Something to ponder over

We now have a Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer who not only expressed great sympathy and admiration for the IRA, on which he was called out by Nigel Dodds, DUP MP for Belfast North yesterday after the slightly idiotic attempt by the new Leader of the Opposition to turn PMQs into a phone-in, but he has expressed the view that he loathes capitalism and spends his time fomenting opposition to it and planning to destroy it.

So, I think it is time to look at a description of what that entails. But, first, Mr Dodds [you have to scroll down to read the different contributions]:

The plaques at the entrance door to this Chamber in memory of Airey Neave, Robert Bradford, Ian Gow and Sir Anthony Berry—serving Members of this House who were murdered by terrorists as they stood up for democracy and the British way of life—are a reminder of the savagery and brutality of terrorism, as are the gravestones and the headstones in Northern Ireland and right across this land. The Opposition Leader has appointed a shadow Chancellor who believes that terrorists should be honoured for their bravery. Will the Prime Minister join all of us, from all parts of this House, in denouncing that sentiment and standing with us on behalf of the innocent victims and for the bravery of our armed forces who stood against the terrorists?

Honourable Members and the Prime Minister, I am glad to say, did join him but as I did not watch PMQs I do not know whether the Labour Front Bench did. Still, as they say, never forget.

On to that hatred of capitalism. I happen to be reading a recent biography of Stalin (yes, yes, I know, a masochist of the first order) by Oleg Khlevniuk, translated by Nora Seligman Favora and published earlier this year by Yale University Press.

In his introductory chapter, Khlevniuk writes:

Underpinning Stalin's worldview was an extreme anti-capitalism. His hostility towards this system was unequivocal, and he rejected even the limited concessions that Lenin made in instituting the New Economic Plan (NEP). Stalin grudgingly allowed a few capitalist economic vehicles within the Soviet system, such as money, limited market relations, and personal properly.

After millions had died during the famine of 1932 - 1933, he agreed to allow peasants limited freedom to produce and sell outside the collective and state farm system. But to the end he believed that the concessions that had been forced on him by hard circumstances would soon be reversed and the socialist economy would be transformed into a money-free powerhouse where people would work as ordered by the state and receive in exchange the natural goods that the state decided they needed.

That, ladies and gentlemen, readers of this blog is what a man who is vehemently anti-capitalist really believes and wants to achieve.

Anniversary

Ten years since those transport bombs in London and we did try to remember. I was at a conference on Intellectual Property so was able to keep that one minute silence with other people. London Transport was going to keep it as were other organizations but I do not know whether the place did come to a complete standstill as it used to at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

I thought I'd go back to some of the blogs we wrote at the time and here is Richard (not yet the Boss) announcing what happened. As it happens I first heard what happened from someone in Germany who was calling to find out whether I was all right. I had not switched on the computer. After that I spent a great many hours trying to find out what was going on.

My first posting on the subject in which I made the same mistake everyone else made in assuming that there was a carefully planned co-ordinated attack. As it turned out the bombs were planted around King's Cross because that is where the perpetrators came into London. I am not too pleased with my later update but on the whole it can pass. My next update came on the following day about the situation in West London and I do happen to live in a very mixed area with many Muslims as neighbours and business owners.

Normal service had to be resumed until we had those luckily ineffective bombers on July 21 (one of them was in Shepherds Bush and police activity immediately after it brought the area to a standstill for several days) and there were a few postings on the subject related to the bombings. Here is Richard reminiscing about his childhood and comparing the Orthodox Jews among whom he, a goyim, was brought up with the Muslim communities in north London and the less than helpful part played by the overweening bureaucracy in the problem.

Well, naturally, I had to sound off on "those British values in full" here and here and the postings are not bad even though I say so myself. While we both carried on with writing on other matters (for example Richard here) by the end of July I became very tired with the mawkishness around me and the incompetence with which the aftermath of the bombings was being dealt with. In particular, I recall being attacked by all sorts of people for expressing doubts about police behaviour in the Stockwell shooting. Well, far it be from me to boast (moi?) but I and those of us who were unimpressed with the first, second and third stories were absolutely right. The whole affair was one of appalling incompetence and self-satisfaction and not one single head rolled.

Still we have muddled on with very few terrorist attacks for which we must praise our intelligence services whose success is, by definition, not known. As the saying goes, our chaps and chapesses have to get it right every time, theirs only once.

That is probably as much anniversary remembrance that I want to do and probably more than readers want to know about. I shall stop here. Normal service will resume.

