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Spiked on... human trafficking.Locked up. Bruno Frey, below, complains that peer-reviewed journals force academics into prostitution.
However, there's another problem with the peer reviewed journal system - the way it locks knowledge away from those outside the academic system.
A few years ago, for example, I had a paper on AIDS published in Science - and there's a few reprints still knocking around in my office.
But I can't access the thing online. Indeed, my Harvard institutional subscription doesn't even let me view the abstract and this is the best link I can come up with.
Now, high intellectual property walls are commonly defended because they protect the right of the author to make money from his or her intellectual property.
But journals don't pay their authors - all they offer is prestige.
As Frey notes in his article, academics are increasingly publishing online - it's quicker and less painful than the traditional route. It also provides a chance that readers, outside a very privileged circle, will chance upon their work.
Academic sluts. Bruno Frey tears into the peer review system for economics journals, in particular the bizarre practice where authors are required to resubmit once they’ve made changes required by reviewers.
"The system of journal editing existing in our field at the present time virtually forces academics to become prostitutes," he writes in the journal, Public Choice. "Unlike prostitutes who sell their bodies for money, academics sell their soul to conform to the will of others, the referees and editors, in order to gain one advantage, namely publication.
"Most persons refusing to prostitute themselves and follow the demand of the system are not academics: they cannot enter, or have to leave academia because they fail to publish.
"Their integrity survives, but the persons disappear as academics."
Frey contrasts people with strong ideas, and prepared to stick with them, with two breeds of easy lay: 'born intellectual prostitutes' who are naturally slutty and 'learned intellectual prostitutes' who are slutty in order to survive.
By favouring economists of easy virtue, Frey suggests that "the members of a competitively oriented academia tend to be more malleable and more directed towards fulfilling what they see to be the prevailing standards."
The resulting effects on economics are negative: "non-economists are using the results produced in modern economics and its publication system less and less, because they judge them to be far from relevant."
Some refuse to be easily bedded, however. Reinhard Selten only published in non-refereed journals, unwilling to make the changes referees demands. He won the Nobel prize.
Frey himself, in contrast, has been round the block, publishing 350 papers in 140 journals over the last 37 years.
Perhaps he caught something that’s making him ratty…
Making the news. Most media outlets lead with the story that Andrew Gilligan has asked for the transcript of his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee to remain private "for the sake of weapons expert Dr David Kelly's family."
The Beeb, however, heads up with the "news" that: "Tony Blair is set to face more questions over the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly."
Yes, the big story is that tomorrow, when the PM holds a press conference, "questions on Dr Kelly's death are inevitable..."
Sure am glad they alerted us to that one.
"The ethics of grassing up a dictator." Yes, the BBC is getting to the heart of the matter by asking: " What are the ethical considerations of shopping the dictator to the US?"
If you know where Saddam is and are eyeing up the $25m reward on offer, Auntie warns you to think carefully before you act. "There is more to morality than the weighing up of consequences," she admonishes.
The Beeb's resident expert is Dr Julian Baggini, who answers questions like "does Saddam deserve to be captured and punished?" and "might my good actions further an immoral aim?"
This is not a spoof.
In the Guardian, Matt Wells says that Andrew Gilligan was recruited to the Today Programme as part of a deliberate attempt to "originate" more stories:
"Andrew Gilligan was headhunted from the Sunday Telegraph to cause trouble for Downing Street, Angus Stickler was brought across from Radio 5 Live to cause trouble for the Roman Catholic church, and former prisoner Raphael Rowe was appointed to cause trouble at the Home Office."
He also reports concerns about the way the programme has defended itself:
"On more than one occasion, Humphrys and James Naughtie have lapsed into the first person singular and plural in testy exchanges with government supporters, causing unease at the corporation. One BBC editor says: 'The way all the biggest presenters defended Gilligan goes to the very heart of Today, which is at the heart of our political journalism. All this we, us and I is very damaging.'"
What really happened at the airport.
While Andrew Gilligan reported fierce Iraqi resistance and US exaggerations, here's an eyewitness account from an Arab volunteer (take from Al-Ahram, via the Middle East Media Research Unit):
"The feeling that something was not right intensified as the volunteers moved to the airport. Abu Khaled believes that there was no military strategy to defend the airport...
