January 2006

Sources are great, aren’t they? Especially when they’re “police sources”. Police sources said Jean-Charles de Menezes may have been found with cocaine. Well, I may have been found with cocaine, but not by a policeman, and not by anyone else – indeed, I may not have been found with it all. Enough semantics. Police sources…

Hear that weird whistling and crackling radio noise? That’s the technicians trying to get Simon Heffer’s Gaydar lined up. What does it tell you about the Lib Dems that the only one of the potential leadership candidates who had anything like interesting and attractive policies has had to drop out because his colleagues refused to…

Robert “Paradise and Power” Kagan, the global expert hyperpundit famous for determining that someone like Jacques Chirac is unwilling to take action to defend his interests, being more interested in maintaining an illusory island of Kantian peace in his backyard, thinks the capital of Australia is Sydney. Apparently, according to leading US scholars, the essential…

Shaul Mofaz has been at it again, threatening that Iran’s president, novelty fascist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would spread misfortune and suffering over the Iranian people if he attempted to build nuclear weapons. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he. Even though Iran wouldn’t have a bomb for at least three years from now, long before which…

I don’t, as a rule, indulge in fisking – I think it’s a slightly dubious piece of blogospheric tradition, perhaps the online equivalent of fox-hunting – but this Simon Heffer screed in the Telegraph is hard to miss. The appliance, Nurse, and 50 ccs of snark! Doing nothing in Iran is not an optionBy Simon…

So..the day after the Lords rained on Tony’s ID parade, the Sun gets an exclusive superspook leako that the Metroplod is investigating a plot to kidnap Leo Blair. Naturally, there is no danger. Nuh. No arrests, and the lad was never apparently at risk. Anyone else spot a connection between these two facts?

The Sunday Times this weekend carried a really frightening story regarding the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell tube station. Now, we know that the Met has a procedure of some kind for the case of finding a suicide-bomber roaming the streets under which they intend to shoot them dead on the spot.…

It’s good to see that something good can still come from the clarted-up pipes of what passes for the constitution. Tony Blair may get a whole edition of Newsnight to blabber about how the scale and organisation of 21st-century crimes make things like due process, evidence, separate executive and judiciary powers obsolete in the War…

One development that has been held out as good news in Iraq is the transfer of the Provincial Reconstruction Team concept from Afghanistan, associated with US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. David Barno, not to mention Bob Bran of Blogistan. PRTs were essentially invented as a response to the obvious need to expand security out…

1st Royal Scots deployed to Iraq this week, in a movement that I don’t think was part of the routine brigade roulement. Underneath the racket about paedo shitbags and surveillance dolphins parenting binge estates, it rather vanished into the background noise, but there is an interesting point here. Out of the battalion from the British…