Our beloved Criminal Records Bureau has apparently owned up to incorrectly listing some 193 persons as convicted criminals, usually by mis-associating applicants with similar names to criminals on the police national computer. This is fairly typical of David Blunkett’s brilliant idea, which famously couldn’t actually check criminal records much and took three months to process…
Read More BBC – CRB brands innocent citizens criminalsGlobalSecurity.org has a useful list of US Army and Marine operations in Iraq. Here goes: Operations Operation PLANET X (15 May 2003) Operation PENINSULA STRIKE (9 June – 12 June 2003) Operation DESERT SCORPION (15 June 2003 – ?) Operation SCORPION STING Operation SPARTAN SCORPION Operation SIDEWINDER (29 June – 07 July 2003) Operation SODA…
Read More A Brief Guide to the Non-War so far…Another damn good WaPo article from Iraq “A few miles to the south, at 4:30 a.m., Capt. John Combs, the convoy commander, radioed back, “This is a known ambush point.” It was a message he repeated frequently on the first part of the journey. Near dawn, he radioed back with another worrisome message: The bridge…
Read More “When we get to the far side, I’ve got absolutely no clue where we are going.”The Guardian is currently running a series of reports by the excellent Nick Davies on the criminal justice system and how crap it is (I paraphrase). Today’s story focused on the huge percentage of trials that simply don’t happen because the bureaucracy bungles, people don’t turn up, the court is double booked (really). “A lot…
Read More CPS – still a hive of indolence?SpyBlog reports that contracts have been issued for a database of information on children in Lewisham, partly at least as a pilot for the national record of all kids planned under the Children Bill. Now, this idea came up as a result of the investigation into the Victoria Climbie case, but it’s very hard not…
Read More Your crime? Other…Insurgents Display New Sophistication The Washington Post reports that Iraqi insurgents have apparently been tracking the movement of the US 1st Infantry Division units sent south from the Baghdad area and arranging for bridges to be blown up ahead of them. “”The dropping of the bridges was very interesting, because it showed a regional or…
Read More And there’s more – co-ordinated bridge blowing in IraqNew York Times: Troops in Iraq Strain to Hold Lines of Supply This is not good. Some news stories recently have given me the strong impression that the world focus on the centres of drama in Iraq – Fallujah and Najaf – has obscured a worsening crisis in the countryside, and that the coalition is…
Read More Troops in Iraq Strain to Hold Lines of SupplyWell, resuming blogging after a break over Easter, it’s time to round up the Iraq situation. (I know, it’s been a very Iraq blog lately but it’s hardly surprising, no?) Although the initial crisis now seems to be past, or at least in suspension, we can’t honestly believe things are getting any better. Not when…
Read More Collapse of authorityIn a long post on the Shia uprising in Iraq on Tuesday, I argued that the Mahdi Army was following a strategy seen in numerous civil wars – seizing the locations of legitimate power and co-opting the police and administration. According to this story in the Indy, I was right.. “”The Americans are just as…
Read More More horrors, Ranter proved right. Sometimes I really don’t like meDamn good coverage from the Washington Post of the Fallujah battle – which rather invalidates the last sentence of the last post. The US Marines have an institutional history of being rather better at political war than the Army, going back to their 19th century role in Latin America – as evidenced by this quote:…
Read More “It Seemed Like Everyone In The City Who Had A Gun Was Out There”