"'We were the last to arrive at the airport and were ordered to take front-line positions, which would have left us completely exposed. We refused the order and accused the Iraqi military commanders of placing us in unnecessary danger. We asked them to let us choose the positions that we find appropriate. To avoid a confrontation, the military commanders agreed we could take a position within the trees surrounding the airport.'
"The first strike on the airport by the coalition forces left thousands of soldiers dead... The second strike was even more devastating, according to Abu Khaled. 'There was a division 50 metres away from me, after the strike I saw nothing - they were erased.' Abu Khaled decided, at that moment, to desert the battlefield. 'I told myself I would not die in this way. I was then convinced that treachery was afoot, and thought it unacceptable to sacrifice my life for nothing.' As he fled from the airport area, Abu Khaled could find no trace of the tens of thousands of troops that were positioned around Baghdad - now all that could be seen were crushed and deformed corpses.
"Abu Khaled's problems were far from over, however. He had to walk 20 kilometres to reach Baghdad . 'Exhausted, tense and with almost no food or drink for several days, I reached a house where I thought I could finally find shelter.' An Iraqi man opened the door and asked Abu Khaled about his identity. The Palestinian fighter answered proudly that he is an Arab volunteer. 'The man slapped the door in my face and said 'go away we do not want you in our country.' Not only did he refuse to let me into his house, he wouldn't even offer me a glass of water.'"
A powerful story - and an affecting one - just not the one Andrew Gilligan, or other BBC journalists, were reporting at the time.
More homicidal than suicidal. "Frankly, over the last few weeks I have felt more homicidal than suicidal at the parade of smears and lies which have been told about me and my reporting," says Andrew Gilligan.
Peter Preston reviews media coverage of the Kelly affair and despairs.
"The plain fact, however, is that nobody from start to finish through these past few dramatic days has contrived to produce identifiable sources beyond the tragic doctor. Some single sources - like 'a defence correspondent' on the Sun - are laughable by any standards. Few of them - even in an oddly energetic FT - have managed to stick with the same line much beyond 24 hours at a stretch. It all looked so certain. But then something else happened and the agendas you first thought of turned to puddles of muddle...
When the American press pursued Bill Clinton, we sniffed censoriously. How crude and cruel. But now all the potential winners of the Lewinsky Prize 2003 are Fleet Street veterans; and Libby Purves may have said it best in the Times, lamenting the toe-curling repugnance of 'the media and Westminster-media world: excitable, angry, self-righteous, ever-eager to dish it out and reluctant to take it'. We chase and we wish to slay the dragons we first thought of; but we do not always stop to think."
The BBC is on a "full war footing", says the Independent on Sunday, quoting Beeb insiders.
They believe a tape of Dr Kelly talking to Newsnight's Susan Watts will allow them to trounce the government.
The Independent quotes "one well-placed source" as saying: "When we heard about it, it was jaws on the floor all around.
"Plenty of us believe Kelly said something totally different to Gilligan to what he said publicly at the committee hearings. The rumours are that it's a devastating piece of evidence. The Government should be pretty worried."
However, The IoS adds a note of caution:
"Yet for all its renewed confidence, the BBC remains partially divided over one aspect of its case: Mr Gilligan himself. His superiors are said to be happy that, "give or take the odd semi-colon", the remarks he attributed to his source in his original report are what Dr Kelly told him.
"However, as one source said: 'There's a sense that they are going to the wall at the wrong time over the wrong story and the wrong correspondent. A lot of people had the impression that Gilligan had another very senior source apart from Kelly, and were very disturbed to find out that he hadn't.'"
The BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies, is pressing home the corporation's attack on the government:
"Our integrity is under attack and we are chastised for taking a different view on editorial matters from that of the government and its supporters.
"Because we have had the temerity to do this, it is hinted that a system that has protected the BBC for 80 years should be swept away and replaced by an external regulator that will 'bring the BBC to heel'."
Matthew D'Ancona, in the Sunday Telegraph, desribes Dr Kelly as "that rarest of creatures: a spin doctor with a doctorate."