An odd take on Ukrainian events

The Ukrainian situation at present is both complex and somewhat opaque, the latter meaning that it is not clear where any of it is going. The general opinion seems to be that Putin has won against the EU and the West in general though that requires some qualification.

In the first place, it is not entirely clear what an EU would have consisted of. Presumably, the initialling of the trade and closer co-operation agreement, which would have given very little to either side. Contrary to what many people seem to believe, membership of the EU was not and is not on offer.

Secondly, winning "hearts and minds" by a combination of a huge bribe that the EU could not possibly top and blackmail over energy supplies works in the short term but trouble is not simply brewing, it is there already. Those demonstrators in Kiyiv may not know exactly what they want or how they are going to achieve what they might think they want but they do know what they don't want and that is closer relations with Russia. The fact that there is a very large minority in Ukraine that makes up almost half the population who do want closer relations with Russia and are suspicious of the EU makes that country an unreliable ally for all, including Russia.

Thirdly, Ukraine is largely dysfunctional and the EU already has dysfunctional members. No more are needed. The problems need to be sorted out by the Ukrainians themselves with possible help from the West but that help would be limited. Of course, moving more definitely into Russia's orbit means that the country will remain dysfunctional but signing that agreement with the EU would not have made any difference from that point of view.

In other words, the whole situation is a mess and Putin's victory is Pyrrhic at best. Indeed, some people might say that it is time he started paying attention to what is going on in his own country, especially after the horrific double explosions of Volgograd that follow on a number of other explosions and terrorist acts throughout the year. (Whoever is responsible for what happened yesterday and today, they were still terrorist acts.)

Having said all that, I do find it slightly odd that a school of thought is developing that calls all this something of a diplomatic success for the EU. Andrew Rettman outlines the sequence of events, which ended in Yanukovich and the EU mutually discarding and reviling each other but, curiously, he also says:

The EU this year lost a battle for Ukraine, but nobody is laughing at its soft power any more.

More like sneering, I'd say. The one thing we can say for certain: neither in Ukraine nor anywhere else has EU soft power achieved anything in the last year (or any other year). That Ukrainians do not want to be in the orbit of President Putin's dysfunctional, lawless and bullying country is not much of an achievement for the EU as nothing very much seems to come out of that.

Meanwhile, Leonid Bershidsky speculates on the Bloomberg site as to why President Putin has been so laggardly in his response to the terrorist outrages in Volgograd when other heads of state and government managed to make statements of condolence and condemnation almost immediately. One imagines that when his statement is made it will be tough and full of nasty language. Also, if past experience is to go by, any suspects will be killed by the security services before they can get anywhere near a trial.

Back to reality

What with one thing and another, this blog has been neglected. (Stop cheering at the back.) Time to get back to reality. There is little more I can say at the moment about the developments in Boston except to be somewhat surprised at the national identity of the suspect. I am not one of those who thinks that Moslem means by definition a terrorist and the problems of North Caucasus are very different from the problems of the Middle East. There is a strong suspicion at the back of my mind that this story will have hitherto unknown ramifications.

Furthermore, I wonder how Americans, who are more sensitive to liberty and natural rights as well as the need to oppose overweening government action will feel when the initial celebration is over, at the thought that one of their cities (and not just any one but Boston) was put under curfew by what looked like an occupying force but was, in fact, their own police, SWAT and so on, in heavy armour, riding heavy armoured cars. Is this really what America has come to? Not even our over-reacting police have done that. And in Israel, a country that is more used to terrorism than Britain, let alone the US, attitudes tend to be very different as this article explains.

In the end, as we know, the younger Tsarnayev was caught after the forces of law and order had almost given up, lifted the curfew and one home owner decided to inspect her boat that was under a tarpaulin in the back garden. Or so it seems at the moment. All too many of the stories through that night and day have turned out to be untrue, either accidentally or deliberately misleading. Incidentally, I was amused by this, a salutary warning to all of us who think that the internet, blogosphere, social media and twitterdom are superior to old-fashioned methods of communication and enquiry. Internet detectives got it very wrong, misled the investigators and caused trouble to innocent people. Almost like real journalists, in fact.

As soon as I raised the subject with some American friends I was told that there is a growing discussion about that shut-down or lock-down or, as I prefer to call it, curfew. Here, for instance. it's not so much Megan McArdle's discussion that is of interest but the comments, many of whom show real unhappiness with what had happened.

