Ordinary Nothing

There was recently a survey (Sorry, Hebrew link only) here in Israel assessing the behaviour and health of teenagers. One part, the one I found amusing, deals with safety and terrorism.

Apparently 22% of children from 6th to 10th grade feel, due to "political instability and the security conditions", that their lives are in danger. Riiight. Sure thing. Look around in a school, and every fifth kid feels their lives are in danger from terror. I’m convinced. Friends who have children at these ages just constantly talk about how their kids are terrified and all their kid’s friends are too. Not.

In addition, 37% of teenagers (Possibly out of the 22% above, the article phrasing is unclear) reported a terror event occurring next to their home, or knowing someone hurt from an act of terror. To which what I have to say can be nicely summed by WTF?! . Terror acts are great attention grabbers. People pay attention to headlines about terror more than to headlines about other things, like traffic accidents for example. But there just aren’t that many acts of terror. Not that many people die from terrorist activities. There are a lot more casualties from traffic accidents. The idea that 8.14% (0.22*0.37) of children personally know people hurt in acts of terror (How many friends away from home do kids have, for crying out loud?) is preposterous.
Unless of course the survey was not on a representative selection of the population, but rather focused in the more terror-stricken areas. But if that is case, which is contrary to what is stated in the article, then it has no bearing upon the general population and should not be used for anything in global political decision making processes.

Also, 34% of teenagers reported that the feelings of insecurity effect their social lives. Yea, right.
No less than 46% reports that it prevents them from going to "various places". Unless those places include the Gaza strip, this makes no sense whatsoever. Kids in these ages don’t make travel decisions apart from where do they want to hang out with friends. I can safely report from personal observation that the amount of people in general, and of teenagers in particular, did not noticeably drop from cinemas (About same amounts of screaming brats interfering with me watching a film in quiet), coffee shops, and the likes. Certainly not a drop as serious as 46%. Although to be honest, for those who are afraid to hang out with friends, 42% by the survey, this can certainly explain the change in social life.

And the cinch? 27% reported feeling less focused in their studies. Pe-leeeease. Schoolkids are not focused on studying due to worries about terror attacks? As if schoolkids need an excuse not to be focused in studying. How many of them bloody want to study at all to begin with?! Sounds like an excellent spoon-fed excuse.

Interviewer: "Do you feel that worries about terrorist activities causes you to be less able to concentrate on your homework and school material?"
Kid: "Less able to concentrate… on homework… eh… yes! Sure! Right! That’s it! I really do want to study hard! I do! But I’m so afraid some suicide bomber will come over to my house and explode while I’m at my desk! Yes! That’s why I don’t do my homework so well! Honest!"

Great survey. I hope nobody pays much attention. Don’t know how the other parts measure up, but if they’re up to the same exacting quality…

The governor of Sicily is to stand trial for assisting the Mafia.
Although quite naturally he denies the charges:

"In the trial we will show that Cuffaro is not involved with assisting
the Mafia", defence lawyer Claudio Gallina Montana was quoted as saying
by the Apcom news agency

Clearly, innocent until proven guilty, and so on and so forth. And I assume proving connections to the Mafia can prove a bit… err… difficult.

Well, a TV crew for an Italian news program recorded him on his way to the trial. When out of the blue a nicely dressed person appears, notices him walking, comes over hurriedly, makes a very polite and deep bow of obeisance, and kiss his hand. All this while the governor tries to shoo him away, since he is aware he is being filmed.

Anyone who have seen any Mafia movie would have recognized something quite similar to a proper show of respect to a Mafia Don.

So did the Italian reporters, who supposedly don’t have to rely on American movies. They tried to speculate about the other reasons that there surely must be to explain the behaviour of the passerby. Because, noooo, surely the governor cannot be a Don, or involved in the Mafia. No way.
They would have sounded almost convincing if the overtones of sarcasm were not so obvious…

All in all, Italian TV news are surely fun for the whole family.

There’s a lot of merriment, and many a chuckle, about the very unhelpful assessment presented by the Israeli chief of Military Intelligence (BTW, as a totally unrelated side note, but from personal experience, it is an oxymoron usually) about the health of Yasser Arafat.



