June 2004

Last night’s TV. What a great subject for a blog post. Newsnight last night was taken up by the BBC’s favourite post-Hutton pastime – broadcasting earnest discussions of its own failings. On the panel was Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, who had a number of curious things to say about Andrew Gilligan, reporting and her…

As heavily reported, the Iranians have seized three speed boats belonging to the Royal Naval party in southern Iraq after they allegedly crossed the border between Iran and Iraq. The people involved are engaged in setting up an Iraqi river police for the area (chalk up another bunch of gunmen to us! I hope I’m…

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Private craft makes space history They did it! Burt Rutan’s outfit went to space! Best news all year!

So – having besieged Fallujah for weeks without success, you hand it over to a new and rather vague “Fallujah Brigade” in the hope that they will be less provocative (with the subtext that it’s a Kosovo Protection Corps-style way of incorporating the gunmen into something quasi-legitimate). Then, without apparently considering any further, you call…

The 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…

Just not for our side. The chart shows numbers of “significant activities” by insurgents. Blue line is the daily total, red is the moving average. From Global Security

In the week that Kabul’s first gastropub opened for business, Phil Carter’s Intel Dump has a great post on the bar scene that has developed inside the walls of the Baghdad Green Zone. Apparently, the Zone’s hottest ticket is the CIA disco. Complete with mirrorball and (sprung I hope) dance floor. “The plushest tavern is…

The Yorkshire Ranter was one year old on the 10th of June. And I failed to mark blogday in any signal fashion. Shame, shame, shame

Der Standard is reporting that a video of Paul Johnson, the Lockheed engineer being held hostage by al-Qa’ida, has turned up on a server belonging to a surveying firm in California. The paper referred to a German techie news site, Heise Online, which in turn referred to this story from Der Spiegel. The firm in…

Civilian Charged In Beating of Afghan Detainee (washingtonpost.com) A privately employed interrogator has been charged with assault over the case of an Afghan man who was beaten to death during three days of interrogation. According to a “source”, the CIA men then tried to blame the army: “Immediately after Wali’s death, he said, the CIA…