This is priceless. First it puts what happened into some perspective, then it points out who actually found the hiding fugitive while the police managed to miss fairly obvious clues, and, finally, there is the interesting piece of information that not all of Boston or, even, Watertown was locked down.

But the Boston police didn't shut down an entire city. They shut down an entire city except for the donut shops.

Here is the story on Boston.com.

On block after block of the Boston’s Financial District and Downtown Crossing, Starbucks shops went dark as the city locked down, spurred by a manhunt for the second marathon bombing suspect. Dunkin’ Donuts stayed open. Law enforcement asked the chain to keep some restaurants open in locked-down communities to provide hot coffee and food to police and other emergency workers, including in Watertown, the focus of the search for the bombing suspect. Dunkin’ is providing its products to them for free.

One would not want the police and others to go without hot coffee and their favourite sugary snack but does this mean that the danger was not quite as bad as they made out or that the lives of the Dunkin Donut shops were expendable?

The comments and debate that follow Clark's posting on Popehat are of great interest.

That having not been solved (discussions will go on for a while, especially when the cost of the whole operation, including lost business will be published) we can move on to another problem. It seems that Dzhokhar Tsanayev will not be given the usual Miranda warning (analogous to the warning the police are supposed to give here when arresting a suspect) before being questioned by the FBI, whenever that may happen as we do not know what state he is in. This is in line with changes that were made a couple of years ago in the investigation of terror suspects, as analyzed in this article at the time.

A good many people are unhappy. Miranda warnings, they think, are essential if the US is to preserve its own legal and constitutional system. Otherwise, the terrorists might be said to have won at least up to a point. Emily Bazelon's piece on Slate.com sums up the problems.

There is one specific circumstance in which it makes sense to hold off on Miranda. It’s exactly what the name of the exception suggests. The police can interrogate a suspect without offering him the benefit of Miranda if he could have information that’s of urgent concern for public safety. That may or may not be the case with Tsarnaev. The problem is that Attorney General Eric Holder has stretched the law beyond that scenario. And that should trouble anyone who worries about the police railroading suspects, which can end in false confessions. No matter how unsympathetic accused terrorists are, the precedents the government sets for them matter outside the easy context of questioning them. When the law gets bent out of shape for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it’s easier to bend out of shape for the rest of us.

Again, the discussion is of some interest. Astonishingly so, for someone who is used to the inanities of people who comment on newspaper columns.

Errm, I was going to write about the latest adventure of the EU Foreign Policy Supremo but seem to have spent too much time on the aftermath of the Boston affair. Tomorrow then.

Horrific news from Boston

Everything is still unclear. It was the Boston marathon and it is Patriot's Day. Not sure whether any of that gives indication of who might be responsible. In the meantime, National Review Online and Hot Air give good running  updates.

Max Boot and his book

This lunchtime I attended a meeting organized by the Henry Jackson Society at which the noted American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian, Max Boot, gave a presentation of his latest book, Invisible Armies, a history of guerrilla warfare that includes insurgency and terrorism as well as a discussion of how governments and armies have dealt with it in the past and might want to deal with it in the present and future.

Judging by this, the book has had a tremendous response in the States and it looks absolutely fascinating though long. I suppose it is a long and complicated subject. While I fully intend to read the book at some stage, I have not done so. In fact, I have no idea whether anybody is intending to publish it in Britain though the author is busy promoting it this week and next. Therefore, my comments are predicated on what I heard at the presentation, much of which was absolutely fascinating and I found myself nodding in agreement.

In particular, I agree with Mr Boot's insistence that both the insurrectionists and their opponents need to master the three 'p's: politics, propaganda and public opinion. While the Romans put down any insurrection with exemplary ruthlessness, the British in North America at the end of the eighteenth century, found themselves defeated because public opinion at home had turned against the war. In fact, they had also been defeated militarily but that would not have mattered so much if Lord North's government could muster support for a continuation of the war and greater resources being pushed in.

Interestingly, Mr Boot did not use this argument in a later discussion about Vietnam (raised by someone in the audience) though there the US had actually won militarily but found itself the defeated side as a result of public opinion and proganda back home.

Where I have to disagree with Mr Boot is his assertion, repeated several times, that the new kind of insurgency and terrorism that involved mass propaganda was not possible before the early nineteenth century (apart from the American War of Independence, presumably) because of the technology of communication as well as of irregular warfare. To be fair, he may not say this in the book. What, I thought to myself, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time of insurrection and terrorism for ideas that were not rooted in nationalism necessarily and also a time of an intensive propaganda war?

