Monthly Archives: June 2006

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

“in the tropical island of Cuba lies the detention camp that is seen by many around the world as America’s gulag”

Typical Matt Frei – light on facts, heavy on spin. Who are your “many around the world” Matt? Do you mean many BBC reporters around the world? Many Guardian readers around the world, many lefties around the world or what?

And what does it matter what these so-called ‘many’ think, when their alleged comparison is so fundamentally flawed? Unless of course you’re spinning us a line rather than giving us unvarnished facts in an impartial manner?

Do you Matt, have any idea what the Gulags were like? How many millions of people were detained in the Gulags? Over how many decades? How many died in the Gulags? Answers, for you Matt, according to Wikipedia, 18-20 million detained over four decades, with 1,606,748 deaths, not including “the more than 800,000 executions of ‘counterrevolutionaries’ during the period of the ‘Great Terror’, since they were mostly conducted outside the camp system” or the 390,000 plus peasants who died in labour camps.

Compare that with Guantanamo – a few hundred detainees, duration so far three to four years, health and welfare generally taken care of, with just a few deaths, none due to execution.

Do you know what you’re talking about Matt? It’s time for you to read some Solzhenitsyn before you go shooting your mouth off again. Sure, Guantanamo is an aberration in need of urgent resolution, but your unsubstantiated comparison of Guantanamo with the Soviet Gulags, based on nothing more than what you think ‘many people around the world’ (how conveniently anonymous) allegedly think is nothing but far-fetched, over the top, biased hyperbole. Plus ca change.

Hat tip to George (UPDATE and also to dumbcisco), who has pointed out this post from LGF: BBC Prisoner Sob Story Hides Terrorist Facts.

The post refers to this BBC story by Martin Patience, Palestinians back prisoner release call, featuring a Palestinian woman imprisoned by the Israelis. The BBC story simply says, “Mr Houdaly says his wife, Ataf, 44, headed a women’s organisation dedicated to providing health services for poor Palestinians.” LGF says:

Notice that Mr. Houdaly doesn’t say—and the BBC apparently doesn’t care—why his wife is imprisoned. They don’t even tell us her full name.

You have to search Google’s cache to find out who his wife really is, and why she’s in an Israeli jail, but it’s very probable that this man’s wife is an Islamic Jihad terrorist who planned to execute a suicide bombing by detonating a car bomb in Jerusalem in 1987, and was jailed for 10 years.

Charles Johnson of LGF then provides links.

Quite apart from the wife, what of the husband? The BBC story says,

Mr Houdaly knows more than most about imprisonment.

Apart from his wife, Mr Houdaly was himself jailed for 12 years for being a political organiser.

To me, that statement cries out for some supplementary questions. What sort of politics, exactly? Did your charge sheet actually say “being a political organiser”, Mr Houdaly? Did Mr Houdaly’s charge sheet actually say “being a political organiser”, Mr Israeli Government Spokesman?

UPDATE: I went looking myself. I found enough to convince me that the usual transcription of Mr Houdaly’s name is Walid al-Hodali. This article by Gideon Levy, in French, made me more sympathetic to both Mr and Mrs Hodali. It says that they had promised each other never again to get involved in the activities that got them into prison.

But what was he imprisoned for? Gideon Levy’s article is coy, diminishing my burst of sympathy. It only says, “Les années 1990-2002, Walid Hodali les a passées dans une prison israélienne, pour atteintes à la sécurité pendant la première Intifada.” That means “undermining security during the first Intifada.” I kept looking.

According to this link from the French language site of the Palestine Information Centre:

The authorities of the “Israeli” occupation freed a leader of Hamas after fifteen years of captivity.
June 24, 2005, 01:10

Ramallah – CPI

The “Israeli” occupation authorities have freed on Wednesday the leader of the Hamas movement Sheikh Sami Yousef Hussein, a resident of the Jalazon refugee camp in the village of Ramallah, after fifteen years in captivity.

The inhabitants of the camp organised a big party to receive the liberated Sheik at the entrance to the camp and brandished green banners and Palestinian flags.

