World Trade Center

We just saw Oliver Stone's film World Trade Center. He was surprisingly restrained - no conspiracy theories in it at all. We both felt it was as honest a portrait as can be told by someone other than the people who actually went through it. Granted, they did work with him on the story and the families were involved - but it is a lot to ask that such a major film (with major actors) would remain true, and I think it did. It also struck me, as we were sitting in the theater filled with a British audience, that the film was so very American and I wondered if they were responding like we were. We Americans expect that everyone, especially our firemen and policemen, will always do the right thing and not be hesitant to risk their own lives for someone else's. That's our culture - or at least one of our cultural myths - and such a common storyline that I take it for granted that the Brits would get it. But do they? Or are they rolling their eyes and sighing in the dark at the blatant heroism? It's funny. Living in England, I feel safe and know that most everyone I encounter will be polite and most likely, kind. And that if our car broke down at least 5 people would stop and ask if we needed help. That's not an assumption I make at home. Yet I don't feel that same belief from the Brits about themselves and I definitely don't feel their belief that they always do the right thing. But maybe they do. Maybe it is too British of a thing for me to get. Maybe they are more humble than us. Perhaps they are just as heroic but they just don't celebrate it. Maybe they should! It may be more honorable to not 'toot one's horn' but the behavior of the policemen and firemen in New York immediately after 9/11 seems to be one thing that we should be proud of. And there aren't many things to be proud of at the moment, so I'm grateful for this!

This is a good film. Very good. A heck of a lot better than United 93.
Go see it! Here's a link to the official site... WTC.

)K

Thirty...

...one!

Dripping wet with a mouse in my hand

Well, I passed the Theory test this morning. 35 out of 35 on the multiple choice questions and 60 points out of a possible 75 on the hazard perception. I believe I would have gotten a higher score on the hazards if I hadn't held back like I did. If you click too many times, you could lose points for the whole clip you're watching (there were a total of 14 clips), so I was trying to think the way the DSA test designers would think. I guess I was too careful.

The test experience didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked. You're supposed to arrive 10-15 minutes early, which I tried to do. It was raining this morning. I drove (illegally) to the test centre at 8am, but I didn't get to the front desk until about 8:45. Yeah, tell me about it. I was a bit mislead by the AA Routefinder directions I had printed out yesterday. It's my own fault, I should have done a bit more research before leaving. Then I wouldn't have walked the wrong way on Old Christchurch Road for about a mile in the rain before deciding that it was indeed the wrong direction. By the time I got to where I needed to go, I was quite drenched and sweaty (if I had gone the right way from the parking lot the first time, I would have gotten there in about 5 minutes and been reasonably dry). I pressed the buzzer for the test centre and the conversation went something like this:

Buzzer Lady: "Good morning..."

Me: "Morning, I have an appointment for the theory test."

Buzzer Lady: "Name?"

Me: "Peder Richardsen" (name changed on the blog to hide identity)

Buzzer Lady: "What time did you think your appointment was, exactly?"

Me: "I know. I'm really sorry. I thought I left with plenty of time, but then I got really lost and I've been running around out here in the rain for the last half hour. Very sorry."

Buzzer Lady: "Well, you better come on up. I don't know if you can sit the test, but come up and we'll see what we can do."

Me: "Ok. Thank you!"

I go inside and the building porter tells me it'll be fine, just sweet-talk her. He wishes me luck and I dart up the stairs, probably splattering rain-water and sweat everywhere. I apologize a few more times when I get to the test centre and she says the only way I can take the test is if I don't do the marketing and customer satisfaction surveys at the end. Uhm, OK. Perfectly fine with that. She tells me she could have given me a lift because she lives just near me. "Wish I'd known!" She asks about my American accent because it says my nationality is Danish. I explain why. She tells me to go hand my documents to her colleague around the corner. He takes me into another room where several people are well into their tests and shows me what I need to do.

The multiple choice section is a breeze and I whizz through it as I'm trying to stop sweating. I have to mop my brow with my wet shirt every few minutes. I click away at the answers. Then I move on to the hazard perception bit. This requires headphones. Impressively, they provide a moist towelette to clean the headphone ear-cups with. Being somewhat "hygiene conscious", I make use of this before and after the test. The hazard perception takes a little longer because you have to watch the 14 clips (about a minute, minute and a half each). Finally, the test is over. I skip the marketing and customer satisfaction surveys (damn, I really wanted to do those) and go back out to reception. Buzzer Lady's colleague hands me an embossed certificate stating that I passed, "Well done!". I thank him, go back downstairs, tell the porter I talked her into it and that I passed the test, head back to the car I'm not supposed to be driving, and drive to work without L-plates or a fully licensed driver accompanying me.

Anyway, I passed and it only took me about 30 minutes for the whole thing (not counting the journey there). Yahoo! On to the next test... the practical. I'm going to call them tomorrow to schedule it. Apparently there's usually a five-week waiting list, but hopefully I can get a cancelled appointment or something. I want to get this over with! I'll probably do a one or two hour session with a driving instructor before the test, though. Just to make sure I've got the correct driving habits to pass the test.

Testing, testing

Well, I've been studying every day and I just took two sample tests on the Driving Standards Agency website. Scored 35 out of 35 on both of them, so I'm fairly confident I'll pass at least that part of the test tomorrow. The hazard perception test should be OK, too. I should be able to at least get 44 out of 75 points (the minimum to pass), though I would hope that I could score a little higher than that. Time to go to bed soon. The test is first thing in the morning.

"Your engine catches fire. What should you do first?
a) Lift the bonnet and disconnect the battery
b) Lift the bonnet and warn other traffic
c) Call a breakdown service
d) Call the fire brigade"



Answer: d

The Constitution... remember that?