"In his field, he was regarded by journalists - and clearly regarded himself - as an oracle, a sounding board and a good source of gossip. The more we learn about him, the more plausible it seems that he had indeed formed a strong view about the worth (or worthlessness) of the September Iraq dossier, a view which he felt entitled to share with his contacts in the media. I doubt he expected the incendiary consequences of his briefing. But I also suspect that he had a fairly clear idea of what he was doing when he spoke to the BBC's Andrew Gilligan, Susan Watts and Gavin Hewitt."
David Kelly's religious beliefs are now under scrutiny.
According to the Observer, he was a member of the Persian Bahai faith. The Bahai's website say they are trying to build a global society, based on the "belief is the conviction that humanity is a single people with a common destiny."
The Observer tells us that Kelly joined the group (which has 5000 members) in 1999. In October,
"Kelly gave a 40-minute talk [to 30 members of the group], which was accompanied with a slide show, about his work as a weapons inspector in Iraq. He ended with a question-and-answer session on the intelligence dossier, which had been made public 10 days earlier as part of what opponents claim was a government attempt to swing public opinion behind war on Iraq."
Apparently, Kelly said he was happy with the factual content of the dossier, but not with how it was being interpreted.
It always surprises me, but Americans tend to make a lot of noise while watching movies - grunts, half cheers, commentary to their neighbours or the audience at large.
Last night, watching the tense Brit horror pic, 28 Days Later, the main characters are driving up the M1 in a black cab. Everyone else in the country is either dead or zombified. The zombies can't drive. The road is therefore empty.
From the back of the theater, in a loud voice, to no-one in particular: "No traffic! Gee! What a perfect situation!"
Does aid work? Not according to William Easterly's damning analysis of what he calls the cartel of good intentions (links and a more detailed summary here).
Easterly is a controversial figure, who ran into trouble when working as economist at the World Bank, when he published an article in the FT based on his book, The Elusive Quest for Growth. Disciplinary proceedings were mooted and Easterly left the bank soon after.
He now works for the Institute for International Economics.
Easterly sums up his charges as follows. Aid organisations: "(a) define their output as money disbursed rather than service delivered, (b) produce many low-return observable outputs like glossy reports and 'frameworks' and few high-return less observable activities like ex-post evaluation, (c) engage in obfuscation, spin control, and amnesia (like always describing aid efforts as 'new and improved') so that there is little learning from the past, (d) put enormous demands on scarce administrative skills in poor countries."
In another recent paper, Easterly claims to have punched holes in the influential Burnside and Dollar piece showing "aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal, monetary, and trade policies."
Easterly and his co-authors show that the Burnside and Dollar model is not robust when more up-to-date data are used. "[Our] paper does not argue that aid in ineffective. We make a much more limited claim. We simply note that adding additional data to the BD study of aid effectiveness raises new doubts about the effectiveness of aid and suggests that economists and policy makers should be less sanguine about concluding that foreign aid will boost growth in countries with good policies."
This is all ultra-polite stuff - indeed Craig Burnside is thanked for his help in re-analysing the data. However, readers there is steel in the attack - focusing aid on well-governed countries is now major donor orthodoxy (though Easterly claims, in The Cartel of Good Intentions that donor is still as likely to end up in 'good' countries as 'bad').
Easterly is also prepared to have a pop at the campaign for debt relief (what next? mother's milk?):
"Despite its overwhelming popularity among policymakers and the public, debt relief is a bad deal for the world's poor," he writes in Foreign Policy. "By transferring scarce resources to corrupt governments with proven track records of misusing aid, debt forgiveness might only aggravate poverty among the world's most vulnerable populations."
Finally and relatedly, reviewing Easterly's book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, Brad de Long makes a downbeat assessment of the efficacy of the latest set of development solutions (although he's trying to believe in them):
"It is clear that the neoliberal policy prescriptions--try to make government honest and smaller (so it doesn't have its fingers in as many economic decisions), try to keep the macroeconomy stable, and boost world trade and thus cross-border economic links as much as possible--affect only a small proportion of these requirements for successful economic development.