Sheikh Sami was arrested on 4 February 1990, accused of being a member of the armed wing of Hamas and of having attempted to kidnap a soldier in order to exchange him for Palestinian prisoners, in cooperation with Sheikh Fuad Al-Hodali and his brother Walid.

Emphasis and translation mine. If Mr Hodali was himself a would-be kidnapper of an Israeli soldier, that is something I would expect to be told by the BBC when hearing about his feelings as the husband of a woman imprisoned by the Israelis – particularly when what prompted the story was the kidnapping of another Israeli soldier.

UPDATE: Google cache of same story in English here.

UPDATE: Gideon Levy article about Walid Hodali in English here.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

“Violence before diplomacy in Gaza”, says the BBC.

Violence moves faster than negotiation. Now that Israel has its tanks in Gaza, military force will drown out everything else until Prime Minister Ehud Olmert decides that his business there is done.

“Now that Israel has its tanks in Gaza…” Everything was just peachy before? Two Israeli soldiers were killed and one was kidnapped in a totally non-violent manner?

Standard stuff. But this next bit is just so weird.

Palestinians feel very uncomfortable about splits, and are always conscious of the pressure and power radiating from Israel.

Palestinians, you see, are like Counsellor Troi, only not with that dress.

Captain, I sense a great mass of … Israelis – the pressure – the power, radiating out – I can’t bear it…

• Two handfuls. First off, hat tip to USS Neverdock. Hat particularly tipped because I nearly got this one myself. On Tuesday morning I saw a story on Ceefax saying that demonstrations against rendition flights at Scottish airports have attracted “just a handful of protesters”. I was, I really was, going to do a quick post praising the BBC. We have often complained here that titchy demos get disproportionate coverage so long as they are for favoured BBC causes, and here was an example of a titchy demo for a favoured BBC cause being reported as titchy. Only when I looked again the story was different. I hadn’t written anything down, and, you know how it is, ordinary life intervened and the post never got done.

  However USS Neverdock followed the same story on the web, and has screenshots.

  Incidentally, 30 demonstrators at one airport and six at another is still titchy.

• “A life in power” indeed. An anonymous commenter writes:
  

  Beeb’s puff piece on Kenneth Kaunda:

  Kenneth Kaunda: A life in power

  A more balanced account from Wikipedia here:

  Kenneth Kuanda

  To the point.

• Max comments regarding this story: Israel soldier’s family wait for news .
  

  After misspelling the name of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit as ‘Shilat’ no less than seven times in the same article, the BBC’s Martin ‘I take cookery class lessons from terrorists’ Patience inserts a bit of agenda:

  “A mayor from a nearby Palestinian village paid a visit to the family to show his support.”

  Since there are no Palestinian villages nearby, one has to assume that Martin ‘Israeli drones would love to see what I can see’ Patience might refer to the Christian Arab village of Me’ilya (not sure if it’s spelled correctly in English) 2 kilometers down the road from Mitspe Hilla – where he’s ‘reporting’ from. For BBC reporters Arab Israeli citizens are Palestinians. Also, he doesn’t bother to identify this village by name; too difficult to spell I suppose.

  Then again I guess that for someone who writes that “Gilad’s older brother, a university student in the nearby city of Haifa [approx. 60 kilometers away]..” accuracy is not a priority.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

And make sure you do – lots of good stuff posted in the last 24 hours!

All over the blogs, differing views on who won.

I’m trying to imagine a John Pilger or Robert Fisk getting such an introduction.

“Ann Coulter, whose right-wing rants …” Paxo opened. Discussing her new book, of which he’d read one chapter, “Coulter argues – if that’s the right word …” then his first question, “I’ve read it (chapter 1) – does it get any better ?”

Paxman then asked “You also believe there is some sort of liberal hegemony in the media, do you ? … I just don’t see how this argument stacks up.”.

“No, you’re right – with the warm introduction like you just gave me – no – no liberal hegemony there …”

You would almost have thought he was blushing at that point. Make up your own mind – the video is at Youtube.

The BBC News search engine is a vital tool for analysis of BBC bias. How else could one find “your 99 search results for far-left” and compare against “your 1,329 search results for far-right” ?

