Toby Harnden: Journalist and Author

Friday, July 28, 2006

A translation device for woofs? It's barking...

Here is the full version of a piece of mine run at less than half this length last weekend. The Bow-lingual, which came to the US about three years ago, retails at around $130. While we had some fun with it, I think there are better ways for a dog to spend his money:

http://www.tobyharnden.com/articles_archive_06.htm#23jul06

#posted by Toby @ 2:46 PM

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Washington Post on Alan Senitt

Here is the Washington Post's piece in today's edition on Alan's memorial service. There is a slight discrepancy (er... 60 versus 150) between their reporter's attendance estimate and mine. Getting the numbers at gatherings is always a very inexact science in journalism. It is possible I over-estimated a touch but there were definitely more than a hundred people there

Below the memorial service piece is a disturbing one also from the Washington Post about what the police knew about the alleged killers before the morning Alan was murdered. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there were real opportunities to take these people off the streets of Washington but red tape and bureaucratic inertia led to them remaining free to commit further crimes.

Mourners Recall British Activist: Aspiring Politician's Life Described as 'Unbelievably Full'

By Allan Lengel, Washington Post Staff Writer

Alan Senitt, the young British activist slain in Georgetown last week, was remembered last night as a selfless, funny man, a booster of Israel who championed battles against anti-Semitism and spoke freely of his lofty political aspirations in Britain -- namely, to be prime minister.

"He was in politics not for self-promotion or vanity but because he genuinely wanted to help people," said Toby Harnden, Washington bureau chief of the Sunday Telegraph of London, who befriended Senitt at a 2003 conference in Israel.

"He was one of the most positive people I ever met," Harnden said. "He believed everything was possible, and he made things possible."

Senitt, 27, was escorting a female friend home along an elegant, tree-lined street early July 9 when the couple were confronted by three robbers. At least one was armed with a gun, and one had a knife; the third, police say, was a 15-year-old boy.

As one man tried to sexually assault the woman, the other slit Senitt's throat, police said. The suspects fled with the woman's purse and later withdrew money with her bank card, police said. They were arrested hours later.

Last night, more than 60 people gathered at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in the District's Chinatown area to pay tribute to Senitt, who had moved to the United States to study political fundraising and to volunteer for the potential presidential campaign of former Virginia governor Mark R. Warner (D).

Before a quiet crowd, about a half-dozen speakers stepped up to the podium. Former Virginia lieutenant governor Donald S. Beyer Jr., who is raising money for Warner, called Senitt charming, funny, bright and handsome.

"Alan, we hardly knew you, but we will miss you greatly for a long time," Beyer said.
Susan Shankman, a rabbi, said Senitt would have found the latest developments in the Middle East interesting but would have wanted people to carry on his message of world peace.

His Jewish activism was central to his life, friends said. To that end, Dan Sacker, a Londoner who is studying in Washington, read a 2002 speech by Senitt delivered at Trafalgar Square in London at an Israel solidarity rally.

"I stand before you today at a time when Jewish students on campuses across the country are being subjected to the most virulent and most disgusting anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that our community has witnessed in over 25 years," Senitt had said. In that speech, he went on to talk about the need for Jews to stand up for their rights and the rights of others as well.

"Jewish students have stood up not only on behalf of themselves but on behalf of black students, Asian students, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim students to tell the racists, the bigots and the extremists that we will not sit back and watch any group or any individual be attacked, harassed or intimidated simply because of who they are or what they believe in," Senitt had said.

Harnden seemed to sum up the feelings of many speakers when he said of Senitt: "He had a short life but an unbelievably full one."

Police Had Suspects' Address Before Slashing
Victim of Earlier Georgetown Robbery Said Credit Card Purchases Sent to SE Location

By Allison Klein and Henri E. Cauvin
Washington Post Staff Writers, Tuesday, July 18, 2006; B01

Detectives investigating a series of robberies in Georgetown had the address of two of the suspects now connected to the slaying of Alan Senitt three weeks before he was attacked.

