Aerial urban surveillance

In my article of 29 August 2007 entitled Sydney skies [display], I criticized Australia's decision to place a jet fighter above the city during the APEC gathering. Funnily enough, my scenario about the possibility of an innocent private aircraft getting blasted out of the sky by this fighter almost became a reality.

Later, in my article of 6 September 2007 entitled Stadiums [display], I mentioned the vast security resources that French authorities planned to use during the Rugby World Cup.

It was only yesterday, on TV, that we had a closeup presentation of one of these resources, used in the sky at Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris. Apparently there's a tiny remote-controlled aircraft floating around constantly in the air above the great stadium, and it's video camera can see everything that's happening on the ground. In a control room, several police specialists control the movements of the robot aircraft, and watch the images it provides on a large screen on the wall. The images are so precise that you can easily distinguish human individuals, including groups of people who might be up to mischief.

The female police officer whose job consisted of "flying" the tiny noiseless aircraft explained that, if nobody gets upset about this surveillance method, it's primarily because it's invisible. She added: "Most modern police departments throughout the world are now using this technique." Hearing this, I pricked up my ears. Was the police department in Sydney actually using this approach during the APEC? If so, was the publicity about the jet fighter in Sydney's skies simply a strategy to make people forget about the presence of tiny robot aircraft equipped with video cameras? Was the ban on all other aircraft over Sydney designed to make sure that the little robotic devices would be free to glide around in an airspace free of turbulence and obstacles?

If ever it so happens that Sydney is not yet aware of this new robotic technology, then it might be a good idea if a few Australian police delegates were to visit France, at the end of the rugby matches, to see what it's all about. In making this suggestion, I'm thinking above all of the safety of private pilots wishing to take their family or friends on future joy flights over the Sydney coastline or the Blue Mountains, while unaware that the local police are protecting Important Visitors and searching for potential Troublemakers and Dangerous Terrorists. It would be so much less messy to collide with a tiny robotic drone than to get pulverized by a jet fighter belonging to the Royal Australian Air Force.

Too bad to be true

The gray-bearded man on the left is a still shot of Osama bin Laden taken from a video that was aired in October 2004. The black-bearded man on the right is alleged to be this same Osama bin Laden in a recent video, released yesterday. If you wish to see a presentation of this latest video, click the above image.

My personal reactions? I'm convinced that the second video is an expert hoax. You only have to compare the two representations of Osama bin Laden to see at a glance that the alleged recent video is simply a finely-executed remake of the older one.

QUESTION: Who would have produced this remake?
ANSWER: Video specialists working for Bush.
QUESTION: Why would they have produced it?
ANSWER: To demonstrate that the devil is still rampant.
QED.

Franco/Spanish police success

Yesterday morning, in the city of Cahors in south-west France, French police swooped upon a suburban house [the grey-walled place on the left] and arrested four alleged bomb-makers, three men and a woman, belonging to the Basque separatist group ETA. According to French and Spanish authorities, the four individuals were actually preparing an imminent attack. One of the arrested men is described as a "historical member" of ETA, which is police jargon for "a big fish".

I'm tempted to compare the calm efficiency of this combined Franco/Spanish operation with the recent fiasco in Australia concerning the "capture" of an Indian doctor suspected of abetting terrorists in the UK. Admittedly, France and Spain have a common border, whereas England and Australia lie on opposite sides of the planet.

Indian doctor and Aussie patient

This morning, I was happy to learn that Mohamed Haneef had succeeded, in a court appeal, in recovering his Australian work visa.

This young Indian doctor is surely an ordinary individual who has never been condemned of committing any crime whatsoever. The idea of being tempted to consider him as a terrorist is idiotic and grotesque.

Be that as it may, the Australian minister Kevin Andrews is not at all happy with the ruling of the Federal Court. As for me, I was satisfied to see a photo of this intriguing all-powerful Australian administrator:

Indeed, it's frustrating to remain aware of the existence of a curiously notorious individual without knowing what he might look like. Thanks to The Australian, I can now associate a physical image with the name of the man who declared that Mohamed Haneef couldn't pass an Aussie character test. Andrews, to say the least, has an intriguing face. To call a spade a spade, the stark face of Kevin Andrews, with its corpse-like rigidity, frightens me.

