Quick round-up:

The list of opters-out to the Google Books Settlement is up here. It’s a long image-scan .pdf in which all the responders are filed by first name, under their real rather than professional name. I understand there may also be issues with married and unmarried names. Annoying, but still a fascinating document, and it includes more than a few notables: Thomas Pynchon is there, so is Louis de Bernières – and so is one John Prescott, who appears at first glance to be the John Prescott, former deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Perhaps I should write to him and ask – if it is he, then he’d be an interesting ally in nudging the government to get off its regal backside and do something useful.

On that note, I’ve been thinking about the government’s attitude and come to the conclusion that it’s relatively simple: it’s convenient to use the smaller players in the media as a whipping horse from time to time. The government loves to be friends with News International and Lord Mandelson gets on frightfully well with David Geffen, but it’s very happy to kick the British Film industry or let writers swing in order to be in tight with Google: trashing creatives in flowery shirts is painless and gives a sense of playing hardball with “the wealthy” – because all creatives are parasitic fops, don’t you know? And some of them, of course, go the other way like that Oscar Wilde bloke, and some take drugs, they’re a bad lot with too much time on their hands, never mind that they’re the engine of a decent slice of the ‘proper’ economy – without actually angering any powerful financial/media groups or making bankers unhappy.

Labour’s obsession with being a friend to industry and finance – a vital component of its election strategy when Tony Blair was reshaping an unelectable party – means that they can’t really be tough with city firms and so on except in crisis, and even then, as we know, it doesn’t stick. They like high-profile initiatives which mean little. Real banking regulation is hard. It’s so much simpler to trumpet the demise of naughty tax equity funding, for example, even if there wasn’t really all that much abuse of the system and it means the demise of £200m of filmmaking over night… (Sorry, that’s a ghost of 2004 I’ve been carrying around for a while – it made my life really difficult for a couple of years, and eventually resulted in me writing The Gone-Away World, so I shouldn’t really complain.)

Aaaaaanyway… rant over. Go check out the Google list. Moving on…

Regarding Oxfam…

I’m going to be talking to some folks from Oxfam this month and getting their point of view. If you have questions you’d like me to ask or wise thoughts you want to share, that’s what the comment thread here is for.

And stuff…

Appearances:

I’m at P-Con at the beginning of March, and then at the Oxford Literary Festival (event 564) at the end of March. Come along and laugh at me as I try to figure out what to say which won’t make me sound like a twerp. I will also be at the 140conf meetup this week.

Facebook:

Someone has created a Gonzo Lubitsch Facebook account. It isn’t me, but it is quite funny.

Someone else has created a Ronnie Cheung page.

UK News:

The Liberal Democrats have surprised me by announcing that they will not form part of a coalition government in the event (increasingly likely) of a hung parliament. They will instead demand four policy initiatives. I understand the logic, but I think it’s a mistake, and I suspect the effects of raising Capital Gains Tax to the same levels as Income Tax may be rather more far-reaching than they imagine. Not to mention that a Conservative government almost certainly wouldn’t go for that without weakening it to the point where it makes no odds.

Elsewhere, the shouting match over Binyam Mohamed continues. Alan Johnson’s bluster and Kim Howells’ inexplicable decision to be (as it appeared to several people I’ve spoken to) rather rude to my wife on Feb 12th have availed them nought. It seems the ISC was misled, and David Davis has said it’s toothless and unable to supervise MI5.

WoW:

By way of an experiment, I have created a World Of Warcraft guild – The Knitting Circle – on the European Scarshield Legion RPPvP server. (Yes, you heard me. RPPvP. I have no idea why, it seemed like a good idea at the time.) We’re an Alliance guild, and my character is a gnome called Weatherby. I wanted to call the guild Lady Weatherby’s Knitting Circle and serve tea in Warsong Gulch, but the name wouldn’t fit on the guild register.

Darn.

Anyway, the idea is that anyone who wants can sign up and we’ll all go trash monsters together and I will call that ‘work’. It is not what you would call a professional guild, and no one is to be mean to anyone. Except the enemy, of course. Actually, if there are any WoW-playing authors out there who want to throw down and make a Horde guild, that would be hilarious.