The information came from a 24-year-old Georgetown woman who was held up June 11 -- three blocks from the place where Senitt later would be slain. She said she provided the address on Robinson Place SE after learning that her credit card was used to make a purchase that was shipped there.

"I thought when I gave them the address, it would be a grand slam and they would get the guys," the woman said in an interview. But it was not until July 9 that police apprehended anyone at the address the woman had provided.

By then, they were pursuing a homicide investigation. Hours after Senitt's throat was slashed, detectives found two men inside the apartment on the dead-end street, one wearing bloody clothing. Authorities charged the men with murder and are investigating whether they were responsible for earlier holdups. No charges have been filed in the earlier cases.

The Georgetown woman, who is not being identified by The Washington Post because she is a witness in her robbery case, provided new details that shed light on the activities of police in the weeks before Senitt was slain.

Senitt, 27, a British citizen, was caught by surprise at 2 a.m. July 9 as he walked a friend home in the 3100 block of Q Street NW. Police said one of the robbers attempted to sexually assault Senitt's friend.

Police officials said last week that Senitt's attackers were suspects in at least two other recent holdups. The Georgetown woman said she is a victim from one of the earlier cases: She was attacked about 2 a.m. June 11 near 27th and P streets NW by three men who put a gun in her face, grabbed her purse and demanded her cellphone. She was not injured.

About a week after she was robbed, the Georgetown woman said, she got a letter from her credit card company notifying her that her card was used to order an item being shipped to the 2700 block of Robinson Place SE.

The item was ordered from a company that sells male-enhancement products. The woman said she alerted the police, figuring the information would lead to the robbers.

Police responded by telling her they could not get an arrest warrant without first doing surveillance at the apartment building and then conducting a lineup to determine whether she could identify suspects. She said she was sure she could identify her attackers and was waiting for a call from the police.

Instead, she said, on July 9 she saw the faces of the men who robbed her flash across a television screen because they had been arrested in Senitt's slaying.

In addition to the address she provided, police also had surveillance video of the suspects from a camera at a gas station, where the suspects apparently used a credit card taken in another robbery, the Georgetown woman said.

The men -- Christopher Piper, 25, and Jeffrey Rice, 22 -- resided at the Robinson Place address, police said. They are jailed without bond on felony murder charges. A 15-year-old who allegedly joined in the attack also is charged with murder, as is a woman accused of driving a getaway car, Olivia Miles, 26.

The day after Senitt's killing, police called the Georgetown woman and confirmed what she already knew: that the men were suspected in her case, too, she said.

The investigator in charge of the case and his supervisors declined to comment yesterday, saying they did not want to jeopardize an ongoing investigation. The Georgetown woman said that she thought the investigator she was dealing with did an excellent job but that he seemed frustrated by the process.

Police officials said last week that a grand jury had been convened in the earlier Georgetown robberies. Chief Charles H. Ramsey also said that police did not have the identities of specific suspects before Senitt's slaying. Police had gone to the Robinson Place apartment building before Senitt was killed, Ramsey said, but did not find the men.

The failure to quickly make arrests in the earlier Georgetown robberies has parallels to events surrounding another homicide case. Police now believe that the suspects accused in the killing of retired New York Times journalist David E. Rosenbaum on Jan. 6 had robbed a man beforehand. The victim in that attack, a retired police officer, said police did not do enough follow-up after his robbery in November.

In the case of the Georgetown woman's robbery, the U.S. attorney's office became involved in the investigation June 15, four days after her mugging, said spokesman Channing Phillips.
With the number of robberies surging, police have been coming to prosecutors earlier in investigations, particularly in cases in which credit cards or cellphones have been stolen, Phillips said.

Cellphones and credit cards can provide promising leads for detectives, but privately some prosecutors say detectives have not always been aggressive about developing those leads when the trail is hot.

When lineups are conducted, they can take days, sometimes weeks, to set up if the target of the investigation is not under arrest. In such cases, the target must be subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, which orders the person to appear in a lineup.