An Australian journalist compared Kevin Andrews with a notorious fictional character of the '60s named Maxwell Smart, an incompetent law authority who invented the shoe telephone:

Personally, I'm not sure that Kevin Andrews could invent anything whatsoever. He doesn't strike me as an inventor. He doesn't strike me as anything of a nice nature. Well, yes, his face does in fact strike me in a morbid sense. I wouldn't like to meet up with Kevin Andrews on a dark night in a remote alley, let along in a government immigration office. To put it bluntly, he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who would wish his neighbor well.

Meanwhile, the amusing thing about this whole affair is that Haneef, sooner or later, will become a celebrity in Australia. People will be queuing up to obtain a consultation with this nice notorious Indian doctor. And many of his patients will be tempted to ask the same questions: "Who's this weird guy named Kevin Andrews? Why did he attack you? Do you think it's safe for Australia that such an individual should remain in such a prominent post?" By then, of course, I would hope that Kevin Andrews will have retired from active service.

Land of law?

From my antipodean observational outpost here in France, I'm frankly alarmed by the way in which my native land is handling the case—or rather the lack of a case—against the accused terrorism supporter Mohamed Haneef. Clearly, the police investigation up in Queensland got screwed up, which explains why a federal law-enforcement directorate is now called upon to review the fiasco. My first reaction is positive: Thank God Australia employs a so-called Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions!

I don't know why Queensland premier Peter Beattie, in criticizing the methods of his police force, had to resort to the foreign [Hollywood] image of the Keystone Cops. Homegrown anecdotes of idiotic police blunders abound, notably in the bushranger domain.

The thing that worries me, when I observe what has happened in the case of Haneef, is a lurking suspicion that Australia might no longer be what we commonly refer to as a land of law. Sure, it's a land of politics, with a lowercase "p", and a land of Dollars, with an uppercase "D". But it appears to be a land in which an Indian doctor can find himself involved, overnight, in a frightening imbroglio, as indicated by the following extract from today's The Australian:

Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty was also forced to deny reports police had written the names of overseas terror suspects on Haneef's personal diary, and that Haneef was being investigated for plotting to bomb a Gold Coast skyscraper.

Many years ago, when I saw customs officials in the port of Fremantle confiscating jars of baby food that my wife was bringing ashore to feed our Emmanuelle during our brief stopover in Western Australia, I formed the vague opinion that certain Australians in authority often tend to be excessively zealous, as if their credibility depended upon their obtaining outstanding results. I witnessed this same behavior twenty years later, in exactly the same city, when I saw WA cops taking pleasure in arresting drivers leaving places of revelry associated with the America's Cup regattas.

If all the events surrounding Haneef were to mean that the threats of terrorism in Australia will henceforth be diminished, one might conclude that it's worthwhile. But that's like saying that the invasion of Iraq could be justified a posteriori if it had reduced the outlaw phenomenon in that land. In my view, in their sunny microcosm, Queensland cops are surely just as dumb as George W Bush.

Business as usual

There's an everyday expression in French, fond de commerce, whose literal meaning is "business assets". But it's often used in the case of small shopkeepers to designate the particular commercial setting and customers that enable them to earn their living. For example, I recall the prolific and popular French novelist Frédéric Dard [1921-2000] talking about his childhood on a radio program. At one stage, his mother had a small shop that sold merchandise designated in French as farces-attrapes, which means trivial objects used for practical jokes, tricks and party gags. [I'm not sure I ever saw such a shop back in Australia... or anywhere outside of France, for that matter.] Well, Frédéric Dard explained with glee that his mother's commercial operations meant, for example, that she had to stock an assortment of the finest imitation dog turds made out of rubber. In other words, her fond de commerce included these objects and, by the same token, the people who buy such stuff. She therefore had to maintain constant contacts with the wholesalers who produced these objects. So, whenever a manufacturer's representative called in at her shop, she would ask to be brought up to date: "Please show me a few samples of this year's creations in the field of dog shit."

In a totally different domain, I've always felt that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is like a small shopkeeper whose constant business preoccupation is terrorism.

