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Auld Lang Syne

My local remainder/discount bookshop had a “sale” recently. That turned out to mean that they had a handful of books at 99p each instead of the usual £3.99 upwards. One was a complete works of Robert Burns (650pp, hardback). Having watched with interest the crowds along the Thames humming and fluffing their way through Auld Lang Syne after the New Year’s Eve midnight fireworks, I thought I would risk 99p for a copy. Bizarrely, the book has neither index nor alphabetical table of contents, so it took a while to find, but here it is:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind!
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne!

Chorus:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne,

And surely ye’ll be your pint stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

For auld etc

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pou’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit
Sin’ auld lang syne.

For auld etc

We twa hae paidl’d in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin’ auld lang syne.

For auld etc

And there’s a hand, my trusty fere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak’ a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.

For auld etc

Now all I have to do is find out what it means. Actually, that is a little unfair, because the book does have a 20 page glossary at the end. eg Auld, old; Syne, since, then; Lang, long. I guessed those, but it is comforting to find them.

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2012 01 18 John Scholes Poetry Comments (2) Permalink

When Mitt Romney Came to Town

This is based on the attack ad that sank Romney when he ran against Ted Kennedy in the 1994 Senate election. The new version, apparently starring the same cast of heart-broken ordinary citizens whose lives were allegedly destroyed by Romney as Gordon Gekko incarnate, has now been remade and re-released by a SuperPAC loyal to Newt Gingrich, courtesy of a $5M donation from Sheldon Adelson. The last Forbes rich list ranked Adelson as the 8th wealthiest American at $23 billion, mainly because of his holding in Las Vegas Sands Corp, which operates the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino:

This line of attack, coming from a leading Republican candidate, surprised a fair number of people, since it is essentially an attack on capitalism. The detail does not seem to stand up to close analysis. The Washington Post ran a lengthy article on it last Friday.

In the film, three former employees of UniMac, which makes commercial washing machines, appear to suggest that quality went down under Bain Capital’s management and that a plant in Marianna, Fla., was closed because of Romney’s actions. But the chronology is all jumbled. Bain Capital bought the business from Raytheon in 1998, and Romney left Bain a year later to run the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. In 2005, Bain sold UniMac (also called Alliance Laundry) to a Canadian entity known as Teachers’ Private Capital. The factory was moved from Marianna to Ripon, Wisc., in 2006, after Bain’s involvement ended …
In fact, Mike Baxley, who was interviewed for the film, said that he and his partner had “absolutely no idea” that the interviews were for a film about Romney and Bain. He said they thought they were being interviewed for a documentary about the factory closing. “They said they wanted to know what it was like when the factory closed down,” he said …
The [Bankruptcy of DDi] segment tries to tie Romney to Wall Street games-playing by focusing on allegations that Lehman Brothers pumped up the stock of DDi, allowing Bain Capital to sell its shares for big gains, even while an Lehman analyst had misgivings about the Orange County electronics maker.

According to an Aug. 26, 2003, account in the Orange County Register, which the film cites as a source, Bain Capital under Romney’s leadership invested $46 million in DDi in 1997. It sold many of its shares for at least $93 million and received a $10 million management fee, but the newspaper said Bain retained a 14 percent stake in the firm that was wiped out when DDi filed for bankruptcy during the dot-com bust. (The film suggests Bain had sold all of its shares, saying it had “dumped the rest.”) Lehman Brothers in 2003 paid $80 million to settle charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that its bankers had tainted stock recommendations in five instances, including recommendations for DDi. But the SEC did not say that Bain had done anything wrong …

Hmmm. If this is the best Romney’s allies can do, then he could be sunk again. The fact that those interviewed did not know their words would be used to attack Romney is surely irrelevant. The fact that the SEC did not say Bain had done anything wrong means nothing. The whole point of the SEC settlement process is to allow quick wins for the SEC. The price of speed and certainty is that the guilty party does not admit fault. [But it is also true that the SEC was not directly examining Bain's role, and Bain did not pay a fine, so there any presumption of guilt scarcely applies to Bain.] But much of the Washington Post article sounds like nitpicking, it does not really deal with the main thrust of the attack on Romney.