The police work on the Senitt case also is drawing criticism of another sort from the union representing the department's officers. A document obtained by The Post shows that officers from each of the department's seven districts were called to respond to Georgetown the night of the slaying to set up a 20-block perimeter in hopes of catching the suspects.

That is highly unusual and rarely, if ever, happens when homicides occur in other, less affluent districts, said Officer Kristopher Baumann, chairman of the D.C. police labor committee for the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 1.

#posted by Toby @ 8:57 PM

Alan Senitt memorial service in Washington

I was honoured to be asked to speak at Alan's memorial service at the 6th and I Street synagogue in Chinatown this evening. It was touching that this was held for him in a city where he only spent three weeks. More than 150 people attended. All Alan's friends are immensely grateful to Shelley Rood for organising such a moving event that did him proud.

This is what I said about Alan:

Alan was so pleased to be in Washington. He was a political junkie and there was no city in the world - with the possible exception of Jerusalem - that catered so well to this side of him. We'd met in Israel in 2003, when I was stationed there as a journalist. This year in Jerusalem, he'd delighted in giving me the inside track on his meetings with Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres and all the other major players there when the country was in the grip of a crisis over who would replace Ariel Sharon. No doubt he would have had many opinions on the current situation in the Middle East and I wish I could have heard them.

It's a tragedy Alan had so little time here in DC. But in three weeks, he made a real impact working for Mark Warner. Soon after he arrived, he sent out a mock Star Trek email to his friends back home from the "Starship Senittprise". He announced: "I can confirm that life does exist here, although they lack some of our more advanced skills.

"Nevertheless, I have managed to settle into their way of life, and have begun my mission to help the simple local population elect a leader who can string more than two words together without insulting a foreign culture or starting a war."

Everywhere he went, Alan met the people who mattered. He told a friend in an email from Washington recently. "You know what I'm like, always managing to haplessly end up meeting very cool people." But it wasn't hapless. Alan was very, very good atmeeting people. And a big reason for this was that he was totally genuine, a true natural.

In his three weeks here, he had built contacts with members of Bill Clinton's White House staff, secured a tour of the Pentagon and lunched with diplomats from the Israeli Embassy.

But the thing about Alan's missions is that they always involved having a great deal of fun along the way. In Washington, he made sure to attend the International Wine Festival. In the Star Trek email he reported: "I can confirm that none of the many hundreds of varieties of wine on offer were in any way dangerous," he reported. "I tasted them all to be sure and deemed the area to be secure, yet somewhat blurry."

Alan was brimming with enthusiasm about working for Mark Warner and was soon telling us all that he envisaged his job as - and I quote - "telling the next president of the United States what to think". I have little doubt either that Alan would have become a Member of Parliament in the united Kingdom and perhaps even Prime Minister, which was something he talked about. Alan was not lacking in self confidence but it was entirely well placed and what I admired about him was that he was in politics not for self promotion or vanity but because he wanted to help people. A lot of people, particularly a lot of politicians, say that but Alan lived it.

A mutual friend of Alan's and mine described Alan as "someone who was totally normal but with an extraordinary other side". And so it was in the final hours of his life that began with an ordinary evening out on Saturday and ended with remarkable heroism. When Alan realised what his attackers intended to do to his dear friend Tybee, he struggled to stop them. He succeeded in stopping them but in doing so he gave his life. He died as he had lived - selflessly, giving everything to help a friend.

Alan was one of the most positive people I have ever met. He believed everything was possible and he made things possible. He looked for the best in people and made them feel better about themselves. He had a short life but an unbelievably full one. The celebration of his life here today and among his family and friends across the world over the past eight days underline two things: many people loved Alan; and Alan truly made a difference.

