2004

So, the explosives were gone before they got there? FOX didn’t think so at the time. In this story, the news station mentions that the US 3rd Infantry Division found something it decided was an explosive at the site. “Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of…

I never appreciated him as much as perhaps I should have done, for the key reason that my dad listened to him. Still, I recall in about 1997 hearing him play the following three bands: Folk Implosion, Ash, and the Jungle Brothers. What a choice.

One of the fashionable fields in recent economic thought has been trying to apply rational expectations theory to political events. Famously, the Pentagon had to pull its “policy analysis market” due to outcry. Now, I see via Brad DeLong that a couple of academics have tried something similar, using a US sports betting website to…

The Guardian website is now showing a Press Association story that David Blunkett has scrapped the idea of adding ID card functions to new passports and driving licences after 2007. Instead it’ll have to be an ID card that says ID CARD on it. This is considerably more honest than the last plan, which implied…

MOLE WHO GAVE TERRORISTS ID CARD DATA JAILED At Kingston Crown Court today, former Siemens Business Systems IT worker Barry Dodgy was jailed for five years for his part in a plot to sell information held in the national ID database – to terrorists. Database analyst Dodgy, 37, of Uxbridge, accepted large sums of cash…

Well, the inevitable leftwing infighting has now had a few days to marinate since the European Social Forum, and it’s boiling down to one of the most spiritually important rites in the lefty calendar – the exchange of angry letters to the Guardian. This always happens, and it takes the form of each party to…

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…