2004

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…

Link “An Air Force search and rescue alert was trigged by Chris van Rossman’s flatscreen Toshiba television set. It has a built-in VCR, DVD and CD player. And an undocumented feature that has authorities scratching their heads. Some sort of electric glitch was causing van Rossman’s TV to transmit on the international distress frequency. The…

Updating the PNG/”self-proclaimed state” story, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is reporting two further arrests, one of whom at least shares a name (Simon O’Keefe) with the WHOIS contact for the self-proclaimed Empire of Mogilno’s selfproclaimed website. More soon..

An interesting DSR (Disturbing Search Request): the Ranter is the 8th highest result on Arabic Google for “Arab composer tongs”. That is all.

It now seems that the US authorities in Iraq are serious in their request for more British troops. We are told that the 1st Battalion the Black Watch is to be sent north to the Iskandariyah area in order to relieve US Marines for an offensive against Fallujah. For a start, the Watch are getting…