Rare feature, this, but the Observer has news: the Stevens report says, apparently, that the US National Security Agency was monitoring her phone calls the night of her death. A couple of questions: didn’t they have anyone better to bug? And, more importantly, what was the French government’s position on this? The Obscurer makes the…
Read More Sunday Princess Diana BloggingApparently the alternative to the Baker commission/TYR solution in Iraq – get the fuck out under a negotiated settlement with Iran – that the White House is floating is a “tilt to the Shia and Kurdish 80 per cent. I find it a little hard to work out how we are meant to tilt to…
Read More Pinball WizardJ.D> Henderson chez Intel Dump writes that General Abizaid should be relieved of his command. But first, he says, he respects Abizaid for the courage he showed in his past career. Fair enough. But there is some historical evidence that extremely brave generals are a bad idea. Consider the British experience – we brought several…
Read More Bravery doesn’t exclude stupidityThere’s been plenty of debunking aimed at the Weekly Standard‘s claim that more US troops in Iraq always means less violence, but I haven’t seen this point. Stuntz argues that 18,000 more troops were deployed between November, 2004 and February, 2005, and the butcher’s bill fell. Well, it would. November, 2004 was the peak of…
Read More GoalpostsChristmas is coming, so it must be time to start raking over old quarrels and scratching at old wounds. The Ministry has at Torygraph hack Con Coughlin, among other things because of this WMD furphy from December, 2003. I remember it well. The weapons were supposedly WMD-tastic warheads for RPGs, which is incredibly silly, and…
Read More Risible claimsNot at all sure what to make of this UN Expert Panel report on Somalia. Some things are clear enough, for example that Ethiopia is supporting the old not-government and Eritrea the Islamic Courts in order to piss off the Ethiopians. But what is all this James Bond stuff about Iranians trading arms for uranium?…
Read More The what and the whyYesterday, October 31st, at 1126 Central European Time, we had the following entry in the server log… 205.65.1.21 [entrypoint #424] 2006/10/carrierwatch-update_30.html Oct 31, 11:26:28 [0:00:00] views: 1 Proxy: noca-b1.uar.navy.mil – CVN65UCSDC2, 1.0webc2.uar.navy.mil:80 (squid/2.5.STABLE3) That is to say, someone aboard CVN-65, the USS Enterprise, read this post. You know who you are. You know where the…
Read More Best visit everJust to update on this post, now well on its way into the TYR Greatest Hits.. Current status of various US aircraft carriers is as follows: Dwight D. Eisenhower, CVN-69 sailed from Limassol, Cyprus on Saturday after calling in for a chilled Keo beer or twenty thousand. To arrive on station in the Gulf, she…
Read More Carrierwatch updateReid wants to change the law so you can be tortured if he says you’re evil enough. Not only that, he wants one of the people who the courts found innocent of preparing ricin in the great no-ricin no-plot tortured, presumably to get out of him why he didn’t prepare any ricin. This is an…
Read More Recidivist with alert populationsIf the Americans were going to attack Iran, you’d think they would do it when they had a ship or two available. Various people have been getting their knickers in a twist because the Dwight D. Eisenhower and her task group sailed for the Indian Ocean on the 3rd of October. (The Nation, this means…
Read More There will be no attack on Iran this year