So it looks like we’ve identified the new Con Coughlin. Here’s a piece in the Torygraph that blames everything SIS might have done wrong in the Bush years on Tony Blair, built entirely on a single SIS source. When I first saw it, it weirdly didn’t have a byline, although it since acquired that of…
Read More Coughlin 2.0How much of a bastard was Jack Straw again? This much. Scotland Yard has opened a criminal investigation into secret MI6 rendition operations that resulted in leading Libyan dissidents being abducted and flown to Tripoli where they were subsequently tortured in Muammar Gaddafi’s prisons….The year after the joint UK-Libyan operations were mounted, Straw told MPs…
Read More Jack Straw, still repellent after all these yearsWell, this looks pretty ugly. I have a question. We know that unofficial, non-doctrinal training material was being circulated around the joint services intelligence centre in Chicksands in 2003-2005 – there’s an interesting quote about it in the Guardian piece here: Any public inquiry into the activities of the JFIT would be expected to examine…
Read More I didn’t think I’d still be blogging this six years laterPhil Carter quits; more here. I rather wonder if it had some connection to this. Is it any consolation that the Obama administration has a better class of resignations? I think not. Meanwhile, another voice of sense is silenced by trolls. I said a while ago somewhere that CNAS was likely to be to this…
Read More Good luck, Phil. AgainProponents of UAVs like to talk about the “enduring stare”; their ability to remain on station, to keep pointing at the target, rather than taking discrete reels of photos. Blogging ought to be a bit like that; keep after the story, don’t accept the official news (or bullshit) cycle. Hence, this McClatchy story, which has…
Read More can’t we, you know, move on?This is wrong; Gitmo will be closed. Binyam Mohammed will be returned to Britain, or put on trial in the USA. Either way the details of his treatment, and that of all the other inmates, will become public. What are Foggy Bottom and the CIA playing at? Get it over with Consider this BBC story.…
Read More BullTwo things. Marty Lederman of popular legal blog Balkinisation has just become the first blogger in good standing to join the Obama Administration. He’s going to be Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Council. That’s repellent schreibtischtäter John Yoo’s old job. I repeat, old Organ Failure Yoo has been replaced by Liberal…
Read More US flattened by self administered denial of service attackThe meeting. Two, three, four men who were not the ones you saw at podiums, behind Fox News desks. The man who’s pure evil. Hard men. Men who say ‘flip the switch’ or ‘push the button’ or ‘pull that lever.’ When they were younger, they might have done it themselves. They are the hidden men,…
Read More fear and loathing, on the campaign trailTim Ireland’s new project is more necessary than ever. It’s not quite achieved the same degree of punch and professionalism that the daddy of tab-bashing blogs, BildBlog offers readers of Germany’s biggest newspaper, but give them time. (This also bothers me. When I started this blog there were one million blogs, of which 50,000 updated…
Read More Blinded By The SunBlaney: Donal Blaney said… I do not bandy the term “nazi” or “racist” about in the same way the left do. 2:05 PM Blaney: This is how the Nazi traffic wardens of London behave when they see a nice car that they decide they want to tow. Blaney: First, a confession. I was appointed a…
Read More Donal Blaney: Hypocrite, Political Whore, and Torture Fan