"Neoliberal policy prescriptions have little ability to create governments that energetically invest in collective goods, a political system that enforces accountability, a national consensus for growth, and a commitment by donors to reward success only.
"Thus there is a sense in which neoliberalism as we know it is a counsel of despair. Most of what is needed is beyond its reach. The hope is that privatization and world economic integration will in the long run help create the rest of the preconditions for successful development. But we are playing this card not because we think it is a winner, but because it is the last one in our hand."
Read more on The Cartel here or there's a whole load of Easterly PowerPoints here.
The BBC seems increasingly confident that it will soon have Alistair Campbell's head, running a solicitous article asking how Tony Blair will "cope" without his spin doctor.
According to BBC correspondent Nick Assinder is akin to a recaltricant child:
"Unless there are some real changes in approach from Downing Street after Campbell's departure, it may be hard for the prime minister to persuade a sceptical public that he really has turned over a new leaf this time."
In a passionate defense of Andrew Gilligan, Boris Johnson argues that the reporter was pro-war:
"But if there were BBC reporters who opposed the war, Andrew Gilligan was not among them. I know, from talking to him while he was reporting from Baghdad, that he supported the enterprise to remove Saddam. He proves, in fact, that it is possible to support the war, and still to have doubts about the evidence submitted for the existence of weapons of mass destruction."
He asks the BBC's critics:
"Are they really saying that David Kelly was not a suitable, indeed an unimprovable source, given that he had been 37 times to Iraq and knew more about Saddam's military preparedness than any person in this country?"
Single sources. One of the ironies of the Kelly affair was that the BBC’s case was based on the claim that the government had abused intelligence sources by publishing uncorroborated information.
In the original Today report (audio), Andrew Gilligan told listeners:
"Essentially, the 45 minute point was probably the most important thing that was added. The reason it hadn’t been in the original draft was that it only came from one source and most of the other claims were from two. The intelligence agencies say they don’t really believe it was necessarily true because they thought the person making the claim had actually made a mistake. He'd got mixed up."
That night, Gavin Hewitt reported on the Ten O’Clock news: "The government acknowledged today that the 45 minute claim was based on a single source; it wasn’t corroborated."
On 6 July, the BBC Board of Governors was forced to defend its own use of sources:
"Although the guidelines say that the BBC should be reluctant to broadcast stories based on a single source, and warn about the dangers of using anonymous sources, they clearly allow for this to be done in exceptional circumstances. Stories based on senior intelligence sources are a case in point."
Not a big deal. But ironic all the same.
[All emphases added.]
Jeff Jarvis picked up my Andrew Gilligan post with startling alacrity - and Matt Prescott has now added a critique of my critique in Jeff's comments.
Matt argues professional journalists shouldn't apologise for earlier assessments, adding that "personally I would rather not watch yesterday's news being rehashed for today. This may be what bloggers have the time and audience to do but is less interesting to the majority of other people."
I'm not sure whether Matt is clear that I was commenting on Gilligan's war blogging from Iraq, not his journalism since returning to the UK (the Kelly affair et al). But I think Gilligan's online reporting would have been much stronger if he'd felt able to return to previous posts when circumstances proved them wrong.
Take his perspective on the airport. We get two posts on 3 April (emphases added):
0906 GMT: We're getting reports from Reuters that US forces have started to arrive in the vicinity of the Saddam International Airport, which if true, means they are 10 - 15 miles to the west or south west of the city.
1513 GMT: Within the last 90 minutes I've been at the airport. There is simply no truth in the claims that American troops are surrounding it. We could drive up to it quite easily. The airport is under full Iraqi control.
And one on 4 April:
0809 GMT: From our end, the airport story isn't over yet. We have extremely reliable reports that the airport road remains in Iraqi hands, and troops have defensive positions with their guns ready. Also, that large numbers of reinforcements are pouring down that road. So although we think the US may well indeed control significant parts of the airport, the story really isn't over there yet.
Then nothing. The story may not have been over - but Gilligan stops following it.
