While reading the BBC field reports from Iraq, I ran across a puzzling reference from one reporter, who said, "Saddam Hussein has already been spotted in more places than Lord Lucan. He's been in the Russian embassy, he's been in the mosque this morning, he's alleged to be on a convoy to Syria - no doubt he'll soon be found on a sofa in Huddersfield." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2934651.stm)

Never having heard of the "Lord Lucan" reference (but guessing it to be somewhat of a British equivalent to an Elvis sighting), I went poking around the web and was intrigued by the story:

] At 9.45pm on the night of 7th November 1974, a distressed
] and bloodstained woman burst into the bar of The Plumber's
] Arms, Lower Belgrave Street, crying out "Help me, help me,
] help me. I've just escaped from being murdered. He's in the
] house. He's murdered the Nanny!"

Though it sounds like the plot of a mystery novel or urban legend, it's evidently quite true: Over 25 years ago, a British nobleman murdered the nanny and disappeared, to be followed by a string of sightings placing him in a variety of countries around the world. The full story of the night of the murder is here:

 http://www.lordlucan.com

The most recent "hard news" that I could find was a 1999 BBC News article announcing that the missing Lord had finally been officially declared dead:

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/487211.stm

And the most recently updated info that I could find, was from a site by Lady Lucan, "setting the record straight" on some of the misinformation that's accumulated over the years. This seems to be the most up-to-date information, and includes many pictures from family photo albums, as well as quite a bit of rant from Lady Lucan. Some of it seems to be fact-based, though there are other sections which make accusations of a "criminal conspiracy" to take away her rights, and "a device used by the medical profession to simulate nervous breakdown" and that she became "involuntarily addicted" to certain types of medication. She goes on to accuse the authorities of abusing her human rights, and levels accusations at various other people with examples of "rude behavior" (such as not inviting her to a family wedding):

 http://www.ladylucan.co.uk/

Anyway, it was an interesting little side jaunt into British culture . . .

The Mystery of Lord Lucan

What appears to be the Interz0ne II Code Challenge has been released... ;)

SETI message to Interz0ne-II

] British military divers are searching for evidence of
] chemical weapons in a flooded underground bunker at what
] they believe was "Chemical Ali's" intelligence
] headquarters.

This reminds me of some other reports we got a few months back, saying that chemical weapons were stashed below the "high tide" mark of the Tigris River.

Divers search 'Chemical Ali's' HQ

] This site is a coalition effort of bloodthirsty hawks and
] ineffectual doves united in admiration for Mohammed Saeed
] al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information (currently on
] administrative leave).

Wasn't sure whether to put this in the humor or current events topic ;)

We Love the Iraqi (Mis)Information Minister

] As a gesture of reconciliation, he arrived with Haider
] al-Kadar, the man who had previously held the
] responsibility for the shrine. Mr al-Kadar is widely
] disliked in Najaf because of his connection to Saddam
] Hussein's Ministry of Religion.
]
] "Mr al-Khoei's appearance with such as reviled figure
] appears to have inflamed one of the factions loyal to a
] different mullah, Mohammed Braga al-Saddar, which appears
] to have led to his death

Majid al-Khoei Stabbed to Death

jfeil wrote:
] Elonka wrote:
] ] ] U.S. officials have pointed to Khazraji, widely respected
] ] ] among the Iraqi armed forces for his role in the
] ] ] Iran-Iraq war, as a candidate for a leadership position
] ] ] in an Iraq without Saddam.
] ]
] ] The ex-Chief of Staff of the Iraqi Army (1987-1990) goes for a
] ] walk near his current home in Denmark, and disappears. Was he
] ] kidnapped (or worse) by Iraqi Intelligence? Did he flee the
] ] country from fear of a war crimes trial, or did something else
] ] happen? Stay tuned...
]
] It looks like this guy might have been spirited away by the
] CIA and killed in Iraq along with the Shiite cleric. From Arab
] News
]
] http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=25014
]

This is starting to sound like the plot of a Clancy novel! Slate MSN says something similar about the Denmark disappearance, that Khazraji may have been spirited out of Denmark by the CIA, so that they could offer him as an alternative to Chalabi, who they very much dislike:

 http://slate.msn.com/id/2081329/

More background on Chalabi and various entities' dislike of him here:
 http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid6142/

If Khazraji was indeed killed along with the Grand Shiite Ayatollah's son al-Khoei, then it makes the story kind of moot, but the reports that I've been hearing are that the two people killed today were instead al-Khoei and al-Kadar. I haven't been able to quite make sense yet about why both these guys were killed, since they seem to have been on opposite sides of the figurative fence: Khoei was anti-Saddam and had been living in exile for years, while Kadar was pro-Saddam and much hated because of his association with Saddam's "Ministry of Religion." They were also both Shiite, and seem to have been attacked by other Shiites, so if anything, this seems to underscore the bitter divisions within the Iraqi Shiite community.

Getting back to Khazraji's status though, while I was surfing the news streams on this, I did see a *lot* of reports that Khazraji has been seen in the Kuwait/Iraq region, so the assassinations do indeed bring more attention to his own story: How did he get out of Denmark? Was the CIA involved, as a couple reports suggest? And is Khazraji going to be presented as a potential leader in the new Iraqi government?