Since 1945, Mr Boot said, about forty per cent of insurgencies have been successful but, of course, that still means that sixty per cent were not. In his opinion, reasonably enough, insurgencies were successful if the government in question was already unpopular and lacked legitimacy in people's eyes. Castro and Guevara were successful against Batista's government but Guevara could not export that to other countries, such as Bolivia, where to government was reasonably popular, reasonably legitimate and reasonably reformist. End of Guevara. Unfortunately, that does not explain while the hardly legitimate and hardly popular Castro government has survived all this time. Possibly because the answer might not fit with Mr Boot's other point and that is the likelihood of a government being successful against insurgencies and terrorists if it takes the trouble to demonstrate its legitimacy and ability to bring the people on side (if only temporarily).

As two case studies, he compared the ferocious behaviour of the French paras in Algiers to the far more nuanced behaviour of the British in Malaya under Sir Harold Briggs and Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson. The British did, indeed, develop a very good multi-faceted plan and dealt with the emergency far better than the French did with the Algerian insurgency, which ended with a comprehensive French defeat both militarily and, more importantly, with regards to public opinion. Of course, the British had two advantages: the Communist insurrectionists in Malaya did not have all that much public support and based their strategy on fear and, perhaps more importantly, the country was far away and not much was known at home about what was going on.

Which brings me to another civil war and insurgencythat was fought for about ten years after the ending of the Second World War, in the Baltic States, parts of Western Ukraine and even, for a shorter period, in Poland. Nowhere in that area was the new government seen as legitimate and after the first post-liberation/occupation period made no particular efforts to bring the people on side. Yet every insurgency was put down, often because of theparticipants' mistakes but even more often because of the untramelled brutality of the official forces. What does that tell us and can that be discussed in the same way as the French behaviour in Algiers and British in Malaya when we are looking to the future?

Outrageous

Here is a developed country with a long history of imperial expansion and subsequent intervention in other countries, particularly if they are politically and militarily weaker using the excuse of some terrorist organization to go into a poorer country that might conceivably useful from the point of view of oil production. No UN vote to authorize them. No proof presented that the terrorist organization offers a direct threat to the developed country. No care taken about the possible spread of hostilities and destabilization of other countries, which promptly hapens. This is known as old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy. Surely we have moved beyond it? The EU, for example, does not believe in such actions but prefers soft power and negotiations. The EU is about to raise the issue in the UN and through various media outlets with France as the lead protester.

Uh, hang on. This is France we are talking about and the EU is fully supportive of its action in Mali with the UK and the USA providing logistical support and Germany mulling over similar actions. Well, well. And the media are apparently very happy with it, though clearly the military action is going to be longer and harder with greater costs than envisaged and equally clearly the destabilization and terrorist actions promised over Iraq are actually happening over Mali.

Now what?

So where are we?

First Al-Jazeera, quoting Reuters and before that the Algerian state TV, then the BBC reported that the siege in Algeria is over with appalling results.

At least 30 hostages and 11 members of an al-Qaeda-affiliated group were killed when Algerian forces stormed a desert gas plant to free the captives, Reuters news agency has quoted an Algerian security source as saying.

Eight Algerians and seven foreigners, including two British, two Japanese and a French national, were among the dead, the source said.

Algerian state television reported earlier that four foreigners had been killed after the end of the operation was announced late on Thursday.

Communication Minister Mohamed Said said troops had been forced to act after talks with the kidnappers failed.

He said many fighters had been killed in the operation at the In Amenas gas field.

Earlier, a spokesman for the group holding the hostages said 34 of the captives had been killed along with 15 kidnappers as a government helicopter attacked a convoy transporting hostages and their captors.

Somebody asked me on another forum whether the Algerian security services were worse than Spetznaz. They don't seem to have killed as many hostages as Spetznaz did in the theatre siege in Moscow and in the school in Beslan so, perhaps, not.

The BBC gives the older numbers of victims but points out that the site is still being searched whether for victims or militants is not clear. In fact, nothing is clear. The government is awaiting precise information about the fate of the British hostages.

An earlier piece in the Financial Times said that

UK officials said they were not informed about the operation before it was launched. David Cameron, UK prime minister, postponed a long-awaited speech on Britain’s relationship with Europe, describing the crisis in Algeria a “difficult, dangerous and potentially very bad situation”.

The implication is that they are not best pleased either as the operation does not seem to have been particularly well planned or carried out. In the meantime, what of THAT speech? Can the Prime Minister not make it in London?