Like this article:

Israel’s chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, did little to clear things up. He told a Cabinet meeting Sunday that Arafat’s “situation is between full recovery and death,” said an Israeli official who briefed reporters on the meeting.

Or this one:

“According to our intelligence assessment, Arafat’s chances of recovery range between full recovery and death. All options are open, General Aaaron Zeevi said in a Sunday briefing on the ailing Palestinian leader’s health.

His comments were greeted on Monday with derisory headlines, with the top-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper declaring: “They haven’t a clue”.

“With all due respect, we don’t need an IDF (army) intelligence branch director for that,” one unnamed minister said after the meeting.

But here’s the thing. It’s not as silly as it sounds. I mean, of course it’s not very informative. And of course you don’t need a full fledged intelligence branch to get this answer. But so what?

That’s the answer he had to give. I’m certain he didn’t volunteer the info of his own accord. He didn’t came over saying “Listen ye’all, we have just gotten some new and very important news!” and then went on with that statement.

Rather, he was specifically asked to give an assessment about the chances of recovery. Not being able to provide any exact assessment, but being forced to provide some answer, he said what he could. He could have said “We don’t know”, or he could have stated that all the options are possible. He chose the latter. It’s not that bad. A tad ass-covering I-did-provide-for-all-the-possibilities one, but a legitimate answer all the same.



Making that statement was not a problem.



Was not having a good assessment a problem? Maybe, but maybe not. There are actually several options here.



The first, and the obvious one, is that he didn’t know. If he didn’t, and was supposed to, then it’s a problem. But was he supposed to? Was it so expected that he, that our intelligence branch, know this, that not knowing it is a reason for ridicule?

Consider that the amount of people who had actual certain knowledge about the exact condition of Arafat was extremely small, if at all. It’s possible even the doctors didn’t know. Even if they did, the list was then limited to a very small percentage of the hospital personal. And possibly a few high ranking Palestinian officials who were notified. Not a lot of people, and not a lot of places to get the info. It’s not rational to expect an intelligence service to be able to very quickly gain that information. So if they didn’t, that’s nothing to deride them about.

Then there is the other option. That he did know. Assume the Israeli intelligence branch has managed to get exact details about the condition of Arafat. Details which are known to very few people, are written in very few places, and were transmitted on very few channels. Should he actually admit that?



When you get right down to classification of information, there are two things which are really secret, all the rest is people having fun playing cloak and dagger games. The important things are Capabilities and Sources.

You don’t expose a source, because if someone notices, you’ll lose it.

You don’t expose a capability (where applicable, obviously this is not usually a HumInt issue, but quite a serious SigInt one), because then you’ll lose all sources that rely on the capability.

If he provided the information, then it would have been easy to deduce we obtained it (genius level reasoning, surely). If we obtained it, we obtained it from someplace. And there was a very small number of places to get it from. Ergo, providing the detail would have nearly certainly burnt a source (An agent in the hospital? Someone high up on the Palestinian hierarchy? A microphone at a strategic office?) or exposed a capability (Tapping to the phone lines / satellite channel / whatever it was the information was relayed from the hospital on). You don’t do that. He didn’t.

And the beauty is that no one can be sure he’s actually protecting anything, since it’s even more possible he really didn’t know.



Claims that he shouldn’t have secrets from government and ministers are of course silly. You can see how what he reported did come out nice-’n-quick to the media, right? There’s no reason whatsoever to assume that exact information would have been kept secret.



So either he didn’t know, in which case the response was honest and legitimate, or he did know, in which case the response was necessary and legitimate.

I don’t see the problem here.



Unless someone just takes for granted that Israeli intelligence branch is so good, that we have to know everything anyway without anyone having a chance of finding out why. If you accept that premise, then indeed there was no point to keep a secret, so he really didn’t know, and no tknowing it’s so unlikely that it surely indicates someone have majorly screwed up… Personally, I can assure everyone that we are not that good. Nobody is.



So there.

Apparently about 377 tons of high explosives were lost in Iraq.

That’s a lot of explosives. Enough to blow up lots and lots of things, and still have much to spare. Probably enough to wage a small war.

