Author: Mick Hartley

This isn’t good news (via):

The harshest political crackdown in years is under way here [Phnom Penh] in what some analysts are calling the final stage in Prime Minister Hun Sen’s drive to consolidate unchallenged power.

Over the past year, he has choked off the last effective political opposition while continuing to marginalize the monarchy, manipulate the courts and intimidate labor unions and other civic groups. In December, the leader of the only significant opposition party, Sam Rainsy, who had already fled the country, was sentenced in absentia to 18 months in prison for criminal defamation.

Now, with a series of arrests and lawsuits on defamation and related charges, Mr. Hun Sen is for the first time directly attacking the human rights groups that, by default, serve as a de facto democratic opposition.

“Cambodia right now is at a crossroads: It must decide whether it’s going to be a real democracy or whether it’s going to move inexorably toward a one-party state,” said the American ambassador, Joseph Mussomeli.

The special United Nations envoy for human rights in Cambodia, Yash Ghai, said only strong action from the countries that support Cambodia’s economy could stop the slide.

“It has all the hallmarks of the beginning of a totalitarian regime,” he said.

Hun Sen’s response to criticism also has the hallmarks of a dictator-in-the-making:

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen defended his use of criminal defamation lawsuits against government critics on Wednesday, saying he was merely responding to being called a dictator unjustly.

“I am a victim,” Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who has ruled the Southeast Asian nation for two decades, said in response to widespread international criticism of the arrest of three prominent human rights activists.

Just what we need on our roads: scores of pensioners wobbling around on their new smart bikes with automatic steering adjustment (via Japundit):

Members of an industrial network in Sakai, a city that ships 40 percent of Japan’s bicycle-related goods, have joined hands with researchers at Osaka Prefecture University to create bicycles equipped with a stabilization system that can automatically adjust steering, it has been learned.

Officials at the university and the Sakai Industry Club network, formed by 28 small- and medium-sized firms in Sakai, are hoping to market the bicycles to elderly people and aim to start manufacturing them by spring. […]

A sensor to detect the lean of the bicycle is placed under the seat. A device attached to the frame picks up signals from this sensor and automatically turns the handlebars left or right accordingly.

For example, if the bicycle is about to fall over to the right, the handlebars are adjusted to the left. The sensor enables slight adjustments to be made at an early stage to maintain balance.

Very clever no doubt, but perhaps an inability to stay upright on a bicycle is God’s way of telling you that you’re too old to be riding one.

The children who suffered in the satanic abuse witch-hunts of the late 1980s and early 1990s are now adults, and we’re starting to hear their stories. In advance of a BBC documentary to be shown tomorrow night, Carol Midgley in the Times reports on the barely credible Rochdale case where a family were torn apart after a 6-year old boy was foolish enough to mention to his teacher that he’d been dreaming about ghosts:

Daniel has only hazy memories of the day that his childhood effectively ended. He vaguely recalls, at the age of 6, being taken to the head teacher’s office at school, of strangers arriving and taking him away in a car. He remembers sitting in a small room filled with toys as a social worker asked him endless questions, of pleading for his mother but instead being taken that night to a Catholic children’s home where they put him in a bath and scrubbed him with nailbrushes. He didn’t know it then, but he would not return home for another ten years.
Though the details of these early events are fragmented in his mind, the memory of his tearful bewilderment and desperate longing to go home remains vivid. Today Daniel, a tall, pleasant but anxious young man of 22, is still uncomprehending and very angry.

Incredibly, he was forced to live in care between the ages of 6 and 16, torn from his distraught parents, despite a judge ruling that there was no evidence that he was being abused.

But that is not the worst of what happened to his family. The full story beggars belief. Thanks to the zealousness — some called it obsessiveness — of a handful of social workers in Rochdale, Lancashire, Daniel’s parents, Andrew and Beverley, were wrongly accused of involvement in a Satanic abuse network, a cult that supposedly involved ritualistic sex with minors, the slaughter of animals and the sacrifice of newborn babies. All four of their children were taken from them.

Three months later, in June 1990, 12 more children, all friends of Daniel, his sister and the family, were taken from their beds in traumatic morning raids, forced to endure intimate medical examinations and placed in care for months while investigations were conducted. During this time, bizarre though it seems, parents and children were kept apart because social workers suspected that they were communicating secretly with their children via coded signals and gestures.

Andrew and Beverley’s other sons, James and Matthew, then 3 and 4, spent seven years in a children’s home. Their daughter Julie, then 11, spent five years in care. Andrew and Beverley were allowed to see their children for just an hour a month, monitored by social workers.