In any case, many of the clips of Romney speaking are eerily reminiscent of Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas in the famous 1987 film Wall Street).

Of course, it is easy, and partly correct, to dismiss the clips from heart-broken ordinary citizens. Just as much of what Gordon Gekko said was true. The reason corporate raiding worked so well was because many senior managements were seriously incompetent and many workforces were overpaid and obstructed the introduction of new and more efficient practices, some even obstructed the introduction of practices which would simply have required them to do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.

Many businesses were simply no longer viable. International competition had undermined their business model. To survive the existing workforces had to be drastically reduced or radically redeployed. The businesses were doomed anyway, but the raiders got the blame for all the unpleasantness, which might better have been laid at the door of senior management over the previous decades.

The snag is that these points rarely sound convincing coming from the mouths of those who have profited hugely by them. Nor is it remotely true that all actions by all corporate raiders have been benign. It is hard not to feel that Gingrich is onto something when he characterises Romney as one of a bunch of rich guys who specialise in “figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company”.

This particular comment infuriated Donald Luskin, a “public intellectual” and controversialist, and apparently also “chief investment officer at Trend Macrolytics LLC”. Writing today in the Wall Street Journal, he claimed that the looting characterisation was “an egregious lie”. The article chose not to present any reasons for that claim but rather to argue that a few blemishes were beside the point:

The enduring case for capitalism—the moral case that Romney must make now—is that it is the only economic system consistent with liberty. Private equity — the realm of capitalism in which Bain Capital operates — is an expression of that liberty. There’s nothing mysterious here. Private-equity firms are much like mutual funds that invest in stocks. But when a private-equity firm invests, it typically buys the entire company.

It is an enjoyable diatribe, full of generalities, but largely based on insult and assertion, with no attempt at reasoned argument. He ends up:

Mr Romney must stand up for the rule of law that underpins free-market capitalism. It can’t guarantee a chicken in every pot—and neither can any other system. But capitalism does guarantee a fair deal. Investors in businesses, and the employees who choose to work for those businesses, know exactly where they stand, and they have the liberty to invest or not invest, and to work or not work, accordingly.

I find that just bizarre. It seems to ignore completely what we have learnt, painfully, in a couple of hundred years of economic history. I am happy to grant that capitalism is the least bad system. But one cannot just proceed by simplification and slogan. The whole argument is surely about just how much, and in what ways, one needs to regulate and temper capitalism to prevent injustice, minimise unfairness and curb excessive greed. Rabbitting on in a general way about liberty achieves nothing. Even the rawest undergraduate knows that liberty is a question of balance. Society and the rule of law is all about how best to balance competing rights.

But all that is beside the point. Many ordinary voters may start to see Romney in a new light after a deluge of attack videos. Certainly, Gingrich was badly hit by all the ads attacking him. Many voters are not as well informed as the political classes. In any case, Obama must be amazed at the way his enemies are slaughtering each other.

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2012 01 17 John Scholes Politics Comments (0) Permalink

It’s morning again in America

It’s morning again in America. Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past 4 years. This afternoon, 6500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what was just 4 years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America and, under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than 4 short years ago?

This 1984 campaign was the work of adman Hal Riney (1932-2008). He started doing PR for the US Army in Italy and then took an entry level job in BBDO‘s San Francisco office in 1956. He rose to become creative director in 1968. In 1976 he moved to Ogilvy & Mather and set up their West Coast office. After working on Reagan’s re-election campaign, he purchased Ogilvy’s SF office and renamed it Hal Riney & Partners. After several highly successful campaigns he sold out in 2003 and retired.

Here is an extract from an obituary in AdWeek:

Riney’s work celebrated an optimistic, perhaps even romantic vision of America. It was a land populated with people of simpler values, small town Fourth of July parades and rocking chairs on shady porches. There was little tolerance for fakery. It was this vision he mined in his 1984 campaign for President Ronald Reagan, as well as his advertising for beer and automobiles.