#posted by Toby @ 5:11 AM

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Murder in Georgetown

One of the occupational hazards of Sunday newspaper journalism is that you can work all week on a story and then another British paper runs something on the same subject on a Saturday, which leads to all your finely-honed work to be unceremoniously spiked. It doesn't happen too often but it happened to me this weekend when The Times ran a piece by Tom Baldwin on crime in Washington on Saturday. So, the only place my piece below is being published is on this blog.

I walked along Q Street today to see where my friend Alan Senitt was so horribly murdered. The sandstone where his blood had been washed off was still wet. I said a silent prayer. There will be a memorial service for Alan and the 6th and I synagogue in Washington at 7.30pm tomorrow (Monday). The response of Alan's closest friends and family to his death has been truly humbling. They have organised a wonderful celebration of his life through messages, photos and reminiscences posted on www.alansenitt.com.

There is still palpable shock in Georgetown over what happened and many questions that remain to be answered. Unfortunately - though perhaps not surprisingly given this is DC - it seems that race and politics are playing a big role in the response to the recent upsurge in crime across the city. There are some interesting comments on all this from by Carol Joynt, owner of Nathan's Restaurant on M Street http://www.nathanslunch.com/, who is quoted in my piece.

By TOBY HARNDEN
in Washington

THE HORRIFIC killing of a young Briton and a wave of attacks on tourists has prompted Washington DC's police chief to declare a "crime emergency" amid fears that the city could once again become America's murder capital.

Alan Senitt, 27, an aspiring politician who had arrived in the US three weeks earlier to work for a Democratic presidential candidate, had his throat cut during a mugging and attempted rape of his friend in the heart of historic Georgetown, Washington's most exclusive neighbourhood.

His murder, allegedly by a black gang, has led to racial tensions, always simmering just below the surface in a 60 per cent black city where wealthy whites overwhelmingly predominate in Georgetown and its environs, boiling over.

Insp Andy Solberg, the Georgetown police commander, who is white, was reassigned to other duties when he told 400 people gathered for an emergency community: "They were black. This is not a racial thing to say that black people are unusual in Georgetown. This is a fact of life."

Some black residents of Washington, however, have complained that the emergency was only called because a white man was murdered.

"That police officer was very unfair to blame this on black people," said Gloria Gaskins, 52, whose son Joseph Allen, 32, was the victim of an unsolved murder two years ago. "If my son had been Caucasian they would have really stepped up their efforts.

"It would have been all over the television and stuff. That's not to diminish what happened to this British man but the police need to look after all the DC people and not just one area where the people have money and are real influential."

Since the murder, the atmosphere has more closely resembled that of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, a biting satire about race and greed in New York, than Elliott Roosevelt's sedate Murder in Georgetown, in which a banker is found dead in his home with his mistress's earring beside the body.

Four blacks, one a boy of 15 and another a woman, were arrested within hours of Mr Senitt's murder and allegedly confessed to the crime, which took place at 2.15am on Sunday as he walked a female American friend home following a trip to the cinema.

Hours after Mr Ramsey declared the "crime emergency" on Wednesday two groups of tourists were held up on the National Mall, close to the Smithsonian museums and the US Capitol. Georgetown, home to the city's political and social elites, is also a major draw for visitors.

Dan Sacker, 24, a British student who had been to see The Devil Wears Prada with Mr Senitt and his friend just before the fatal attack, said it was the crime's location as well as its brutality that had shocked Washington. "This is like Mayfair. These things don't happen in Georgetown."

Some Georgetown residents were outraged to learn that detectives already had evidence linking the accused killers, one of whom was out on parole after serving 15 years for armed robbery, to other violent crimes in Washington. The gang should already have been in custody, they argued.

There was further dismay at the reassignment of Insp Solberg by Charles Ramsey, Washington's police chief, who is black. "Chief Ramsey is obviously more interested in knee-jerk obeisance to those who play the race card at every opportunity that he is in actually fighting crime," wrote Margaret Tomlinson, who lives close to the murder scene, in a letter to the Washington Post.

Mr Senitt was the 11th of 14 murder victims in Washington so far this month, a particularly violent spell for the city. All the others were black. There have been 96 murders in Washington so far this year, only two more than at the same stage in 2005.

