Remember the flight and arrest of Charles “Fiddy Cent Thousand Dead Child Soldiers” Taylor back in March? Sure ya do. You may also recall the bizarre involvement of Kilari Anand Paul, an Indian Protestant evangelist and – to be brutally frank – charlatan with a Boeing 747. Paul, who claimed to be Taylor’s “spiritual adviser”,…
Read More Kilari Anand PaulSome months ago, we took note of a curious twist in the scandals surrounding Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Texan politico Tom DeLay. You may recall that they were revealed to have been involved in exporting Russian night-sights to a group of West Bank settlers, and to have received cash and hospitality from a mysterious…
Read More More on DeLay/Abramoff and the RussiansUnfortunately, Blogger chose yesterday to eat all the HTML below the Viktor Bout index post in the sidebar. I’ve just finished restoring it, but unfortunately the blogroll is currently restored to a previous state and quite a lot of links have gone. This will be restored in the next couple of days. It’s nothing personal.…
Read More Admin (Vortex): Site RestoreVarious British blogs, especially around Tim Ireland’s Bloggerheads, are getting terribly het up about the news that Zack Exley, an internet activist from MoveOn.org, has come over to the UK to work on the Labour campaign team. Tim has got to the point of crossing Atrios and the Washington Monthly off his blogroll because they…
Read More Zack Exley, Triangulation and a Blog RowNewsweek reports on Bernard Kerik’s time in Iraq. Apparently he preferred going out on night raids after the “bad guys” with other officials’ South African bodyguards to working with the Iraqis. That throws a little light on how he became known as the Terminator of Baghdad, I suppose. No wonder Doug Brand had to beg…
Read More Kerik in Baghdad (2)The new US Secretary of Homeland Security, former New York cop on duty at ground zero on the day, and Saudi royal bodyguard, Bernard Kerik, has been encountering a certain amount of blogosphere criticism since his appointment. Amongst other things, he’s been accused of partisanship (he was the chap who said during the election campaign…
Read More Bernard Kerik, and the South Yorkshire PoliceWhat is it with these people? Every time you expect them to do something that isn’t evil, like seizing people’s library records, raping prisoners of war or allying themselves with a government that boils dissidents, they botch the job. Talking Points Memo has the details on the Iraqi government’s declaration to the IAEA that a…
Read More 350 tons of RDX vanished in IraqNow, I’ve just spent a good hour composing a long post about the Bush documents, but Blogger had one of its increasingly frequent crappy fits and the lot vanished. So, I’ll keep this short. The fact you can recreate the documents in MS Word is no kind of argument that they were created that way.…
Read More Really, this is not good enoughThe Guardian reports that Afghan police in Kabul have uncovered a group of mercenaries who were operating their own prison under the cover of an “import business”. In the building they had several people hanging upside down, who had apparently been beaten up first. Lovely. Although the group’s leader is apparently one Jonathan Keith Idema,…
Read More What now? Mystery of free lances and their own little jailThe mighty Talking Points Memo has an interview with Anonymous, the spook author of Imperial Hubris, the book in which he bashes Bush’s counterterrorist policy comprehensively. TPM and Anon discuss Saudi Arabia (or next month’s outrage, as I’ve decided to call it) and establish that al-Qa’ida apparently operates on the principles laid down in Withnail…
Read More The Withnail Theory of Terrorism