Now it's hard to work out exactly what happened, but it's a fair assumption that US troops must have been in the vicinity of thr airport on the 3rd, as they moved in at dawn on the 4th. The airport was taken that day. According to this photo essay, troops "encountered sporadic light arms fire, but not the stiff resistance they had feared."
If significant troops did pour down the airport road, then they must have turned back again - because the counter-attack promised by the Iraqi information minister (the airport will become 'a graveyard' for US villains) never materialised.
I wonder now - and wondered at the time - what Gilligan thought he'd got it wrong and why.
I'm not idly pointing a finger at him. Having blogged from a major event (though nothing on the scale of a war), I know how one wanders around in the gloom, with informants casting the odd shard of light on what is going on. It takes time to piece together a realistic picture and some events seem destined to remain indeterminate - with contradictory perspectives that stubbornly refuse to be reconciled.
Part of the beauty of a blog, though, is that you can be open with the reader about these difficulties. Gilligan, it seems to me, rowed from one island of certainty to another. And his reporting was the weaker for it...
Google Adsense - a good background briefing.
The story on Gilligan's blog seems to have got a lot of attention - thanks a lot for dropping by - and thanks to all those who linked to it. It's weird to write something late at night and find that thousands of people have read it by the time you get up the next morning!
It's Campbell's fault. The BBC's Mark Mardell points the finger of blame for the Kelly affair at the government, and most probably Alistair Campbell (video).
"There's little doubt Dr. Kelly felt under pressure because his name became public, so how did it happen?" he says. "Dr Kelly was named because the Ministry of Defense press office told journalists if they'd guessed correctly. One journalist put up twenty names before reaching the right one. One firmer insider told me that the MoD has behaved abominably, but he said no civil servant could have taken that decision. It was a political act, so whose to blame."
Mardell tells us that Hoon has ruled himself out, while Blair snapped "untrue" when journalists suggests it could have been him. Of the three suspects he fingers that leaves just one - Alistair Campbell who is "saying nothing."
Denis Boyles, meanwhile, puts Kelly himself in the dock: "To Gilligan, Kelly wasn't Deep Throat. He was Loose Lips, dropping an innuendo here, slipping a reference in there, perhaps inflating his importance at the expense of others as he went. Kelly obviously relished his relationships with journalists, of all people. Up until his last moments, he was emailing reporters, his new best friends."
Gilligan’s Blog Many people won't remember that Andrew Gilligan - the reporter at the centre of a scandal over the suicide of UK scientist, Dr David Kelly - kept a blog during the recent war with Iraq.
Gilligan contributed to the BBC group blog, making 60-odd posts from Baghdad, and clocking up over 6000 words of impressions of the war.
A blog allows a writer to report live and direct, unmediated by his editors. So what does an analysis of Gilligan-the-blogger tell us about Gilligan-the-reporter?
Point 1: Gilligan knows Iraq well. Gilligan jokes about his favourite Saddam Hussein statues ("one of my favourites is a moody-looking Saddam on a tall plinth. And there are tiny little models of Margaret Thatcher, George Bush Senior and the President of France, Jacques Chirac cringing at his feet") and has 'close Iraqi friends.'
His impressions are not based on a short sojourn during the war. He seems to have considerable experience of Iraq under Saddam's regime.
Point 2: Gilligan believes Iraqis prefer Saddam to the US. "I do get the impression that people are sincere in a lot of their denunciations of the US," he writes on 27 March. 'They may not like Saddam a whole lot, but they may dislike Americans even more."
By 1 April the strength of anti-US feeling has worsened. He detects 'a deep and growing resentment of what the Americans are doing,' adding 'people here don't like Saddam at all but they don't like the Americans any more.'
After Saddam's fall, however, Gilligan notes 'It's now become as taboo to be in favour of Saddam, as it was taboo to be against him a few hours ago.'
Point 3: Gilligan is very wary of US/UK 'claims'. Sometimes, this is light-hearted. 'We hear reports of it being the "heaviest night of bombing" and maybe I'm just a very good sleeper, but it didn't strike me as at all heavy last night," he writes on 21 March. 'I thought if anything it was on the light side.'
