Batten Down the Hatches - 25 January 2002

About a dozen or more years ago the prevailing west winter wind, blowing in from the Pacific, developed a new trick or trajectory.

Instead of tearing across straight across 3,000 miles, most of it frozen prairie, and then hitting the Appalachians here in the East, and depositing its loads of snow across New England and New York state, it now, halfway across the country, dips down and heads due south.

It runs into warm winds drifting up from the south and all hell and Siberia breaks lose with the odd result, for instance, that in the past 15 years Atlanta, Georgia - in the state where the song says "Everything is peaches" - Atlanta has had eight times the annual snowfall of New York city.

So now, quite frequently, our snow storms here in and around New York come from the south.

Such a one, and a mighty one, was predicted last weekend and on Sunday morning the tele reassured with pictures of the new mayor in alpine gear and the word that 1200 snow fighters, 1400 snowploughs and 20,000 tons of salt were at the ready.

Mobilising

The coverage of a desert golf tournament, the Australian Open tennis, were interrupted from time to time by storm alerts. The bureau which committed a boo boo a few weeks ago was not going to be caught napping twice.

On your marks, here comes the storm - boom.

Well Central Park, which is the Weather Bureau's official recording centre here registered 1.7 inches of snow. So for the second time in a month the local weather bureau's forecast was a bust.

And this time it was not just a popular joke for it represents a loss of several million dollars for a hard-pressed city budget in the cost of mobilising all those thousands of snowploughs, tons of salt and an army of what are called sanitation workers.

However, two busted weather forecasts vanished into oblivion within hours of the arrival of a storm over Washington that in the first shock appeared to be as grave and scandalous as anything since the Watergate affair, which within two years of its discovery forced the first voluntary resignation of a president in American history.

The temptation to talk about the sudden collapse of Enron, the seventh largest American corporation, is irresistible but I, for one, shall resist any long, chop-licking recital - even though the press has pounced on it like a cage of mice let loose in a cheese store.

Integrity

There's no question it's a huge scandal but the impulse to treat it as a political scandal is mistimed and mistaken.

Both parties had received huge sums in campaign funds - 71 senators in a hundred were financially beholden to Enron.

The plot, in retrospect, is simple but the ramifications in banking, in economics, campaign financing, the law affecting pension funds, the integrity of the American system of auditing companies' books, the ramifications are as tortuous as the caves of Afghanistan.

Simply then Enron is the biggest energy company in America, in its special sense of a company engaged in such businesses as coal mining, oil refining and the generating of electric power.

Need I say that when such a company prospers it prospers exceedingly.

Stunning blow

Sometime in the late summer a vice-president of Enron warned the other high-ups of a likelihood that the company might be the victim of an elaborate accounting hoax and another officer wrote to the chairman warning that the company's stock was so absurdly over-priced that she feared the company "might implode in a wave of accounting scandals."

Nevertheless the chairman went on the internet saying everything was fine and he urged the employees to go on buying the company's shares.

Only two weeks ago did the stunning blow fall when the company declared its bankruptcy.

A stock that last summer was worth $90 a share was now worth about 60 cents.

But at the same time we heard several, if not many, of the company's directors had heeded the warnings, dumped their holdings and left with many millions of dollars.

Most of the company's 4,500 employees, who'd put their savings into the company's stock, were, overnight, out of work and penniless.

The American public is as stunned as the British people would have been in 1912 to learn that the captain of the Titanic, having been told by the ship's architect - as he was - that the ship would go down in two hours, summoned his exec officer, told him to round up the officers and prepare to abandon ship as silently as possible, ordering two or three lifeboats to be slipped down on the starboard side.

Contributions

Meanwhile the purser was instructed to open the ship's strong box, take all the currency and the jewels of the passengers and join the fleeing officers.

The chief steward was told to have his men patrol the ship and assure the passengers that everything was fine, no danger and go back to sleep. The stewards might then join the rest of the crew in the departing lifeboats and pull away.

Four congressional committees have started investigations, the most relevant of which is Senator Lieberman's committee on pension law reform.

Nineteen of his committee of 23, including Senator Lieberman, have received handsome campaign funds from Enron and many of them, and several other senators, have been quick to return the contributions with thanks and apologies all round, not least to their constituents, some of whom could be impoverished Enron ex-employees.

I think we'll leave it there and without doubt we'll come back to it many times.

The thing to watch is the material that comes out about the accounting, especially the auditing practices of American accountants. That, at any rate now, seems the place to look for the most unethical, even criminal, behaviour.

Messy and confused

You'll have guessed that there's one topic which is unpleasant to face and not enjoyable to talk about but essential to confront, since it has set off a firestorm of protest in Europe and practically shelved all other aspects of the war.

I mean, of course, the dreadful photograph of those detainees at the navy's base in Cuba.

I ought to be careful for reasons to come and say - detainees on their way to being detained in Guantanamo's cells.

And by way of introduction I have to say something in general I've avoided mentioning: That the Bush administration has been not very good in presenting its story of American policy since the shattering start of the war.

This was particularly true of President Bush's earliest statements on foreign policy.

I don't believe most Europeans had any idea how messy and confused Mr Clinton had left American foreign policy.

Ridiculous

Mr Bush's way of trying to clarify it was to say, in his inaugural, that the United States would look at each issue on its merits and act accordingly.

It would not feel compelled to rush in to every Balkan or Middle Eastern uprising and then get stuck with a timeless occupation.

This vow was spoken so simply and boldly, almost defiantly, the European media at once responded with the warning that under Bush the United States was going isolationist. Next thing you know, some said, NATO would be out or in on its own.

This was always ridiculous. But on related matters - the Kyoto Treaty for example - President Bush made an unnecessarily blunt declaration that he would not ratify it.

The vast majority of Europeans and Americans had never heard of the Kyoto Treaty. Ninety nine per cent of the signers felt the same way and only one country - was it Belgium? - had ratified it.

But the first rule of public relations, if you may use a term that sounds very callous applied to the tasks of war, is to ask how will our publicity look to the audience we're aiming at?

Threatened

So far the wartime public relations of this administration have been, in the main, designed not to enlighten Europe but to reinforce the patriotism of the home audience.

But what was in the mind of the man or the committee that released the dreadful Guantanamo photograph is impossible to guess.

This week Secretary Rumsfeld apologised for it, said his department should never have released it and explained that the men were not in their cells but in a passageway or walkway on their way to detention.

Many of these captured men had threatened, if they got the chance, to kill their captors.

They were told along that walkway to kneel down. They were handcuffed and shackled, and the ones who had, after a medical examination, seemed possibly victims of tuberculosis bade the decision to have the captors order masks.

Within minutes, once they got to their cells, they were unshackled, uncuffed, unmasked.

Accused

The nasty, unsolved problem about these detainees and about thousands more to come is to have the allies agree on their wartime legal identity.

All the legions of protestors jumped the gun, begged the question by assuming they are legally prisoners of war.

Secretary Rumsfeld himself doesn't know. Teams of lawyers are already working on the different rights available to a prisoner - an unlawful combatant, a civilian charged with a crime, a fellow soldier who can probably be accused of treason.

In the next weeks you're going to hear a lot of quotations from and appeals to the Geneva Conventions.

Next time I think we ought to remind ourselves of their history and present relevance.

After a first run-through I suspect that the last Geneva Convention, like the United States Constitution, did not anticipate this new kind of war.

It is still arbitrating the world of declarations of war, identifiable prisoners of war, clean distinctions between allies and enemies and silent on several of the moral issues of this new strange war.

Time for a new Geneva Convention.

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