As a consequence of September 11, 2001, Rudy nows knows more about how to deal with terrorists than anyone else in the world... including Bill Clinton, of course, and maybe even George W Bush. Rudy is a specialist in terrorist threats just like the mother of Frédéric Dard was a specialist in imitation dog turds. It's Giuliani's business, and nobody should dare to tell him how to run his business, particularly if they're Democrats. Above all, Rudy doesn't want to listen to anybody talking about bringing the troops home from Iraq.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee made it clear, tersely, that Rudy's establishment is not at all the best little shop in town: "Rudy's arrogance has gotten the best of him. How can a man who failed to prepare New York City for a second attack after the first one, who sent firefighters and emergency workers into Ground Zero without respirators and quit the Iraq Study Group to raise money keep America safe?"

Will those negative remarks slow down Rudy's operations? Not at all. Business as usual.

America didn't listen to France

It has just been revealed publicly, in the prestigious daily newspaper Le Monde, that the DGSE [French secret service] submitted to the CIA chief in Paris, on 5 January 2001 (eight months before the destruction of the Twin Towers), a precise report concerning the threat of aircraft hijacking by Al-Qaeda terrorists. This note even included an organizational chart of the senior Al-Qaeda hierarchy.

Since France had been the target of terrorist attacks at an early date, French intelligence concerning Oussama Ben Laden was far in advance of US knowledge in this domain. The report sent to the CIA by the DGSE mentioned seven airlines that might be targeted by Al-Qaeda hijackers, and this list included the two that were finally chosen: American Airlines and United Airlines. The January 2001 report spoke of timing, explaining that the hijacking project, initially prepared for 2000, had been postponed.

Bush invaded Iraq without paying attention to warnings from France concerning the grave consequences of such an idiotic act. Today, we learn retrospectively that, well before Iraq, ignoring French advice had already become a style of foreign affairs "thinking" in the USA. It would be well, I feel, if this situation were to evolve soon in a positive sense.

Disturbing news

You can’t believe everything transmitted by the media. We now know retrospectively (a little too late for anybody to do much about it) that the concept of “embedded journalists” was invented by Bush & Co as a means of ensuring that media representatives would finally set aside their professional deontology and relate only the “news” (not necessarily sound) that US military men wished to disseminate. This diabolical concept was a foundation for media lies and disinformation. In persuading journalists to sell their souls in this way, Bush & Co had produced a weapon of mass deception. [This expression was invented by two witty American authors, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, whose books are presented in an excellent website, which incorporates a video: http://www.prwatch.org/tbwe/index.html]

Today, should we believe the disturbing news revealed yesterday in the French press in connection with a documentary film that will soon be aired on French TV ? The film’s title, translated into English, is Bin Laden — Failures of a Hunt. It is signed by two journalists, Eric de Lavarène and Emmanuel Razavi, and produced by Hamsa Press and Ligne de Front. The rare people who have been invited to view private projections of this hot document say that it includes disturbing accounts by four French soldiers, whose identities were not revealed. Apparently, members of the French forces in Afghanistan had Osama Bin Laden in their gunsights on two separate occasions, in 2003 and 2004, but they nevertheless refrained from trying to capture him. Why not? According to the film’s alleged firsthand witnesses of these close-range encounters with the chief of Al-Qaeda, US military commanders gave no explicit green-light orders to the French soldiers to intercept Bin Laden. So, they did nothing. And Osama Bin Laden walked away, unaware of the fact that he could have been gunned down by French soldiers.

Before being tempted to draw any conclusions whatsoever concerning the strange facts related in this documentary, we must await confirmations that they are indeed authentic. For the moment, the French Ministry of Defense has denied vigorously that French soldiers were ever in a position to capture Bin Laden, and the film’s accounts are described as fabulation. So, we should remain skeptical.

Information of a similar kind was provided some time ago by a 43-year-old French specialist on espionage named Eric Denécé, director of the Centre français de recherche sur le renseignement [French Center for Intelligence Studies]. He claimed that French commandos in Afghanistan had spotted Bin Laden through binoculars during the first fortnight of September 2004, and that US military authorities had asked the bewildered French soldiers to refrain from actually intercepting America’s number-one public enemy.

Anecdote: The above-mentioned Frenchman, Professor Eric Denécé, is a member of the ethical committee in charge of a weird project concerning a so-called Spyland theme park, of the Disneyland kind, which is soon to be set up just twenty minutes away from where I live, alongside the highway to Valence. Near the top of the following website, there’s a button that enables you to download an English-language description of this amazing project:
http://www.cf2r.org/fr/spyland/presentation.php