2005

Information received from the boys at the Army Rumour Service suggests that we have an answer to exactly when Tony Blair found time to visit the wounded returned from Iraq. Apparently, he has done, once. That was in March, 2004, in Birmingham. He’s not been back. Neither did he call on the joint services rehabilitation…

First, before doing anything else, go and read this Patrick Cockburn report for the Indy on Iraq. It’s the stuff all right – you may especially enjoy the account of the Americans who turned up to deal with a fight in a petrol queue, equipped with a 155mm self-propelled howitzer. Never bring a knife to…

Tony Blair has frequently been accused of lacking empathy with the families of the dead and wounded in Iraq, not least by Reg Keys. Among other things, like not knowing how many of them there are, he has also been criticised for not visiting the wounded returned to the UK. Now, earlier this week, Blair’s…

Back on Monday, the London Evening Standard ran a long and sensational story by Andrew Gilligan regarding none other than my alter-ego, Viktor Bout, who it seems has been working for the MoD even after many of his companies were blacklisted by the US. Now, I intended to blog about it in a free moment…

I’ve been extremely slack on updating the blogroll lately. But today, I’ve added all the recent linkers. Professor Mark Grimley’s War Historian, the Current Outlook, Tim Worstall (our token conservative), Jarndyce’s Pseudo Magazine, Steve Gilliard’s Newsblog, What do I know?, new group blog project The Sharpener, the secret Dubai diarist’s Secret Dubai Diary, Carlos W.’s…

AFP via Le Monde reports on yet more Greek/Turkish sabrerattling and playing with high-performance jets. According to the Greeks, no less than fifty-six Turkish aircraft were involved in some 16 frontier violations (never mind the maths!), including 40 F-16s and 16 F-4 Phantoms, of which 8 aircraft (type not given) were armed. (The original report…

I’ve been handed the report that an Antonov 26 belonging to something called “Kisangani Air List” has been crashed in the DRC by our esteemed colleague Soj. Rather, Soj handed me the report. She didn’t crash the Antonov 26, or at least I don’t think so. At the moment, I can offer little further information…

Back in January, I asked What’s Up in the Yemen? after noticing regular flights by Irbis Air Co., a Kazakh-registered airline owned by Viktor Bout and now placed on the US Treasury seizure list, from Sharjah to Riyan-Mukalla airport in the eastern Yemen. Since then, we’ve seen confirmation of this with the crash there of…

Right. I’ve been a split-brain blogger for the last month, putting all my election stuff over at General Election ’05. After tonight, there will be more TYR. There is some interesting news to come on what, exactly, is going on in the Yemen. On that theme, you will probably be pleased to know that our…

(With apologies to Gough Whitlam) It’s time to do a final election post. If you haven’t voted yet, kindly take a moment to read through the archives. We’ve had masses of Iraq and secret detention, mass surveillance, any amount of stupidity, cash-burning PFIs, schools controlled by anyone who will stump up one-tenth of their cost,…