Crack BBC journo Peter Taylor’s film The Secret Peacemaker, about Brendan Duddy, the man who maintained secret communications between the IRA leadership and the British government from the early 70s to 1993, was a cracker; it provided rich detail about the practicalities of ending the war, the missed opportunities of the first ceasefire, and moreover…
Read More What if they staged a coup and nobody came?I think TalkingPointsMemo has badly missed the point of this AP newsfart. Says Josh: You know things aren’t good when you see a headline about Pakistani refugees fleeing to Afghanistan. But they’re not fleeing into Afghanistan because they expect civil war any moment as a result of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination; for a start, we’re up…
Read More Missed!The IPCC report is, first of all, a cracking job of work, despite that the Met did its level best to dodge the investigators. They have established a lot of facts, and carried out a mass of interviews, and come up with sensible conclusions; I’d like to recommend again that you read it, as it…
Read More Stockwell Report: A ResponseThe IPCC seems to be clueless about running a website, so here’s a direct link to the Stockwell I report (PDF, 1.35MB): link. Much more later.
Read More The IPCC ReportOK, so by chance we have some real data to put into the sums in this post. The head of MI5 has just announced that we should all be very scared, because he reckons there may be 2,000 people in Britain who pose a threat to national security because of their support for terrorism. So…
Read More Some data pointsUpdate: Right, I am somewhat calmer. The first thing that strikes me about this is that we still don’t know quite a few interesting things about the decisions that led up to the shooting; for example, why the firearms squad took so long to rock up, who was responsible for the briefing they received, which…
Read More It Is the Deliberate Policy of the Metropolitan Police to Shoot People and Lie About ItWhat to blog about? In the face of work like this or this? Why not Pakistan? The fix is in, as they say – Musharraf safely re-elected by crook more than by hook, pesky corruption charges disposed of, Nawaz Sharif shouldered out of the way, time for the great heroine’s return. The enemy, of course,…
Read More Trimming to the TalibanA short compendium of US illegal surveillance links: Qwest “threatened with loss of contracts” after pre-11/9 surveillance request, says exec on insider trading rap. Greenwald blasts immunity proposal. David Isenberg. Much detail. Laura Rozen. I have nothing very original to say, except to point out that there seems to be quite a big iceberg here.…
Read More Uninspired surveillance postThis New York Observer interview with Ann Coulter is being heavily blogged (sample), but I think there is an important point that’s being missed here. If you follow the link, you’ll see that the reporter adopts the old trick of shutting up and letting the subject natter; this is a classic of journalistic craft, as…
Read More The Dynamic of Extreme Conservative RhetoricI’ve gradually become addicted to Overcoming Bias, and specifically Eliezer Yudkowsky’s contributions to it. And it struck me, reading the reports on the de Menezes trial, that a good dose of this blog could have done the Metropolitan Police a power of good. Specifically, members of the police command staff recalled hearing a radio message…
Read More Death By Bias