2005

According to news reports in Vienna’s Der Standard and the Italian paper Il Manifesto, a UN investigator in Afghanistan, Cheriff Bassiouni (who is an academic from Egypt) has stated that a secret CIA prison existed in Hungary. It’s not clear what information his statement is based on, but it certainly fits with my suspicions. (So…

I am the 10th result on search.com for “chubby men porn bear”. It’s the pride, dammit.

A blogger was present when Ahmed “The Greatest” Chalabi addressed frothing neo-con groupthink-tank the American Enterprise Institute this week, despite being under FBI investigation and accused of leaking US cryptographic data to Iran. (Note: Chalabi recently paid a call on the Iranian President. What’s going on there?) You can read full details of the visit…

Apparently the American bomb disposal men in Baghdad sometimes can’t go out because their comrades in the Air Force are jamming the GSM phone network and therefore, there’s a risk that any command detonated IEDs might go off unintentionally, and also their radio detectors won’t work. Is it me, or is this just incredibly, amazingly…

That’s it, then. Blair is officially dead as a political force. All the whipping, all the attempts to get support from the far right of the Tories, even trying to draw the Paisleyites (the last reserve of the desperate in British politics) didn’t work. The 90-day detention provisions are dead by 31 votes, and who…

…cutlasses sonic blasters and prepare to repel boarders! Cruise ship attacked by RPG-wielding Somali pirates, fights back with a device that blasts the buggers with noise. More traditionally, the captain attempted to run down the pirates’ boat, too. Dunno what to make of this, though: One of the rockets certainly hit the ship — it…

One thing about the Internet is that it’s very easy to overfocus on points of language that would rarely disturb you otherwise. Take the French police trade union chap who used the word “guerrilla” with regard to rioting recently. Everyone you’d expect to latched onto this as proof, proof! that the decadent Yurpeans were doomed…

Inconsequential: last night, Guy Fawkes’ Night, the Railway Hotel not far from my flat burned off four hundred quid in fireworks, the good stuff..green flashes, golden and purple rain, and explosions. Yes. Bangs so good they hurt, and triggered the burglar alarms on all the blank-windowed Thatcherite Heathrow-corridor office blocks, setting the RIM building squealing…

Stand well back, please, because I’m about to bloviate a tad. In the last few days I’ve been participating in a couple of fascinating comments threads, over at Phil Carter’s Intel Dump, where they’ve been having an open Iraq thread, and also on John Robb’s Global Guerrillas with regard to the Palestine Hotel attack and…

After yesterday’s revelations in the Washington Post that the CIA was keeping detainees in “several Eastern European democracies”, today has seen an unseemly scramble of mutual accusation. Anyone familiar with recent politics could have prepared a shortlist of ex-communist states closely allied with the US that might have been candidates, but the exact degree of…