Unfortunately the search engine ain’t very good. Worse, the ‘bog-standard’ search misses some results completely.

Eighteen months ago I wrote a post contrasting the media reporting of two murders – one by an Iraqi Kurdish refugee, one of an Iraqi Kurdish refugee.

When I wrote the original post, I could find no BBC report at all of the murder by the Iraqi. I searched using the vanilla engine for the victim’s name, Anthony Farrell and could find nothing. However I could find a result if I looked for the name of the murderer. The ‘vanilla’ engine, it turns out, will find “Anthony Farrell” in double-quotes (but not otherwise), but will find Ali Karim without quotes. The advanced engine finds both without quotes. Why ?

There’s a reason for asking. After the far-right BNP (far-right as opposed to the ‘nationalist’ Hamas) made gains in the Barking and Dagenham local council elections, some predicted a rise in racist incidents. Here’s a BBC report of such an attack, carried out on May 17th.

It was a disgusting attack, as are all such attacks on innocents, which the BBC were right to report. But it wasn’t the only violent incident in the Barking and Dagenham area that week. Six days later, on May 23rd, two men were left critically injured in a shooting in Parsloes Avenue, Dagenham.

There seems to be no report of the incident on BBC News. I’m not sure if they don’t think the story is worth reporting on, or if the search engine is so bad that I can’t find it.

UPDATE – an apology. Earlier in the post I described the death of Kalan Karim as ‘murder’. Of course the person who attacked and killed him without warning in Swansea was not at all a murderer, but was found guilty of manslaughter. His five years should be up around this time next year, given current sentencing discounts.

The BBC reports on the undermining of what it refers to as “the ‘so-called war on terror'” in this story which flowed from this one based on a New York Times Pulitzer-hunting, terrorist-helping sellout. [My opinion on the behavior of the NYT.] What the Beeb fails to point out in either online account is both the firm legal ground and the high degree of success of the SWIFT programme.

Here’s a slippery little paragraph used in both online stories to cast doubt on SWIFT’s legal standing without really having any supporting facts for this novel theory.(See SWIFT’s own statement on the story here and Treasury Secretary John Snow’s statement here.)

From the ‘angry Cheney’ piece:

Although there is no direct connection, the scheme has echoes of a recently revealed US surveillance programme in which millions of international and domestic phone calls and e-mails were monitored, correspondents say.

From the “US defends secret money tracking piece”:

Although there is no direct connection, the programme has echoes of a recently revealed US surveillance programme in which millions of international and domestic phone calls and e-mails were monitored, correspondents say.

They say that although the US government insists it acted on a firm legal footing, this programme is likely to elicit similar charges of enfringement of civil liberties.

We are not given the names of these ‘correspondents’. For all we know, they are 16 year-olds on MySpace. What the BBC could have told us, but didn’t, is that this programme successfully brought about the exposure and apprehension of real terrorists who had committed murder and/or were planning further massacres. Who are they? At least the New York Times reported it.

Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said. The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, “has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities,” Stuart Levey, an undersecretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview Thursday. The program is grounded in part on the president’s emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans’ records.

Some specifics on those apprehended:

Among the successes was the capture of a Qaeda operative, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort, several officials said. The Swift data identified a previously unknown figure in Southeast Asia who had financial dealings with a person suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda; that link helped locate Hambali in Thailand in 2003, they said.

In the United States, the program has provided financial data in investigations into possible domestic terrorist cells as well as inquiries of Islamic charities with suspected of having links to extremists, the officials said.

The data also helped identify a Brooklyn man who was convicted on terrorism-related charges last year, the officials said. The man, Uzair Paracha, who worked at a New York import business, aided a Qaeda operative in Pakistan by agreeing to launder $200,000 through a Karachi bank, prosecutors said.

Heather McDonald reports:

The Wall Street Journal adds that the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings were fruitfully investigated through the Swift initiative and that a facilitator of Iraqi terrorism has been apprehended because of it.

One might think that the UK would be served this bit of information about this matter from its ‘so-called national broadcaster’, but that would be asking a lot.

Hat tip: PowerLine, Hugh Hewitt and RealClearPolitics