Low Earth Orbit

The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.

The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, “Giacomo”.

His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning “Giacomo” to procure and circulate documents - France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.

Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade “yellowcake” uranium from Niger, France was trying to “set up” Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.

Malmø, Sweden. The police now publicly admit what many Scandinavians have known for a long time: They no longer control the situation in the nations’s third largest city. It is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslim immigrants. Some of the Muslims have lived in the area of Rosengård, Malmø, for twenty years, and still don’t know how to read or write Swedish. Ambulance personnel are attacked by stones or weapons, and refuse to help anybody in the area without police escort. The immigrants also spit at them when they come to help. Recently, an Albanian youth was stabbed by an Arab, and was left bleeding to death on the ground while the ambulance waited for the police to arrive. The police themselves hesitate to enter parts of their own city unless they have several patrols, and need to have guards to watch their cars, otherwise they will be vandalized. “Something drastic has to be done, or much more blood will be spilled” says one of the locals.

Bush has something rare in the modern politician, a calm patience that lets him work a long term strategy.

I think he methodically lays a foundation and then gradually builds on that. Like many careful planners this makes him appear slow and plodding to those that live in the moment.

By comparison Kerry (and even looking back, Gore) looks like ferrets on crack. He seems so obsessed with mastering the immediate moment that he surrenders all continuity with both the past and the future. Long term plans disintegrate under the need to “do something right now!”

For example, Bush’s handling of the the AWOL allegations has been a masterwork of calm repetition. Every allegation is answered with, “The President fulfilled his obligations.” Its like having an argument with a grandfather clock.

I don’t think that Bush deftly guides his opponents into his chosen killing ground so much as he just lets them thrash around until they hurt themselves. He’s like a tortoise hounded by yapping lap dogs. He armors up, picks his direction and plods away while the lap dogs bounce about frantically, nipping ineffectively on his shell until they bound wrong and collide with a tree.

John Roberts, the network’s White House correspondent, called to report he’d just completed an on-camera interview with the White House communications director, Dan Bartlett. Bartlett, it appeared, had no quarrel with the authenticity of the documents.

That was the turning point.

“If we had gotten back from the White House any kind of red flag, raised eyebrow, anything that said, ‘Are you sure about this stuff?’ we would have gone back to square one,” Josh Howard, the program’s executive producer, said Friday.