in short, looking very far into the future is now next to impossible. But it is possible to identify policies and attitudes which look unwise, since instead of creating more flexibility they reduce it. 

Read this interesting Reason interview with John Mackey, who has built up a superb business through 'conscious capitalism' and who looks forward with optimism:

reason: How do you think the 21st century is going?

Mackey: Well, entrepreneurs tend to be very optimistic people, and I’m a very optimistic person. I never would have started a business if I wasn’t.

If you just watch the news at night or read reports on all the things that are going wrong, you can really become frightened with all the problems that are out there. I do think we have enormous challenges right now.

You’ve got to make a distinction between the short term and the long term, because I think things move in spirals, and if you look at a spiral, sometimes it loops back on itself. It’s kind of like it takes three steps forward and one step back. In some ways, I think we’re taking a step back right now, but I’ve got great hope that we’ll take three steps forward over the next several years.

… I like the quote by Michelangelo. He said, “Criticize through creating.” It’s easy to be a critic. It’s much harder to create something. I always want to encourage young people to take their passion for making the world a better place and channel it to help us create new solutions to our challenges.

I’ve devoted my life to trying to build a business that makes a difference in people’s lives and in the not-for-profit world, in ways that I think also serve our society and culture. So I’m optimistic, because I’ve seen how much progress we’ve made.

If we can just get people to become more conscious about what capitalism is, because I think capitalism is a tremendous force for positive change in the world, and take the collective human intelligence and creativity and begin to channel it in constructive ways, there’s really no limit to where humanity will be in the 21st century.

Spot on.

The tumultuous launch of ADRg Ambassadors gives way to a requirement to write an article for DIPLOMAT magazine about Diplomats and Mediation.

One interesting theme is 'neutrality'. Is it possible for any international mediator in a dispute or problem to be truly impartial, and does it matter if that is not achieved or achievable?

It is probably possible for diplomats to be adequately neutral for most practical purposes if they have no evident axe to grind in the dispute concerned. Hence small smart countries geographically removed from a problem can have an impressive impact - a classic modern example being the way Norway used diplomatic nimbleness to broker the Oslo Accords.

On the other hand, one of the hardest tasks facing a mediator is not to get personally 'involved'. Hence mediators who are seen as impartial (enough) on the substance themselves usually have reputations to win or lose, so they might end up over-pressing one or other of the parties to reach a settlement - itself a form of non-neutrality.

Is this a bad thing? Maybe not, when issues of war or peace are at stake. On the other hand, a party which feels that it has been coerced or bamboozled into a settlement against its better judgement or instincts may just not try to implement that settlement, so the much-praised deal falters anyway.

Then there are mediations where divisions between the mediators themselves start to affect the outcome. See this fascinating account of how a German, American and Russian team of senior diplomats tried to broker a deal between Kosovo and Serbia. The Kosovo/Serbia problem in effect became a new place for their other rivalries playing themselves out.

Another option is to outsource mediation efforts to non-diplomats, people who are skilled, modest and anonymous - people who derive their authority as mediators from really being detached from the politics of it all, and who look rather at the emotional and even spiritual factors at play.

Such as the Quakers, who have had a long and usually creditable record in trying to find common ground in some of the world's toughest hot-spots, relying on sophisticated 'impartial listening'.

One important part of their method lies in denying to themselves as far as possible any sense of satisfaction, one reason why career diplomats tend to have no understanding whatsoever of this sort of work - diplomats are impressed by their own cleverness, or at least are told to bring home some glory for their Minister:

If a conciliator believes in confidentiality, he or she must deny themself `many elements of ego satisfaction', maintains Mike Yarrow in his book, Quaker Experiences in International Conciliation. `It takes a certain amount of courage to intervene in a complicated, dangerous situation,' he continues. `To keep it up the conciliator needs some sense of satisfaction. All this can readily build up to a feeling that the individual is essential to the resolution of the conflict, and even that he or she has the solution. Such feelings are fatal to this kind of unofficial effort.'

Conclusion?

None, other than to point to the array of examples of mediating interventions which have made a difference, and the many more where despite heroic efforts by well meaning mediators to help the parties identify sensible outcomes, the problem just keeps dragging on. And all concerned lose out.

Perhaps this happens because, as we all know, issues are like Shrek the Ogre. They have layers:

Shrek:     Ogres are like onions.
Donkey:   They stink?
Shrek:      Yes. No.
Donkey:   Oh, they make you cry...
Shrek:      NO. Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. You get it? We both have layers.

And you have to be a superhuman mediator to be able to identify all those stinky tear-inducing layers, and then help the parties to deal with them simultaneously.

European Voice looks at the humiliation of the Eurozone if Greece has to go to the IMF for help with its uneconomic economy, and the different schemes being cooked up by other EU members to try to manage the problem:

There is mounting concern in Frankfurt, Brussels and in other eurozone capitals that, if the crisis is handled badly, contagion might spread from Greece to create financing difficulties for some other member countries of the eurozone, notably Spain, Portugal, Ireland and even Italy.

The discussions are complicated by the Maastricht treaty's “no bail-out” clause for eurozone members. The treaty prohibits the direct financing of public entities' deficits by national central banks or the European Central Bank.

But, according to an EU official, the “no bail-out” clause might be side-stepped if the crisis was dealt with inter-governmentally within the Eurogroup. The Eurogroup – the gathering of finance ministers of the eurozone – is now recognised as an official EU institution under the Lisbon treaty

It all boils down to a simple proposition. Someone has to lend Greece money on a significant scale, knowing that Greece needs this money because it has shown itself to be highly incompetent at running its own affairs.

So the lent money too will be at risk, even with 'conditions'. Who wants to subsidise the likelihood of Greece behaving responsibly, or not? Will EU taxpayers in those other member states which have run their affairs sensibly want to see their savings at risk in that part of the continent?

And what if Greece won't or just can't meet the promised conditions?

Quite interesting.

Here, by the way, is a banal example of a Greek Gift sacrifice in chess - where taking the proffered 'gift' leads to rapid disaster.

This week's Britblog Roundup is hosted by Matt Wardman.

Will we accept household electricity bills of £5000 per year? No.

And a link to a gushy piece about a new economic model, which seems to mean stifling innovation to get the wonders of a 'steady-state economy':

For example: if you hear someone proclaiming an innovation as great for productivity, ask questions (and if it means workers won’t spend 10 hours a day breaking rocks, great, but if it means a machine replaces a person doing a decent, proper job, ask why? then ask again).

What?

Where do you think the 'machine' came from? It came from other people doing decent proper jobs in inventing it and all the parts and thought that created it.

And the chances are that that machine is doing the tedious bits of a job, opening the way to allowing a human to have more time to focus on the less boring bits.

Much better to have all those people in wearying domestic service?

Mark Steyn has it:

Whenever aspiring writers ask me for advice, I usually tell 'em this:

Don't just write there, do something. Learn how to shingle a roof, or tap-dance, or raise sled dogs. Because if you don't do anything, you wind up like Obama and Fineman – men for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real.

America is becoming a bilingual society, divided between those who think a pickup is a rugged vehicle useful for transporting heavy-duty items from A to B, and those who think a pickup is coded racism.

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