Swiss watch

Switzerland is in the headlines this morning - and not for a good reason.  The Swiss Embassy in Rome, together with the Chilean Embassy in the same city, fell victim to bomb attacks, at least one of them delivered by mail, yesterday afternoon.  Two employees, one in each embassy, received hand injuries.  It is likely that the Swiss national will need to have one hand, if not both, amputated.  Police in Rome are on high terror alert as a result and several embassies there are taking special precautions.  There was initial speculation that the Swiss bomb attack might be connected to the April arrest in Switzerland of two Italians and one Swiss national from Italian-speaking Switzerland allegedly for planning an attack on an IBM office in Switzerland.  No speculation has been reported to rationalize the Chilean bomb attack.  More details can be found here.

There have been several bomb-related incidents in Rome recently, but there does not seem to be any common thread that links them.   I simply cannot fathom - or approve - any mindset or rationale that would justify any such actions.  They actually harm the causes - some otherwise worthy, although certainly not in this case as speculated - that the bombers profess to champion.  In view of the general antipathy and abhorrence shown towards such actions, at least by those who are sane, I have often wondered whether at least some bomb attacks are actually instigated by agents provacateurs in order to discredit both the causes and those who work for them.  There is certainly historical precedent for such.

I do not know which action that I personally find more reprehensible: bombing for a cause or instigating bombing in order to discredit a cause.  I heartily condemn both actions.  But, in the sense that the latter generally involves the deliberate participation of an institution to which we would ordinarily look for protection in an effort to incite individuals to commit crimes, it would seem logically to fall on the more reprehensible side of the scale.  Just MO.

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Airports in Switzerland appear to be managing the snow and cold weather better than some of their counterparts.  This is in part due to Switzerland's having less snow and the airports being smaller air traffic hubs.  Zurich Airport prides itself on never having had to close for snow even once during its 62-year history.  It credits this to its strategy of keeping 350 stand-by personnel to deal with bad weather conditions from mid-October to mid-April, with almost 100 machines - snow plows, snow blowers and other equipment - as well as to its stockpiling of de-icing chemicals before the bad weather arrives.

Smaller airports at Basel and Geneva have not been so fortunate.  Geneva, for instance, was closed for a day on December 1 and was closed temporarily last Friday morning.  Most Swiss air traffic problems have involved stranded travellers whose flights to London Heathrow, Paris, Frankfurt and Brussels were cancelled.  Having ourselves recently travelled through London Heathrow from Geneva, HWMBO and I are very thankful that our flights were uneventful.  We do hope that all travellers are able to be with their loved ones for the holidays.  Working in one of these airports at such times must provide at least a glimpse of Hell on Earth.  I know that travelling through them can.  But we travellers can relax once we reach our destinations safely.  The personnel who have to keep working and providing courteous services in the worst of times are candidates for battle pay - at the very least, IMO.

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A Swiss magistrate who has been conducting a six-year investigation of three Swiss engineers, Urs Tinner, his brother Marco and their father Friedrich, has recommended that the three be charged for allegedly supplying the Pakistan-based network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, creator of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, with technical know-how and equipment that was used to make gas centrifuges and thus violating Swiss nuclear proliferation laws.  While the three do not deny that they worked for Khan, their defense is that they were actually spies working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and were not aware of Khan's nuclear aims.  If that is truly so, then they must be among the most dim-witted of spies and should be charged with sheer stupidity, if nothing else.

The magistrate's investigation was hampered throughout by the Swiss Government which shredded documents with the justification that they involved national security concerns.  This seems to be a common justification for not releasing information these days.  The magistrate blasted the government for interfering in the legal process by destroying nearly all the evidence.  The charges, however, were found to be justified when copies of some of the shredded documents turned up.  In the magistrate's words,

“And beginning where they should have known that Khan produced atomic weapons, in May 1998, until they started to collaborate with the secret services, in June 2003, they in their specific roles were part of this network, and delivered parts to the network that the network then itself delivered to other countries, such as Libya.”

Marco Tinner was described as the accountant, producer and supplier of the components used for uranium enrichment and should also face charges of money laundering of some CHF12 million ($12.5 million).  Friedrich Tinner brought technical know-how to the family operation and Urs was the “workshop manager” in Khan’s factories in Dubai and Malaysia, according to Müller.  Khan’s network also supplied Libya, Iran and North Korea with parts and plans for building a nuclear bomb before it collapsed in 2003 and 2004.  The Tinners say that their spying helped the network to collapse.

It's clearly the "stuff" of spy novels, however unsavory these people may be.