Just a reminder

Things are happening out there in the big bad world. Bad things. And article in the Wall Street Journal about the Libya debacle says quite firmly: the more we learn about Benghazi the more it looks like a gross security failure. Indeed, it does. What with that and things looking nasty between China and Japan, it is hard to find our own party conferences in the slightest bit interesting.

It wasn't the film, after all

For days people who know about the Middle East, including the Libyan President have been saying it: those attacks on 9/11 and in the subsequent couple of days may have used that wretched film that nobody has seen but were actually co-ordinated terrorist attacks.

No, no, no, said the State Department and other spokespersons for the Administration. It was that terrible provocative film and we shall lean on Google to withdraw it.

Well, what do you know? Apparently these were terrorist attacks and the State Department has now admitted it. Let us be thankful for small mercies.

UPDATE: Ex-Gitmo detainee is reported to have been involved in the attack. Oh surely not.

More on the Bulgarian terrorist explosion

We now have a final figure of those killed: five Israelis, the Bulgarian bus driver and one terrorist. The last one has been named by the Bulgarian media as Mehdi Ghezali, though when this went to press there was no independent confirmation. The story came from somewhere, though.

Ghezali was reportedly a Swedish citizen, with Algerian and Finnish origins. He had been held at the US’s Guantanamo Bay detainment camp on Cuba from 2002 to 2004, having previously studied at a Muslim religious school and mosque in Britain, and traveled to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Following a lobbying effort by Swedish prime minister Göran Persson, Guantanamo authorities recommended Ghezali be transferred to another country for continued detainment, and he was handed over to Swedish authorities in 2004.

The Swedish government did not press charges. He was also reportedly among 12 foreigners captured trying to cross into Afghanistan in 2009.

Covering all bases here.

More information here.

Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali was born in Stockholm in 1979. He is the son of an Algerian immigrant and a Finnish woman. He finished secondary studies in 1999 and trained as a welder.

Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali then he traveled to Portugal, supposedly to pursue a career as a Football player. Ghezali was apprehended by the Portuguese Police in Algarve, on 07/31/1999, for a suspected bank robbery and a jewelry theft. Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali and his partner were sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment, but were released early. Ghezali was released from prison on 06/12/2000, after having spent 10 months in a Portuguese prison, and returned to Sweden (his father claimed that Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali went to Algeria to serve in the Algerian Army).

Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali then traveled to Medina, Saudi Arabia, to study at the university. However, he was not accepted and returned to Sweden in 04/2001 for a brief period before travelling to London where he studied at the Madrasa of the Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad. He then travelled to Pakistan in the summer of 2001 in order to study at one of the Madrasas situated there. After failing to gain acceptance into any of the Madrasas he then travelled to Afghanistan, where he according to his own statements stayed with a family in Jalalabad.

You can also see him on the video if you scroll down. We are assuming this is the right guy.

The UN is consistent

UN Watch points out that official reaction from SecGen Ban Ki-moon to the terrorist attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria (not forgetting the Bulgarian bus driver who was killed) has not been adequate but still better than that of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, who has said .... nothing at all.

What are we to make of this?

RIANovosti (RIAN) and other outlets report that

Norway’s twin terror suspect Anders Behring Breivik trained at a secret paramilitary field camp in Belarus earlier this year, a Belarusian opposition politician said on Thursday, citing security sources.

The politician is Mikhail Reshetnikov, the head of the opposition Belarusian Party of Patriots and he gave his information to Gazeta.ru.

Reshetnikov also claimed Breivik had participated in “sabotage-terrorism drills” under a former Belarusian special service officer and that he had used a fake passport to enter Belarus.

“His codename in Belarus’s KGB was Viking,” he added. “Rumors say he also had a girlfriend in Belarus.”

“The theory that Belarus’ special forces were involved in training Anders Breivik seems, of course, far-fetched,” political expert Viktor Demidov was quoted by Gazeta.ru as saying.

“On the other hand, [Belarusian] President Alexander Lukashenko’s friendship with Muammar Gaddafi is no secret - neither is his fondness for Adolf Hitler.”

Norway is taking part in NATO operations in Libya and Gaddafi has threatened attacks against Europe.

If true or even half-true, this puts a slightly different perspective on the shooting and bombing. As Viktor Demidov points out, and as this blogger immediately recalled, Lee Harvey Oswald had also spent time in Minsk. [Here is the article in Russian.]