And the US apparently knew those explosives are missing since about April 2003… The story of course broke out only now. Good to know.

I assume it means someone got all those high explosives and is just sitting on them and waiting…



I think, however, that the best part of the Reuters article, for many different reasons, is this reply by someone in US asked why the us military didn’t do something like guard this small pile of cherry-bombs:

“You just can’t leave a guard force at all these places you find. If you leave a squad at all 10,000 places that are known so far, then there’s 50,000 (troops) out of action,” said another U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Certainly you can’t leave a force to guard “all those places“, if you’re talking about small empty buildings. But a pile of nearly 380 tons of explosive?! I do sincerely think you should even put a large force to guard that! Unless of course he implies that each on of the 10,000 sites he mentions contains that amount of explosives… That’s a very very scary thought. Which I hope, and believe, to be false. But if that’s the case, then I agree guarding them all is not practical. Which means they should have been either concentrated or destroyed, not left alone to get “lost”.

It is at least understandable why the half-wit chose to remain anonymous.



And then there’s the small numerical/linguistical issue there, though I assume the parentheses mean it’s the reporter’s/editor’s fault, and not the official half-wit’s… Troops does not mean soldiers! Really! If a squad consists of five soldiers, you may need 50,000 soldiers to watch 10,000 sites, but NOT 50,000 troops.

Last night there were several terrorist attacks in Sinai, the major one practically demolishing the Hilton hotel in Taba. There were many dead and wounded. I’m not about to talk of the incident itself in here



What seems to me very odd are the complaints that Egypt delayed the rescue forces from Israel, and the accusations that more lives might have been save if the people and equipment were allowed to get there sooner.



Is this factually correct, and did the Egyptians delay the Israeli rescue efforts? I don’t know, but it seems quite plausible.

Is this a cause to attack them, blame them, or anything of the sort? Of course not! That’s totally absurd.



Sure, from the point of view of a common Israeli person, Israel is nice and honorable, and much better equipped, with more well trained rescue personal. So if there’s such an incident, involving Israelis, it seems elementary that Israel should send forces to the rescue.

And if the Egyptians don’t let us, and keep their less trained and hardly equipped personal dealing with it alone, then they must be doing so in purpose, and be guilty of whatever the delays cause.

But that’s hardly a point of view that Egypt would share. Israel and Egypt are officially at peace, but that hardly implies close friendship and trust. To expect the Egyptians to allow Israeli military personal to enter Sinai at all, that’s quite a lot as it is. If they indeed took four whole hours to do so, the amazing thing is that they agreed so quickly.



Probably, had the infrastructure in Taba better, and they could handle it with their own resources, they wouldn’t have at all. And that would have been… normal. What sovereign state would allow a neighboring country, with which it has a strenuous relationship at best, to send military forces inside its borders, without giving the matter some consideration?

Israel knows it’s only sending rescue forces, and has no intention to do anything else. Egypt can’t know that, only agree to assume that for the time being. That takes some faith. And time to realise that they’re really not equipped to handle the problem as well, and that they want to handle the problem (Not doing so would be a PR nightmare, even if someone assumes that they don’t care at all about the city or the people hurt. Personally I don’t think it’s a likely assumption, but sadly enough some people do)



Imagine a similar condition, where a hotel in Eilat is bombed, and a lot of Egyptian tourists are hurt. Now imagine that Egypt requests permission to send in military and rescue crews to assist…

I’d be shocked and amazed if Israel would say yes. I’d be shocked and amazed if the population of Israel wouldn’t be shocked and amazed in case the government said yes.

Letting Egypt insert forces and heavy equipment into a city in Israel seems like a preposterous and ridiculous idea. Why should letting Israel insert forces and heavy equipment to a city in Egypt seem so much saner?



I’m not so sure most people in Egypt realize that Israel is the good and peaceful guy, and that they are the bad guy with militant intentions that cannot be trusted. I’m sure once someone tells them, they’ll see it as clearly as we Israelis do. That should help sort matters out. I wonder why no one thought to tell them sooner… OK, that’s enough sarcasm…