“The beauty and whimsy, the cleverness and the suggestion seem to be gone from everything,” Riney said in 1982. “And it’s been replaced by two people holding up a product they would never hold up; and talking about it in a way no one ever talked; and being astonished, pleased, delighted or surprised about characteristics of a product which in real life would actually rate no more than a grunt, at best.”

Riney’s persona catapulted his San Francisco agency to national, and even international acclaim. His style was widely copied, and his disciples went on to found 28 other advertising companies.

I mention all this because there was an interesting comment piece in Thursday’s i, suggesting that a slight re-write of this ad will be the centre-piece of Cameron’s re-election campaign in three years’ time:

They will be declaring Morning in Britain, whether it is or it isn’t. And this is the impossibility of Ed Miliband’s position. He has to argue it isn’t. So a politician who instinctively wants to cast himself, like Blair and Obama, as an agent of change instead sounds like Mr Doom and Gloom … A man who is young and positive by nature is trapped in a language of hopelessness and negativity … Ed finds himself constantly bemoaning a long, dark winter night. The dream has turned into a nightmare from which he might not wake up.

The first sentence sounds plausible, but I am not sure about the rest. Declaring Morning in Britain might well work. The reason is that New Labour, which was welcomed with such enthusiasm, ended up as something of a nightmare. A few cynics like me found Blair ghastly from day one, but most people thought he was a breath of fresh air. An exciting, dynamic leader who would take the country to places it had not been before.

He certainly did that. He became convinced that his messianic role was to right the world’s wrongs by pre-emptive strikes in countries where there was no national interest in intervening and no bilateral treaty to justify our intervention. After early success (by later standards) in the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, he joined America in seeking revenge for 9/11 by invading Afghanistan when Mullah Omar refused to hand over Osama Bin Laden. Despite the fact that it was clearly against our national interest to do so, there was some at least some kind of Old Testament eye-for-an-eye justification for attacking Afghanistan. But bizarrely, just as the mission looked – against the odds – as though it might succeed, the US and UK got deflected onto a totally madcap scheme to invade Iraq.

It was probably the most unpopular overseas adventure in UK history (in terms of absolute numbers of citizens against it). Certainly, it was by far the most outrageous act of any UK government since Suez. It ended more disastrously than even its severest critics imagined possible. Even worse, Blair spent most of the time since lying about it and trying to whitewash what happened with a series of rigged enquiries (carefully chosen enquirers with carefully chosen terms of reference.)

Meanwhile, domestic policy was largely controlled by Gordon Brown. He was much more an old-fashioned socialist who wanted to change the UK by substantially increasing expenditure on various public services and to modernise the country by freeing market forces from unnecessary regulation. In broad terms those objectives were reasonable, but unfortunately they were disastrously botched in execution. An alarming proportion of the increase in public expenditure was totally wasted. What on earth was the point of arranging for the median GP salary to be £100k?

Then his approach to financing it was scandalous. Stealth borrowing was simply a device to get around the government accounting rules. That might not have been too bad, if it had not been so expensive and inefficient. Because it was also a way of making government borrowing far more expensive. It also enriched a generation of entrepreneurs who were amazed to find a government willing to offer them a guaranteed profit with almost no risk.

The light touch regulation practiced by OfThis and OfThat was almost as bad. A collection of fat cats were allowed to run de facto cartels, many of which will prove hard to get rid of, because their lawyers would probably complain to the European courts if their cream was taken away.

Much of this has failed to catch the attention of the typical voter, mainly because New Labour was lucky enough to face the most incompetent Opposition in living memory. The Tories spent most of the New Labour decade consumed by infighting and a struggle to find a set of policies that looked different from those stolen from them by New Labour. With hindsight, that was Blair’s real achievement and truly breathtaking it was. He took over the Tory policies wholesale in order to make New Labour electable.

It was breathtaking for two reasons. The first was how easily he triumphed all the socialists in the Labour party who were absolutely appalled at what he was doing. The second was how readily it was lapped up by the voters as something new, when actually he was just carrying on with more of the same.

Voters are slow-moving. They can take years to grasp something that the political classes grasp almost immediately. Well, maybe that is a little too kind to the political classes. It seemed to take a great many political journalists a surprisingly long time to grasp what Blair was doing. But that cuts both ways. Once the electorate had turned against Blair, it was always going to take a long time to woo them back.

