I’ve been thogged by the Ministry. Thogged? Well, it’s a meme going around..name five bloggers who make you think, hence thinking bloggers, hence (thanks to Chris Dillow) thoggers. I don’t usually do these things, partly because obviousness is hard to avoid. But on this occasion, I’m a-thogging the following bethoggen. die Stiftung Leo Strauss, for…
Read More ThoggedLong-time readers of our series on Viktor Bout may remember the Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor’s report which implicated various people in Sierra Leone in terrorist financing. We’ve been interested for a long time in West Africa, and the links between Charles Taylor’s regime and Al-Qa’ida, not to mention the missing 727 case. One of the…
Read More TYR Exclusive: Interview with Paddy McKayDoes “Paleoprog” contribute anything to the otherwise indispensable American Footprints at all? Consider this thread, where he is defending the Iranian-IED stories on the grounds that i base it on what the president, rice, gates and others are now saying. If I had decided to disbelieve any statement from any of these people out of…
Read More I talk, and talk, say nothingAn interesting couple of mystery-jet stories – last week saw an aircraft using a Flying Dolphin/Dolphin Air callsign (ICAO: FDN), the company in Sharjah that took over the assets of Viktor Bout’s Santa Cruz Imperial and that continues to deal with Phoenix Aviation, pass through Dubai en route to Baghdad. Not that unusual, but interestingly…
Read More When you feel the heat you’ve got to move your fleetEvery blog and its cat has been discussing the tale that Richard Armitage supposedly threatened to bomb Pakistan back into the stone age, but no-one seems to have mentioned a very obvious fact about this: Pakistan has an estimated 20-60 nuclear warheads deliverable by various means. Now, you don’t go round threatening to bomb nuclear…
Read More All the Pakistan that’s fit to printAh, those fine Blairite institutions. South Maidstone is apparently to be blessed with a school where some rich person gets 51 per cent of the votes for 20 per cent of the money, but something has gone terribly wrong. Specifically, the Tory-run Kent county council is trying to do something unfashionable. According to our sources,…
Read More AcademiesRemember this post from July 2005? Regarding the full sickology of the Iraqi war economy, it covered epic CPA corruption, heroin smuggling, Iraqi girls turning up turning tricks all over the Middle East, and of course Viktor Bout. In comments, someone claimed to have heard from a Kroll securigoon that Russian planes were bringing in…
Read More We love the corruptionCharles Taylor has been re-nailed, after a day or so of freedom on the lam from the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone. I was amused by this description of his arrest on the Nigerian-Cameroonian border: The former Liberian leader had arrived at the frontier in a Range Rover jeep with diplomatic corps number plates,…
Read More Who Are You Going to Massacre Next?The European Commission has issued a new blacklist of dubious airlines. You can get the document here (pdf). Notable on it is that a number of frequently-mentioned Viktor Bout-related operators are now on the list. Specifically, Phoenix Aviation, GST Aero, Reem Air and Jetline are all there, as are Butembo and Great Lakes Business Co.…
Read More Firedumped!The Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor has a very interesting indeed report on Sierra Leone, diamonds, the curious connections with political Islam of various more or less violent kinds, and our favourite subject – mystery jets! Regular readers may recall that this blog has gone into the bizarre case of why Iraqi Airways’s planes are registered…
Read More 9L.