Other times, the scepticism is casual, but more pronounced: 'There is clearly something going on, but not in the centre as the Americans have said, but out on the outskirts of Baghdad.' (5 April)
And there seems to be a general predisposition towards believing the US and UK exaggerate (sex up?) as a matter of course:
'I know there's been a lot of wishful thinking in the coalition in all sorts of ways - about revolts in Basra, chemical weapons factories, short marches on Baghdad.' (2 April 2003)
'The US has a history of premature claims in this conflict and it's clearly in their interest to create psychological momentum in the hope that the defenders will give up.' (5 April 2003)
Point 4, Gilligan seems less sceptical of Iraqi claims. Although we suspect Gilligan must have been subjected to significant Iraqi 'media minding,' there are few hints of this in his blog. At one point, he talks about being locked in a press conference as Iraqi ministers leave ('I sneaked out through the kitchens and saw them making off in a taxi. So they are actually still in Baghdad and still very defiant'), but generally we are left feeling he is operating more or less unhindered.
Gilligan must have had considerable exposure to the Iraqi information minister, but he mentions him just a couple of times, once right in the regime's dying moments, when he makes 'a remarkable performance' on 'the BBC roof' (7 April).
It's surprising that such a comic figure doesn’t receive more prolonged discussion. Perhaps it's because he's so convinced both sides are spinning: 'it is in the interest of both sides to make wild and unrealistic claims of their successes.' (5 April)
After all, the Americans time the liberation of Baghdad for breakfast news: 'We always wondered whether the American tanks would roll up in front of our live cameras in time for the American morning TV shows, and they just about have - 0845 on the East Coast, 0545 on the West Coast. It is more or less picture-perfect timing for the Americans.' (9 April 2003)
Point 5, Gilligan doesn't always believe what his eyes are telling him. Throughout the blog, he notes the poor state of Baghdad's defences (describing them as 'amateurish'), but he still cannot believe the city is going to fall without a fight.
'Despite American hopes for the Guard's destruction,' he writes on 31 March, 'the bombing may not have the desired effect. After seven weeks of intensive pounding, the Serb army emerged from Kosovo almost intact.' He also detects 'a growing sense of people coming to terms with the bombardment.'
The next day, he reports that people are buying TV aerials in order to keep up with the Iraqi TV: 'The level of support for the regime amongst the population seems to be stronger than we thought… It seems people are going out of their way to buy something that allows them to keep in touch with regime and its message.'
When the Americans do arrive, Gilligan seems to be really surprised. 'Early this morning, the extraordinary sight of American armour in the heart of Baghdad,' he writes (7 April).
Point 6, Gilligan's pretty stoical. He doesn’t complain much (though on 28 April he mentions that the previous night's bombardment has been 'genuinely frightening.') or seem to regard himself as the story.
He does get bored at one stage though ('I'm afraid my reports are beginning to sound a little like Groundhog day because all I can tell you is what happened last night is what happened every night') and seems to spend a lot of time holed up watching Iraqi television.
He is also convinced that the US is deliberately targeting journalists: 'It's an attack on the journalists here. It's been expected for a long time - we've taken not to going to the information ministry at night because we believed it may be attacked. Even so I think it does take targeting to a new phase.'
Point 7, Gilligan's sourcing seems a little dodgy. Gilligan's most noted error was his fervent denials that the US was moving into Baghdad international airport. "Within the last 90 minutes I've been at the airport," he tells us at 15.13 GMT on 3 April There is simply no truth in the claims that American troops are surrounding it. We could drive up to it quite easily. The airport is under full Iraqi control."
He's still clinging to this story at 08.09 GMT the next day when extremely reliable reports tell him 'that the airport road remains in Iraqi hands, and troops have defensive positions with their guns ready. Also, that large numbers of reinforcements are pouring down that road.' The airport, of course, fell with little resistance, while BBC colleagues have expressed doubt that Gilligan made it all the way to the airport at all.
Is it me, or does Gilligan's reported speech from an Iraqi market sound less than convincing? 'We went down to the market yesterday and people said they thought it was just more of the same from Centcom. We've had lots of things that have been premature, lots of things that turned out to be wrong, and they thing it's more of the same.' (3 April 2003)
Also, wouldn't you reassess your life if one of your 'close Iraqi friends' really told an American marine this? "I'm going to exercise my right of free speech for the first time in my life - we want you out of here as soon as possible."