So that is my analysis. The political classes may have moved on from May 2010, but most voters haven’t. They still blame New Labour for the current mess, which makes them disinclined to vote Labour back in.

Certainly, Ed Miliband looks unelectable, whatever the voters’ mood. That has nothing to do with what he says, it is just a question of how he says it and what he looks like. He lacks charisma. In fact it is hard to think of any politician who has less. Even John Redwood sparkles by comparison. But then, the first leader of the opposition was always likely to be replaced before Labour got re-elected, so any rivals are probably only too happy for Ed to take the blame.

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2012 01 17 John Scholes Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Uniquely talented

[This is the fourth article in a meandering sequence about education in the UK. Earlier articles: neglected geniuses; too many universities; and riches v talents. ]

My attention was caught by a blistering indictment by Will Orr-Ewing of a 2006 TED video by Ken Robinson:

.

[A Feb 2006 talk at Monterey, CA. It is also available on the TED site, complete with subtitles and transcripts in fifty languages.]

Ken Robinson (61) worked for most of his career as an education academic at Warwick university, ending with twelve years as professor of arts education. He was also director of the Arts in Schools Project 1985-9, which was a major project to reshape arts education in England and Wales. He is now a popular speaker and high-level consultant, and has written a couple of books. “Out of our minds” (2001, 2nd ed 2011), promoting creativity and the need for education to foster it, and “The Element” (2008, similar, but focussing on the need for passion).

He is a working-class Liverpool kid made good, and an excellent speaker. For me, the most charming story was about Gillian Lynne, a well-known choreographer. Her school thought she had a learning disorder and got her mother to take her to a specialist.

she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it — because she was disturbing people; her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight — in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, “Gillian, I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately.” He said, “Wait here. We’ll be back; we won’t be very long,” and they went and left her. But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”

Orr-Ewing is having none of it.

it’s not true. Most teachers you speak to will admit it – there are some children who do not have tremendous talents. The problem with the current system is not a pessimism about the potential of children, but the reverse: a crazed optimism, an “Educational Romanticism” in Charles Murray’s words, that refuses to discern between the varying abilities of children. As a result, those who do have tremendous talents are not allowed – whether it is through grammar schools or other selective means – to realize that talent; and those who have less academic talent are not given opportunities to learn the sorts of valuable skills at secondary schools that will enable them to lead valued lives.

Of course, Robinson lays himself wide open to this.

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we?

As, Orr-Ewing says, Robinson et al have had some success. Dance is now taken more seriously in schools. But just how much of it does he want? There is a time problem. You cannot teach everyone everything. Some things have to have higher priority. What exactly is he proposing? This extract is worse:

If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue — despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days — what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it.

The implication is that because we cannot predict in detail what the world will be like over the next 50 years, it is wrong to teach arithmetic. Children might not need it much in their future lives. This is just silly. Certain skills are fundamental to a vast number of other things. “Reading, writing and arithmetic” has served well for fifty years as a guide to the most fundamental things. I can see no reason why the 3Rs will suddenly become redundant.

Of course, by age 16 we should surely have taught all children far more than that. The bizarre thing is that we haven’t. In fact, I doubt if even a bare majority of 16 year olds have adequate competence in reading, writing and arithmetic. A significant minority clearly have grossly inadequate competence.

Just maybe four hours of dance a week would inspire them all so much that they would end up racing ahead in the 3Rs. But Robinson does not seem to be making that case. To be fair, he is not actually claiming that everyone has “tremendous talents” – that was Orr-Ewing’s straw man.

What is a tremendous talent? Presumably one that gets you widely noticed, so that you become a celebrity, or at least a leader in a recognized field. Maybe there are ten thousand fields, maybe each has a new leader every five years. That would mean 2,000 “tremendous talents” being recognised every year, compared with a birth rate of about 0.75 million/year. So by definition less than 0.3% can hope to be tremendous talents. Well, you can stretch the numbers a bit, but it is obvious that the vast majority of people will not have tremendous talents.