Contact with Daniel was reduced gradually from an hour a month to an hour a year.

Update: more here.

ewbury, Berkshire.

“I was watching the Luton match on TV with my family and I saw the keeper off his line. I was shouting ‘Shoot!’ and he did.

“It seemed to take an age to hit the net but when it did, I just went berserk.”

The 42-year-old father-of-two said he might spend some of the winnings on a family holiday.

Bookmaker Paddy Power said: “When he placed the bet we thought it was the easiest £200 we had ever made.

“But fair play to him. It’s great when these unusual bets pay out and it shows that dreams do come true.”

You only hear about the winners though, don’t you? What about the guy who dreamed that Burton Albion would beat Man U with a penalty for handball in the second half, and remortgaged his house to place the bet? He’s currently under sedation. They don’t mention cases like that.

p>The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautiously acknowledge on its Web page that it is quite possible that “the only cases currently being reported are those in the most severely ill people.” Random samples — the life blood of statistics — are hard to obtain under the best of circumstances, and canvassing poor people in rural Southeast Asia certainly doesn’t qualify.

Why (oh why) do they do that? I mean, in documentaries such as this, when a local African talks, they dub over them with someone struggling to speak English in a halting African accent. What’s the point? We know it’s dubbed, because they allow the speaker to start off before the dubbing starts, so why not give them the dignity of sounding at least half-way intelligent – eloquent even – by dubbing with proper English. Even better, use subtitles. As it is the impression’s given that they can’t even speak properly in their own language: basically, that they’re stupid.

I don’t think you can accuse the BBC of racism here: I’m sure I’ve heard Frenchmen being dubbed into English wiz ze most reedeeculous French accent. It’s just patronising and annoying.

The latest edition of Democratiya is now out, and features a fascinating interview with Kanan Makiya which has so many quotable chunks that I’d just recommend reading the whole piece.

There’s also a letter of mine in response to Marko Attila Hoare’s article in Democratiya 2, on Turkish attitudes to the Armenian Genocide, together with his reply. My original post on this, if you’re interested, led to an exchange of views in the comments between myself, Hoare, and J. Cassian, of this parish, which takes the argument further.

s (e.g., Aylik and Kaide) of known terrorist groups such as the IBDA-C – which contain Islamist and jihadist propaganda, extol terrorists like Osama bin Laden and his associates, and spread Holocaust denial and virulent antisemitism – continue to be freely and legally published and sold in Turkey.

n an interview from Miami. He spent months living under police protection in Denmark. […]

In Norrebro, an ethnically mixed neighborhood of Copenhagen where the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is buried and where kebab stands dot the tree-lined streets, Imam Ahmed Abu-Laban, a leader among Denmark’s Muslims, bristles at what he calls the “Islam phobia” gripping the country. He asserted that the cartoons had been calculated to incite Muslims because it was well known that in Islam depictions of the prophet were considered blasphemy.

“We are being mentally tortured,” Imam Ahmed said at his mosque, an anonymous building that looks more like an apartment complex than a house of worship. “The cartoons are an insult against Islam, an attempt by right-wing forces in this country to get a rise out of the Muslim community and so portray us as against Danish values.”

The latest post on the subject at Brussels Journal (scroll down for the full list of their posts on this) notes, among other things, the way this is being being reported in the Muslim press: in Egypt apparently they’re saying that Danish newspapers are waging a campaign against Islam, that Copenhagen plans to introduce a state-censored version of the Koran, that a Danish film is underway “to show how horrible Islam is”, and that there were 120 cartoons, not 12.

ok place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

It also reminds us that the Bush administration hasn’t exactly helped its cause by its amazing inefficiency:

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million “exploitable items” have been thoroughly examined. That’s 2.5 percent.

But things may be about to change:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon’s role in expediting the release of this information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. “He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop,” says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.

There may also be more information on Ansar al Islam, the Kurdish Islamist group that’s generally believed, though so far with little evidence, to have been supported by Saddam:

Speaking of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence officer says: “There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and there was an equipment connection. It may have been the case that the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] support for AI was meant to operate against the [anti-Saddam] Kurds. But there is no question IIS was supporting AI.”

The official continued: “[Saddam] used these groups because he was interested in extending his influence and extending the influence of Iraq. There are definite and absolute ties to terrorism. The evidence is there, especially at the network level. How high up in the government was it sanctioned? I can’t tell you. I don’t know whether it was run by Qusay [Hussein] or [Izzat Ibrahim] al-Duri or someone else. I’m just not sure. But to say Iraq wasn’t involved in terrorism is flat wrong.”