Pontification will follow

Every now and then I decide to take time off the internet and, indeed, my computer, fond of it though I am. I try to have a life though some people might say with very little success. This means that I am possibly the only person who has not pontificated on the events in Norway and Amy Winehouse's death. The former will follow as soon as I have read some of the latest comments on the subject (though that might be counter-productive) and on the latter I can only say that the death of a 27 year old is always a tragedy even when it is the outcome of her own behaviour. This was the destruction of a genuine talent by internal demons and the subsequent destruction of a life. However, I have no doubt that the media will manage to turn it into a circus and thus erase the sadness one feels. And that really is all I have to say on the subject.

The latest news from Norway is that the custody hearing is to be conducted in camera. Personally, I think this is a mistake. Anders Behring Breivik, the accused, wants to tell the world why he did what he did and the world ought to know. The world is not likely to sympathize with him, no matter what he says, and silencing him will not serve any purpose. I foresee many conspiracy theories being hatched and many more calls for strict control of the internet. Let the man speak.

Moving away from those two tragedies towards another one that has its own funny moments,

Moody's cut Greece's credit rating further into junk territory on Monday and said it was almost certain to slap a default tag on its debt as a result of a new EU rescue package.

It was the second rating agency to warn of a default after euro zone leaders and banks agreed last week that the private sector would shoulder part of the burden of a rescue deal that offers Greece more cash and easier loan terms to keep it afloat and avoid further contagion.

In the long term, this saga, as most of us know, will be of far greater importance.

One man arrested

As readers of this blog have undoubtedly seen one man has been arrested in Norway in connection with both the bomb attack and the shooting spree at the youth camp. An acquaintance who lives in Oslo, is safe but badly shaken, seems to know no more than we do here, which is understandable at this stage.

The suspect is reported by local media to have had links with right-wing extremists. He has been named as Anders Behring Breivik. Police searched his Oslo apartment overnight.

The BBC's Richard Galpin, near the island, says that Norway has had problems with neo-Nazi groups in the past but the assumption was that such groups had been largely eliminated and did not pose a significant threat.

Police say they are investigating whether the attacks were the work of one man or whether he had help.

For what it is worth, I am finding it hard to believe that one man could be responsible for both attacks without any help at all.

From Norway

The Norwegian police think the two attacks are linked. The PM was supposed to attend the youth camp today. Whether that has anything to do with the timing is not clear. The Telegraph has a timeline and the Global Jihad terror group has claimed responsibility.

The BBC says that it has been confirmed that the gunman has been arrested and that he is Norwegian, whatever that might mean in the circumstances.

Norway's Justice Minister says that his information is that the arrested man is Norwegian but he (the Minister) does not know much else about him (the gunman). Reuters also points out that at present it is hard to tell exactly who is responsible for either or both the attacks, with pointers to both Islamists and possible right-wing extremists though there are claims by extremists that this is a "warning" to Norway and other European countries.

What I said then

Here is my posting on EUReferendum on July 7, 2005.

Mind you, I was wrong to say that the bombs were carefully co-ordinated to cause maximum mayhem. As it turned out, they were planted where they were because the perpetrators came into London at King's Cross and spread out from there without ever understanding fully where they were with regards to other parts of the city. But that is a detail.

July 7, 2005

Today's biggest news (if true)

President Obama announces the death of Osama bin Laden.

In a dramatic late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A. operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had eluded them for nearly a decade. American officials said Bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea.

If true, this is the most important piece of news that the President could announce but, I have no doubt, questions will still be asked. And let us not forget, there is a presidential election coming up next year. Potential Republican candidates will have to play this one very carefully.

Of course, by now bin Laden's life and death are little more than symbolic, Al-Qaeda having long ago evolved away from him. But symbols matter.

ADDENDUM: An interesting analysis about what might happen if the news is definitely true (and no conspiracy theorist is likely to accept it as that) and how it will play out in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

His death also means that the Pakistani military-jihadi complex gave him up. This will allow Barack Obama to declare victory and pull US troops out of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pakistani army can then orchestrate an post-US dispensation wherein its proxies first share power with the Karzai regime. And then, sometime in the near future, take over power.

Well, it is one scenario.

Just shows what propaganda can achieve

It is now an accepted geopolitical theory that the West, particularly the United States, wages war on Muslims. How that squares with the opprobrium flung at the West, particularly the United States, for intervening after the European countries failed miserably in the war of Yugoslav disintegration, is anybody's guess. However, it would appear that some Kosovan Albanians know as little history as the western media does. How else can one explain the fact that the murder of two American soldiers in Frankfurt and the wounding of two others, was carried out by a Kosovan Albanian?