February 2005

The Washington Post reports on the background of the election-day riot and shooting at Camp Bucca, Umm Qasr, the main coalition jail in Iraq. “”What happened here on January 31st has changed the dynamics” of managing such situations, said Maj. Gen. William Brandenburg, who oversees U.S. military detention operations in Iraq and toured the facility…

We don’t have to believe it if we don’t want to, but then that’s conservative talk. Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson shot himself in the kitchen of his Aspen bunker yesterday. He is dead. I would like to report that he screamed across the firmament of a clean blue sky in a thundering scimitar of dirty…

Newsweek reports at some length on the operations of the so-called “torture flights”, the two no-titles jets allegedly used by certain parts of the US government to transfer suspected terrorists to countries where they may face a worse fate. The Ranter of the 15th of November 2004 covered a previous version of the story, however…

The outstanding Gene Expression has a brief post with links to a variety of guides on how to spoof automated fingerprint readers. It’s clear that, using fairly simple and widely available technology, spoofing is feasible. It’s also clear that, whatever the ID-control technology, criminal creativity will catch up with it – after all, the same…

Phil Carter’s Intel Dump reports on a Wall Street Journal story on a rash of apparently unauthorised irregular forces appearing in Iraq. (Note: original story is locked in a subscription ghetto) It is reported that “The unplanned units — commanded by friends and relatives of cabinet officers and tribal sheiks — go by names like…

I’ve only been watching the Great Gannon Hunt in passing, but this is amazing: it is said he knew about the opening of the Iraq invasion four hours beforehand. Now this is even more important than the link makes out: H-hour in Iraq was brought forward by 24 hours at the last moment, because of…

Juan Zarate, US Assistant Treasury Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crime, gave a long testimony to the Senate Financial Services Committee yesterday. It’s good to see that, in his words: “Treasury is also working with the interagency community to identify and shut down illicit financiers who have penetrated the diamond and precious commodity industries…

The website of a man who can see in ultraviolet light, unlike the rest of us. The reason is that he had an artificial lens inserted into one of his eyes to treat a cataract – our lenses filter out UV, but the replacement doesn’t. He experiments with cameras, in order to show us something…

I didn’t say anything at all about the death of Arthur Miller, or the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, or even the row around Ken Livingstone. On Miller, I remember vividly studying The Crucible at school: our class was assigned parts to read, and I got Governor Danforth, the menacing state authority who appears towards to…

God, the stats log’s been entertaining in the last few days. After the folk who were looking for porno pictures of the president of Yemen, and the crazed FreeRepublic.com trolls, now we have someone at the Elysée Palace. At 0816 hours, Thursday 17th February 2005, IP address 62.160.71.179 searched French Google for “KH-55” and hit…