Alternate Seat of TYR

If you can read you should read this if you read nothing else this decade. It’s all about how the Americans started torturing people, whose idea it was, how men like John Yoo came to provide the legal justifications, who was keen (the ideological core of the administration), who didn’t want to know (the [...]

I recall I once told readers of this blog to watch out for anyone who starred in a “Young Enterprise” program or won an award for the so-and-so most likely to succeed in business. They’ll be the ones vanishing over the hills with Acme Materials Science Ltd’s total cash balances, while you try to work [...]

Abu Muqawama on Pakistan:
Raise your hands if you think Pakistan would totally sell the U.S., India, and Afghanistan down the river to earn it a (temporary and illusory) respite from the Islamist insurgents currently
threatening Islamabad. (You can’t see it on your computer monitor, but Abu Muqawama is typing with one hand because the other is [...]

So why was Viktor in Thailand? Well, there are some possible explanations beyond the CTB theory that it was something to do with the Burmese junta, or the Chinese, or someone.
Specifically, there are reasons to think that South-East Asia might have been the next stop in the VB caravan, after Ostend, South Africa, and the [...]

Much more is filtering out about the Bangkok Bout Bust; it seems fairly certain that his arrest was the result of a sting operation in which the DEA posed as buyers from the FARC. Bout booked a meeting room in the Bangkok Sofitel; he, and several others, were waiting for their guests to arrive when [...]

We’ve been seeing a steady flow of Click Airways (ICAO: CGK) and Click Airways International (ICAO: CKW) movements between the UAE, Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Bagram, and some other war-on-terror locales like Djibouti and northern Somalia. Here’s something interesting; Click(CGK), one of the airlines banned by the EU in April last year, is registering a lot [...]

John Reid. Thank God we managed to avoid the nightmare; Prime Minister Reid. That really worried me in 2006-2007; Chris Lightfoot and I were planning to start a dedicated anti-Reid website at one point.
Anyway, Reid has been personally fingered by the coroner’s inquest into the death of RHA Captain James Philippson, as the Grauniad reports. [...]

So Gates has been doing the rounds of EU capitals, looking for more troops (and money) for Afghanistan. He didn’t get very far; although Germany did agree to find half a battalion of light infantry as a quick-reaction force for the northern zone, this just relieves a Norwegian force that is currently doing the job. [...]

Nonbarking dog of the year, 2007 was the fact that the increasingly heavyweight NATO force in Afghanistan’s logistics are dependent on the road from Kandahar-Quetta-Karachi, that is to say through Taliban and Baluch rebel country to Pakistan’s most politically unstable and violent city. As you’ll see at the link, someone finally attacked trucks on it [...]

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 in the mountains [...]