But Chief Ramsey said there had been a marked increase in armed muggings. "Now we're starting to see a trend where more and more people are being arrested in neighbourhoods they do not live in," he said.

The current murder rate is still a far cry from those during the crack cocaine wars that peaked in 1991 when 482 were killed. Mr Senitt's killing was the highest-profile crime in Georgetown since 1997, when three workers were shot dead execution-style in the Starbucks opposite what is known as the "social Safeway" on Wisconsin Avenue.

Georgetowners had tried to insulate themselves from the previous violence by blocking plans for a metro station there. "But the bad people don't take the subway, they use wheels," said Carol Joynt, owner of Nathan's Bar in Georgetown.

"We've been hearing for a while that crime from the other part of town had started coming over here and their modus operandi was having a car and a driver and two people on the street."

Georgetown community groups have sent out emails recommending residents take steps such as leaving porch lights on at night, cutting back shrubbery, walking in groups and volunteering as citizen "block captains" to coordinate anti-crime efforts.

Ed Solomon, an elected neighbourhood commissioner in Georgetown, said there were proposals for a text message crime alert system to be introduced." Police could send out a message and description of suspects that could be out to everybody in the community within 20 seconds.

"At the moment there's sadness and anger and outrage here and people are feeling vulnerable." There are concerns that businesses could be hit by a decline in tourism.

The one thing that seems to unite Washingtonians on either side of the racial divide is the worry that the authorities are not tackling the problem. "I don't like what's happening in the city," said Mrs Gaskins, who was out shopping in Georgetown.

Mrs Joynt said Insp Solberg had fallen victim to political correctness. "You are not allowed to talk about race in Washington DC. It is just taboo. Ramsey overreacted but that's the way the game is played in this city."

#posted by Toby @ 9:33 PM

Monday, July 10, 2006

Alan Senitt

It was with utter disbelief this morning that I saw on the front page of the Washington Post that my friend Alan Senitt had been horrifically murdered in Georgetown.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/09/AR2006070900215.html

I first met Alan at the Herzilya Conference in Tel Aviv in 2003 and we kept in regular touch afterwards. When we had lunch in Knightsbridge late last year he was full of enthusiasm about his campaign as a Labour candidate for a council seat in north London (he subsequently lost but this did not dissuade him from a political career - instead, he viewed it as a vital process of cutting his teeth). In January, he happened to be in Jerusalem with his then boss Lord Greville Janner when I was sent to cover the political crisis after Ariel Sharon slipped into a coma. Alan took part in meetings with the main players in Israeli politics such as Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres - as well as senior Palestinian figures like Jibril Rajoub - and was in his element theorising about all the possibilities for the new Kadima party and how this would impact the chances of movement towards a political settlement. The insights he was able to pass on from these private meetings, discreetly and without breaking confidences, were invaluable to my writing at the time.

So I was delighted to receive an email from Alan last month telling me that he would be in Washington to work for Mark Warner, former Virginia governor and Democratic aspirant for the White House in 2008 www.forwardtogetherpac.com ("you know where he's headed!" Alan wrote) and suggesting we grab a beer. With his acute judgement and political nose, I know he would have been able to give me the inside track on the Warner campaign as well as being great company. He was the sort of political junkie that Washington is made for.

Alan had an infectious enthusiasm for everything life could offer. Although he was a committed Zionist and Jewish activist he truly wanted and worked for a peace in the Middle East that could provide justice and security for all. He could not wait to get stuck into the latest phase of his political education in Washington. There is no doubt that he would have gone very far in public life. I cannot believe he is gone.

He was killed in a truly senseless way in a beautiful part of Georgetown about a block from where I was married in March - the most shocking crime in this leafy, well-to-do corner of America's capital for many years. It was a cruel and unbearably sad end for such a talented, engaging and genuinely good young man. My heart goes out to his family and many friends.

#posted by Toby @ 10:13 PM

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