Great little piece in The Observer today about how the fundaments of the US Constitution are being eroded by the current Administration. A shame really. After all, the Constitution is one of the things that defines America. Anyway, here it is:


Even a bag-lady can teach Bush about human rights

The President is destroying the constitution and few Americans seem to care or even notice

Henry Porter
Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer

An elaborately turned-out bag-lady of the sort you occasionally see in Manhattan - a former fashion editor, perhaps, or designer who has lost her mind but not her style - stopped in front of all the people sunning themselves in Bryant Park and shouted at me: 'I obey the constitution.' I wish I had had the wit to shout back: 'Which is more than your President.'

What Bush is doing in the run-up to the midterm elections is a disgrace equal to any other scandal of his nasty, incipiently despotic, regime. Using the hallowed anniversary of 9/11, he has demanded Congress pass a law that enables the major terrorist suspects, until now held in CIA secret prisons all over the world, to be transferred and tried at Guantanamo.

The proposed courts would allow evidence obtained by what is politely called in America 'coercive interrogation' as well as hearsay and would deny the suspects' rights to see evidence against them because it is deemed by the government to be classified. Because these courts plainly fly in the face of the rights enshrined by the American constitution and the Geneva Convention, the Supreme Court ruled against them last June.

This was hardly going to deter Bush and Dick Cheney. Last week, the President made a speech to an audience of sympathisers in the White House, many of whom had lost people in the attacks five years ago, to promote this legislation. If enacted, it will set Congress and the executive against the Supreme Court and the United States against international standards of decency and the rule of law.

Whatever Congress decides, nothing can change the court's original opinion that the United States would be in violation of article three of the Geneva Convention, which only allows for trials in regular courts that afford 'the guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilised people'.

The day after his speech, Bush went to Atlanta to address another audience, this time of 'conservative intellectuals' (truly an oxymoron in Bush's America), and told it that he required a law from Congress that would legalise the NSA's eavesdropping programme, which has also been held by the courts to be illegal and against the rights established in the constitution. The strategy of demanding these laws now is actually rather clever. Every member of Congress and some senators are about to go back to their constituencies to fight the November midterm elections and few are willing to stand up for the constitutional rights when security is still the top priority of the vast majority of American voters.

Bush is likely to get what he wants from Congress, at the same time as refocusing attention on the terrorist threat rather than the inferno in Iraq.

Not many Americans appear to understand what is going on. But a few do - the odd bag-lady, dissident, late-night talk shows such as Bill Maher's and the New York Times which, considering it is the leading voice of liberal, law-abiding America, has been a mite too genteel for my tastes these past five years. However its editorial on Thursday did say this: 'Mr Bush wants to re-write American law to create a glaring exception to the Geneva Convention, to give ex post facto approval to abusive interrogation methods and to bar legal challenges to the system.'

Precisely. The point that will surely feature in the forthcoming obituary of American rights and values is that the law that Bush proposes includes a measure which makes it retroactive to 11 September 2001. So, officials and CIA interrogators will be protected from prosecution under the War Crimes Act for anything they may have done from the inception of the 'war on terror', i.e. 9/11.

Why would this be necessary unless Americans had been torturing the 14 senior suspects who have been transferred to Guantanamo? It certainly gives the lie to Bush's statement on Thursday: 'The United States does not torture. It is against our laws and our values.'

Rupert Murdoch's dreadful Fox News and his papers promote these utterances, offering a subliminal wink in the direction of the White House because they understand that torture is part of the 'war on terror' and, more crucially, that bamboozling Congress before the recess will concentrate more power in the 'decider's' hands.

It is all part of a process of fashioning what Dick Cheney called 'strong, robust executive authority' with 'constitutional powers unimpaired'; that is to say, executive power which is untrammelled by the courts or the people's representatives in Congress. As in Britain, power is remorselessly flowing to the centre and threatens to disrupt, if not permanently cripple, the democratic system.

At the last count, Bush has discreetly claimed the authority to disobey 740 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the constitution.

This state of affairs has gradually developed since the days of the Depression, when Roosevelt used the economic crisis to gain more power for the executive branch. Before the Thirties, legislation had been precisely drafted so as to minimise interpretations by the executive branch. Now the executive branch can ignore anything it wants and only consults Congress when it needs a law to bypass the remaining obstacle to total and unfettered power - the Supreme Court.

You may think I exaggerate, but the facts speak for themselves. The majority of Americans cares not one jot for the constitution and lawyers and politicians are content to set aside any of the revered articles whenever it suits them. Nobody complains. There are no demonstrations on Massachusetts Avenue, no mass rallies in Central Park in defence of the constitution.

'It is paradoxical,' says American author Paul Craig Roberts, 'that American democracy is the likely casualty of the "war on terror" that is being justified in the name of expansion of democracy.' Quite.

[source: Guardian Unlimited, published September 10, 2006]

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But here are some Americans that are noticing what the Bush administration is up to:

-The American Civil Liberties Union: "Even while the president's abuses of power diminish the light of American values, key victories since 2001 show that together we can carry the torch for freedom."

-Sourcewatch: Bush administration vs. the US Constitution

In case you'd like to read it, here's where you can find the US Constitution online.

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In slightly-related other news, you've probably heard/seen the furore over the "documentary" that ABC is planning to air. If not, here's an article from the BBC: Clinton aides attack 9/11 drama; and from Air America Radio: ABC to alter miniseries. Interestingly, this 3-hour docudrama will be airing tonight and tomorrow night on BBC1 here in the UK, presumably unexpurgated. We're not very happy about this very distorted view of events will be presented over here as fact.