The New Book:

… is great (even if I do say so myself), bastard hard to finish properly, going well, and will be done when it’s done. At the moment I can barely see the damn screen because my nose is running so hard and my eyes are sore, so in about ten seconds I’m going to have a shower and go get a bacon sandwich, fill my body with over-the-counter medication (but not paracetamol which initiates a chain reaction of badness culminating in the blood vessels around my eyes breaking) and see what happens. If there is a passage in the middle of the book with unicorns and flowers we may assume I wrote it today.

Wow.

Alan Johnson is angry. He’s outraged. Like Jonathan Evans and some old geezer who studies MI5 and is therefore completely impartial (unlike five senior judges, whose ‘preposterous’ suggestion that the Security Service could be complicit in torture is baseless and wicked and gives succour to Al Qaeda).

[Photo: Downing Street under CC Attribution]

There is no ‘culture of suppression’ in MI5 (I thought keeping secrets was their job, but I was wrong). They rushed – against the wishes of the Americans, who despite releasing all this information in their own country were absolutely determined to keep it from ours – they rushed to assist Binyam Mohamed’s lawyers with evidence that he’d been subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. The fact that the goverment’s lawyer wrote to the court to ask them not to say any of these things has nothing to do with suppression, and everything to do with the judiciary’s insane crusade on behalf of the enemies of Great Britain.

Yes, it’s all about Them and not Us. We are good, and everything we do by definition is also good, because it is done in support of our goodness. So all this talk about ‘democratic accountability’ and ‘the rule of law’ is just so much hot air spouted by men in dresses who don’t understand the exigencies. Criticism of Us is mana from Heaven for Them, and don’t you forget it.

It’s also not about complicity in torture. MI5 does not condone, collude in, sponsor or solicit torture. No, indeed. The British Government (being good) would not allow it. The fact that the law does not seem to agree with Mr Johnson and Mr Evans’ perception is not relevant.

And what does the law say? Let’s ask the Joint Committee on Human Rights:

The UN Committee Against Torture, on the other hand, appears to have adopted a wider definition of complicity, which includes “tacit consent” and “acquiescence”, and includes constructive as well as actual knowledge that torture was taking place (i.e. it is enough if the party who is alleged to be complicit should have known that it was taking place). The UN Committee also appears less concerned with the requirement that the assistance must have had a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime of torture itself. So for example, the Committee Against Torture has made clear that the involvement of doctors is to be treated as a form of participation, even if only for the purpose of ensuring that the victim of torture does not die or suffer physical injuries during interrogation.

We know already that it was apparent that Binyam Mohamed was subject to mistreatment during his time in Pakistan. That of itself may constitute complicity, at least as far as I can see. It is apparent that he then disappeared from view when he was rendered to Morocco for really serious, full blown torture, and that our questioning of him continued while he was off the radar. It is not yet demonstrated whether we knew in what circumstances he was being held or that someone was cutting his penis and testicles with a scalpel. It would however be clear to a hedgehog that when the security services of another country disappear someone for interrogation (which is in itself of questionable legality) from a place where that person is deprived of sleep and mistreated, and they then refuse to give details of the conditions under which the subject is being interrogated, certain conclusions at least suggest themselves. Myself, I would not imagine that they’d been taken from Pakistan to a beach resort with nice cocktails. If it were the case – and again, to my untutored eye, every step along this road of discovery seems to take us closer to this conclusion – that we were aware of what was happening in Morocco, that would clearly and unequivocally be complicity in torture. Even if we didn’t know but really should have (or chose not to) that’s apparently enough.

But none of that is relevant because we are good, and Alan Johnson and Jonathan Evans are keen to remind us of that. It’s shameful to ask the question and irresponsible to demand an investigation. Only wimps and liars and terrorist sympathisers would ever do those things, and they’re un-British and should be ashamed.

Only Al Qaeda, thundered the academic bloke who studies MI5, only our enemies will draw any comfort from this.

No, sir. You are in error. There’s one other group, small though it may be, who might draw such comfort from all this being examined by our judges: men who have been tortured with razor blades while we pushed notes under the door.