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 [...]

The Times has been doing the best reporting from Iraq by far at the moment. Here’s some evidence.
Now, to substance. Note this:
“We have received a shipment of Strela antiaircraft rockets,” Abu Sajad boasted to a Sunday Times reporter.
“We intend to use them to prove to the world that the Mahdi Army will not allow Basra [...]

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 [...]

Via comp.risks, across the wire the electric message came: German students crack encryption on over 2bn RFID smartcards made by NXP Semiconductor. The cards in question are NXP’s MiFare Classic type, and are used for public transport….but also for access control in sensitive government installations, it turns out. Inevitably, NXP threw up its hands - [...]

Viktor Bout arrested in Thai hotel room on charges of arming FARC.
And I didn’t even know he *was* doing. More, as they say, as we get it.
Update: Here’s the pic - it’s obviously him.

What on earth? Dolphin Air, (ICAO: FDN), the company formed from the assets of Santa Cruz Imperial, has a flight leaving Sharjah at 1600GMT for the United States - specifically Decatur, Illinois. Flight number is FDN 1457.
As far as I know the only aircraft left on the FDN register is an old 737-2X5, which has [...]

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 [...]

So dodgy Russians have bullied Fasthosts into darking Craig Murray’s blog, as well as a gaggle of others on the same virtual machine. (Iron-clad integrity *and* technical chops; what more do you want?) Naturally, this has only spread the poison; so here’s the complete text. Kindly post it on your own blog.
In a creative note, [...]

This Spyblog post, regarding the Grauniad’s splash story yesterday that the TITAN RAIN inquiry into alleged Chinese hackers attacking the US government had spread to attacks on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, raises some interesting questions.
For a start, like all Chinese-hacker stories, it’s based heavily on semi-military sources and quotes from doctrinal publications. What, precisely, [...]

Michael Hodges’s new book on the history of the Kalashnikov assault rifle is clearly a work that fits in with this blog. And we can say that it’s also well worth reading; not just for the knockabout, although there are some good stories (the brothel in the Izhevsk arsenal; Mikhail Kalashnikov’s special elk soup).
As history, [...]