May 2004

New developments on the story that the international gun runner Viktor Bout has been taken off a UN sanctions list apparently at the behest of the US, despite his links with the Taliban and (allegedly) Osama bin Laden. My Way of Thinking, who seems to have been the first blogger to pick up on the…

Well, after yesterday’s Commons protest by the Fathers’ Rights activists who hurled purple dye over Tony Blair, one of the traditional rituals or standard operating procedures of British political life has clicked into action. This is the way in which, whenever an unusually spectacular demonstration occurs, politicians and the media take on a very special…

Yahoo! News – U.S. Troops Raid Chalabi’s House in Iraq Ahmed Chalabi, the former hope of the Pentagon’s true believers, is finally on the skids. The Iraqi exile politician whose Iraqi National Congress was the source of many of the wilder tales about nuclear weapons and Iraqis greeting the US Army with flowers as opposed…

“”Everything that you’re discussing is information you’re not supposed to have,” barked Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton when asked about the off-the-record briefing his delegation received on March 25. Details of that meeting appear in a confidential memo signed by Upton and obtained by the Voice. The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and…

Now, having done the obfusc lesson, we can proceed to a practical exercise. William Safire, the New York Times’ pet neocon, has been expressing himself on the subject of the sarin shell. (Link) We shall see some examples in the text. “a small, crude weapon of mass destruction may have been used by Saddam’s terrorists…

Obfuscatin’! It’s the way of today – the all-purpose debating tactic that defends all kinds of otherwise indefensible abuses from climate change through the war against Iraq to speeding. As a service, the Yorkshire Ranter offers a brief guide on how to employ this scientifically proven technique to win your ideological battles tool. Yes, you…

I’ve just been doing some more searches about this. Need to read the docs first, thought. The names to watch are “Flying Dolphin”, “Air Cess”, “Santa Cruz Imperial”, and “Centrafricain Airlines”. As far as folk go, apart from the man himself, look out for Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Saqr al Nayhan(link), Sanjivan Ruprah(link), and…

Well, I may have said that the neo-cons weren’t trying to claim that the alleged sarin bomb justified the invasion of Iraq. I wasn’t entirely right. The Times, that sad ruin of a newspaper, illustrated the story with a large picture of various chemical-looking tubes and instruction leaflets printed in Arabic, English and Russian. The…

Michael Howard stakes out a radical challenge to Blair “Mr Howard is thinking of ways within the parliamentary rules of presenting Mr Blair with some oysters at Prime Minister’s questions tomorrow (Wednesday). “The thing that disturbs me,” he said, “is that the in-fighting that is taking place at the highest levels of the Labour Party…

Despite yesterday’s discovery of a sarin-filled artillery shell in Iraq, the Americans seem strangely reluctant to trumpet the obvious fact that their mission has now been justified. A weapon of mass destruction has been found? So – where are the victory parades? Of course, there were a couple of flies in the sarin. The shell…