But saying that everyone has a unique talent is an entirely different proposition. The Catholic view is that God sees each of us as uniquely valuable and having an important, but often largely hidden, role to play in the great cosmic drama.

I notice Orr-Ewing because he featured in yesterday’s Sunday Times in an article about the new super-tutors. Rich parents are paying up to £1,000 an hour to tutors to get their children into Oxbridge. Reading beyond the headline showed that this was a classic salesman’s use of up to. The reporters had found one tutor, who claimed that on one occasion he had managed to sell 10 hours of his time at that hourly rate to a “rock star” in New York. Orr-Ewing is in the business of running an agency to supply such tutors’ services, so in blogging about Robinson he is also talking his own book.

Interestingly, he has been studying the tutoring firms in New York with a view to upping his game. His Evening Standard article on 5 Jan 12 was probably what led the Sunday Times to write about him:

The first person I met was Arun Alagappan, who founded and oversees Advantage Testing, New York’s most highly regarded tutoring group. Alagappan is passionate about tutoring’s capacity to transform lives. Even his competitors are quick to admit that he was a pioneer in instituting the scrupulous standards that have elevated tutoring to the respected profession it has become in New York City. By insisting upon long-term, academically substantive preparation for any standardised entrance exam, Alagappan has helped New York’s parents understand that tutoring provides far-reaching benefits and represents a worthwhile investment in their children’s future. Of course, professional standards bring professional prices. New York’s tutors charge eye-watering figures. Advantage Testing’s 250 tutors charge between $250 and $950 an hour, and typically meet students for roughly 30 hours a week.
…
Another New York tutoring company, Prestige Prep, will not let its tutors teach until they have done 12 months of training. In one module of many, their director, Phil Cohen, hires young actors to imitate behaviour seen in the most unco-operative students – and coaches his tutors on how to help these students achieve academic success.

Tutoring is truly a profession in New York, and many of the tutors I met there drew analogies with the legal world. The Ivy Consulting Group, for instance, has modelled its corporate structure on that of a law firm so that consistently good tutors can “make partner” and share in the equity. Alagappan says that he borrowed more than 30 standard procedures from the Wall Street law firm for which he used to work after graduating from Harvard Law School.

Compare that with this clip by Guy Claxton explaining how he is not spouting politically correct nonsense, because he is a scientist:

Well, maybe that clip is entirely vacuous because he wants you to buy his book “What’s the point of school?” ISBN 1851686037. But he in other talks he explains in a little more detail how Building Learning Power (BLP) works:

We are now much more interested in what learning muscles are being exercised and stretched as you do your sums … In traditional education the learning muscles that got invited and exercised every day tended to be passivity, notetaking, accurate retention and regurgitation on demand …

This sounds like a variant on Tom Lehrer’s famous “New Math” song – “but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right”. Except now the important thing is not to think straight but to exercise the right mental muscles whilst doing it.

I confess to finding modern educational theory so silly that I rarely listen to it. A diet of Claxton et al droning on about BLP would soon drive me screaming from the room. Maybe I should be more sympathetic to Orr-Ewings criticisms.

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2012 01 16 John Scholes Education Comments (1) Permalink

Assassinating bad guys

I remember clearly how, not long after Tony Blair pushed us into invading Iraq in March 2003, I became amazed at how little we were doing to protect obvious targets in London. For it was self-evident that, despite Blair’s protestations to the contrary, the effect of his policy was to increase the terrorist threat to London significantly.

I remember chatting to two armed policemen posted near the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. I said how angry I was that they were just sitting ducks. Their tactical position was hopelessly exposed and they obviously had no backup that could get there in less than 2-3 minutes. In any serious attack they would simply be the first casualties. In other words, it was gesture defence, rather than real defence. The same point had obviously occurred to them. I had considerable admiration for their courage – because everyone was somewhat nervous – but fury at the cynicism of those who arranged the charade.

Another point that struck me was how vulnerable Blair himself was to magnetic bombs. I satisfied myself one day as he was being swept through central London with motorcycle outriders that even on foot it would be possible to attach a magnetic bomb to his car door. It would have been even easier for the passenger on a motorcycle. I reckoned such an assassin had a good chance of not being caught, but Al Qaeda apparently had fanatics who did not mind being shot dead, which would had made it even easier. The car doors were supposedly armoured, but I doubted they would stand up to shaped magnetic charges.

