October 2004

What is it with these people? Every time you expect them to do something that isn’t evil, like seizing people’s library records, raping prisoners of war or allying themselves with a government that boils dissidents, they botch the job. Talking Points Memo has the details on the Iraqi government’s declaration to the IAEA that a…

The Washington Post reports on the existence of a Justice Department memo authorising the CIA to remove prisoners from Iraq secretly, breaching the Geneva Conventions. “The draft opinion, written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and dated March 19, 2004, refers to both Iraqi citizens and foreigners in Iraq, who the memo says…

Le Monde(warning – PDF) has a monster supplement on Iraq, including extensive reporting from sources inside Fallujah and, indeed, in major rebel groups. Perhaps the most interesting is their interview on page 4 of the supplement with a former General in the Iraqi Army, Al-Haji Feras, who now leads a nationalist guerrilla group. He claims…

Thompson delivers his, typically forceful, contribution to the debate. Not brilliant, but worth reading just for this: “Some people say that George Bush should be run down and sacrificed to the Rat gods. But not me. No. I say it would be a lot easier to just vote the bastard out of office on November…

AP reports that the bodies of fifty-one Iraqi soldiers were discovered on a remote stretch of road east of Baghdad. They were travelling on leave in civilian clothes when their bus was stopped by rebels. They were all, it seems, shot in the back of the head kneeling on the roadside. On the same day,…

Cramer reports on wingnut site WorldNetDaily running a serial by a mad, rapture Christian author on mercenaries in Africa. Strangely, he seems especially keen on the white ones. Now, anything involving WND ought to be shunned if only for the weird quack remedy ads that seem to finance it, but this is interesting. (Please note:…

Well, it seems I were right, with the exception of those Challenger tanks that I called as deploying with the Watch. Instead a recce squadron from the Queen’s Dragoon Guards is going in the first instance. The heavy metal is now a “possible” later reinforcement. (Analysis)Likely this means that the QDG will be there to…

Well, the “decision that hadn’t been taken yet” has now officially been taken. Geoff Hoon stood up in the Commons and said that the Black Watch are indeed officially going to the region of Iskandariyah. It’s worth pulling out and unpacking some of the arguments that the government has used on this one. The first…

Last night, the much-trailed BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares punched in. Adam Curtis’s film kicks off from 1949, when the leader of the Islamic Brotherhood and the founder of neo-conservatism were both living in the US and not liking it. What sticks out is the community of language, not just between the protagonists, but…

Back here in November, I covered the story of an American tank that was destroyed in Iraq by a previously unknown weapon. Wild speculation reached for suggestions as wild as a second world war anti-tank rifle given depleted uranium rounds or an electromagnetic railgun, but it now seems that it was almost certainly an RPG7…