Point 8, Gilligan never apologises. One of the beauties of blogging is the ability to use later posts to comment on, reshape or even correct earlier ones. 'That's what I thought was happening then, but this is what I now know…' That sort of thing.
Gilligan doesn't go in for any of that. He never tells us what went wrong with the airport story. We don't hear why he thinks Iraqi support for Saddam, 'stronger than we thought' on April 1st has evaporated a week later.
In fact, not one single recapitulation, reversal or reanalysis in 6000 words.
Instead, when a prediction or report is wrong, Gilligan moves seamlessly on to the next one.
Point 9, there are no happy endings in Gilligan's world. Gilligan gets a little giddy at the reception he receives when Baghdad is liberated ('I'm starting to feel a little like the Queen, with so many people waving at me... People are rushing up to tell us how much they hate Saddam,' 9 April), but the mood doesn’t last long.
The next day, looting and anarchy are starting to bite. A day later, he watches looters 'dragging out heart monitors and incubators' from the a hospital.
Even more worrying is the lack of water, 'there are a lot of problems with the water supply in the city and that's really very serious because very soon people will start dying from disease and thirst caused by lack of water.' (9 April)
Death from water borne disease is all too common in developing countries, but death from thirst is comparatively unusual. With conditions so bad in Baghdad, one can see why Gilligan is worried…
Point 10, through it all Gilligan keeps his sense of humour. Gilligan signs off on 15 April with a predictably tough analysis: 'Most people hated Saddam but they're not really very keen on being part of what they see as an American colony. I think if the Americans can't get some sort of credible Iraqi administration going, opposition could build up very quickly here.'
However, he managed to amuse himself a few days earlier with the unlikely comic figure of the Iraq's fugitive former President: 'Saddam Hussein has already been spotted in more places than Lord Lucan. He's been in the Russian embassy, he's been in the mosque this morning, he's alleged to be on a convoy to Syria - no doubt he'll soon be found on a sofa in Huddersfield. He's a man of great mystery. It was never certain he was in Baghdad in the first place.'
'Of course,' he concludes, 'everyone is very keen to find him and bring him to justice.'
And the others, too, of course: Tony Blair, George Bush, Alistair Campbell…
A Long Peace gets a good write-up from Ruth Dudley Edwards: 'The pamphlet is a terrific read: the trio are as sympathetic to the unionist community as they are unsparing in their criticisms of its tendency to negativity, passivity and paranoia and are spot-on in their suggestions as to how it could use its brains and punch its weight for the greater good. Download the pamphlet from the website: it might make you think rather than hate.'
So if you're interested in Northern Ireland, do what the woman says - download A Long Peace here...
Casualties of war. “We all called it a war – the greatest ever war between the BBC and the government," said Andrew Marr on BBC Radio 5 today, on the death of Dr David Kelly. "We never meant it like that. We never thought there would be any casualties.”
Phone fraud Apparently, last year's London street crime explosion wasn't all that it was dressed up to be. According to the Telegraph:
"Mr Godwin said research by the Met, Dixons and The Link, suggested that as many as 100,000 alleged street crimes involving mobile phones in England and Wales could be false.
'It is important that what appears to have become a fairly common practice is stamped out and we can concentrate on the real problems of street crime,' he said.
In one case, a man entered a south London station to claim he had been robbed of his phone. He gave the number and when police called it, the supposedly stolen phone rang in his pocket."
Greer leers... "I'll be called a paedophile after this. It's going to get me in a lot of trouble," says Germain Greer about her forthcoming book, "The Boy".
"I just can't let it go. Working on it has been the best fun in the world, because it is a book of pictures of ravishing boys.
"I'd like to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys - real boys, not simpering 30-year-olds with shaved chests.
"The snag is that everywhere I turn I find new pictures of outrageously lovely boys and it's too late to get them into the book but I keep downloading them, scanning them and printing them, just in case and just for fun."
I imagine the British police have already started investigating...