Of course, what the police and intelligence services were really counting on was the incompetence of most terrorists. Indeed their faith has been amply justified over the last ten years. Most terrorist plots are almost unbelievably incompetent.

I mention all that because the same technique that I had in mind seems to have become a favourite for US and Israeli special forces intent on defusing the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons.

In December I wrote about Stuxnet, the successful cyberwarfare attack on an Iranian facility enriching uranium. In response to complaints that the Iranian effort is not aimed at producing fission weapons, I started to write more on that topic, but have not yet got beyond some basic background. I hope to return to it soon.

It was reported yesterday that Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan had been killed in Tehran. Two assassins on a motorbike attached a magnetic bomb to his car in the morning rush hour. It detonated a few seconds later, killing him and his driver. He was apparently a chemistry expert and head of procurement at the Natanz facility. Majid Shahriyari, a nuclear scientist, and Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a quantum physics specialist, were assassinated last year.

Blaming the US and Israel is somewhat speculative. Unsurprisingly, there is a lack of hard evidence. Hilary Clinton immediately denied “any US involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran”. Nonetheless the sheer professionalism of the hits argues against a terrorist group being responsible.

A long-running and vicious covert assassination campaign seems to have formed part of the UK campaign to overcome the Troubles in Northern Ireland. One key target there was the tiny number of expert bomb-makers. Whatever the ethics or the politics, those assassinations and attempted assassinations (if such they were) would at least have made some kind of sense. Terrorist groups are quite different from nation states. A supply of competent professionals is typically their scarcest resource. They usually manage to get funding and find friendly governments prepared to supply them with basic weaponry, but their foot soldiers are typically incompetent and ill-disciplined. The Irish groups were apparently desperately short of individuals capable of fusing the bombs.

If is much less clear that even this pragmatic justification applies to the Iranian enrichment programme. But killing the bad guys seems to play well in the current Republican primaries:

[Rick Santorum, a Republican candidate addressing a meeting in Greenville, South Carolina.]

And now they’re in the process of developing nuclear weapons, and it is obvious to me that the Administration is doing little to nothing. Now I am hopeful that some of the things we are seeing with respect to the nuclear program that the US is involved in, which is on occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that is a wonderful thing. Ok. I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, or from North Korea, or from Iran and you’re going to work on a nuclear programme, to develop a nuclear bomb for Iran, then you are not safe. And people say “Well, you can’t go out and assassinate people”, well tell that to Alwaki. Ok. We have done it; we have done it for an American citizen. We can certainly do it for someone who is producing a nuclear bomb that can be dropped on the state of Israel or provides a nuclear shield for a country which will spread terrorism with impunity and change the face of the world.

“Alwaki” refers to Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a US drone attack on 30 Sep 11. “done it for an American citizen” is probably a reference to the Fort Hood killings. A single gunman killed 13 and wounded 29 at Fort Hood, a major US base in Texas, on 5 Nov 09. Major Malik Hasan, a US Army, was put on trial for the shooting in the middle of last year. There is said to be evidence linking Awlaki to that shooting.

Obama authorised his assassination in April 2010, eg see the Washington Post:

A Muslim cleric tied to the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner has become the first U.S. citizen added to a list of suspected terrorists the CIA is authorized to kill, a U.S. official said Tuesday.

Anwar al-Aulaqi, who resides in Yemen, was previously placed on a target list maintained by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command and has survived at least one strike carried out by Yemeni forces with U.S. assistance against a gathering of suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

Because he is a U.S. citizen, adding Aulaqi to the CIA list required special approval from the White House, officials said. The move means that Aulaqi would be considered a legitimate target not only for a military strike carried out by U.S. and Yemeni forces, but also for lethal CIA operations.

[Salman Rushdie with Pia Glenn at a party at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. Photo by David Shankbone.]

The question is whether all this is justified. How does it differ, for example, from the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (he of the implausible girl friends)?

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2012 01 15 John Scholes Al-Qaeda
Assassination
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