The plot thickens . . .

RE: Top Iraqi defector disappears

] Most Iraqis have been unable to access the Internet since
] March 31, when cruise missiles hit servers and satellite
] dishes at the Information Ministry in Baghdad. Repeated
] strikes on telephone switching centers have also disabled
] much of the phone service in the city, rendering dial-up
] modems -- Iraqis' predominant means of connecting to the
] Internet -- useless. Additionally, the war has knocked
] out almost all of the websites operated by the Iraqi
] government and state-controlled media.
]
] Meanwhile, the U.S. government's plans for repairing
] Iraq's IT infrastructure are still unclear. The Bush
] administration has charged the Agency for International
] Development with rebuilding the infrastructure and public
] facilities in post-war Iraq. But none of the agency's
] eight projects currently out for bid includes repairing
] Iraq's telecommunications or information technology.

I'm particularly interested in this too, to find out what happened to Salam Pax, the "Where Is Raed" blogger. According to a 3/31/2003 article in Salon, his IP was hit hard:

From http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/03/31/iraq_offline/index.html

] Meanwhile, two primary Internet access points for Iraqi
] citizens -- among them a high-profile blogger using the
] alias "Salam Pax" -- have been unreachable since the weekend.
]
] A Cisco switch that connected Baghdad residents to the Internet
] stopped responding Saturday morning, Iraq time. The device,
] located at Internet protocol address 62.145.94.250, served as a
] Web gateway for many citizens.
]
] The headers of a March 19 e-mail message from Salam Pax, author
] of Where Is Raed? a popular blog chronicling life in Baghdad,
] showed he connected to the Internet using the switch. Pax's
] electronic journal has not been updated since early last week.

Salam Pax's blog, last updated March 24, is here:
 http://dearraed.blogspot.com

Wired News: IQ Test for Rebuilding Iraqi Net

BBC Field reporter about the US Flag that was temporarily placed on the face of the Saddam statue yesterday:

] We've just learned from the US marines that the US flag
] that was put on the face of Saddam yesterday - it was
] replaced by an Iraqi flag when the people shouted for
] that - was the flag that was flying over the Pentagon on
] September 11.
]
] For a lot of the American marines, they think this war is
] all about defeating terrorism, they will tell you that
] over and over again. There is also a connection in the
] minds of the American public between the regime of Saddam
] and what happened on September 11, and apparently the
] flag that was draped over this face was flying over the
] pentagon when the plane crashed into it.

Note: I haven't been able to find any confirmation of this story aside from the BBC report.

Update: ABCNews is confirming this, in an interview with the soldier who put the flag up, Corporal Chin from New York:
"And the flag — it was on the Pentagon when it got hit on 9/11. That was the same flag, and me being from New York, it kind of all goes together a little bit. It was a team effort, which made it even better, you know," he said.

ABCNews article here:

 http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/Primetime/Iraq030410USFlagStatue.html

Further update: Other news agencies are confirming that it was Marine Corporal Chin up there, but are not mentioning the origin of the flag.

(unconfirmed) US Flag on Saddam statue was the one that was flying over the Pentagon on September 11th

Regarding the reports of Saddam using a Jaguar encryption system:

] Steven Aftergood, a senior intelligence technology
] researcher at the Federation of American Scientists,
] said: "If it was really a 20-year-old system, then one
] has to assume that the encryption is obsolete, that it
] has been penetrated." Other military analysts said it was
] just as likely that the British government would only
] have granted Racal export licences for the radios if it
] had already been satisfied it could break the encryption.

Decius wrote:
More on Saddam's Crypto Systems. Interestingly enough, this could be a case where crypto export regulations actually worked.

politechbot.com: Should Saddam have been using PGP? Iraqi crypto broken...

Okay, here's my rant.

Last night, while doing my regular scanning of the news networks for info on the latest in Iraq, I tuned in to Fox News for awhile, and then found myself getting steadily more and more angry at their flippant attitude.

They were bouncing in and out of different stories, one of which was from one of their embedded reporters, a guy named Kelly, who was reporting from one of Saddam's Palaces in Baghdad. They were laughing and calling it "Kelly's Palace," making fun of the tennis courts, and one of the anchors even said something to the effect of, "I bet Saddam is watching this right now. Hey Saddam, we've got a tank on your front lawn!"

They were treating their news coverage like some kind of "morning drive-time" chatter, and it was *so* belittling of other nationalities' viewpoints, I was appalled.

I've been steaming ever since last night, trying to figure out how to communicate to those nitwits just how damaging their attitudes and comments could be, and this is what I came up with.

Try, just for the mental exercise of it, to turn things around and look at it from a different perspective. A lot of people, I think, are bewildered at the anger that the Arab people have for the American invasion of Iraq, so here's a different way of looking at it:

Imagine, in some sort of alternate twist of fate, that Al Qaeda or the Taliban had managed to take over some territory on our own shores. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that they had infiltrated and taken over Texas (yeah yeah I know, some people wouldn't mind losing Texas). But, let’s say that for some reason our own military had not been effective in removing them, and that we in the rest of the country had watched with rage as all kinds of atrocities were committed in territory that we regarded as our own. Atrocities that were being committed against Americans -- people that we might not necessarily agree with all the time, but who we strongly identified with.

Further, imagine that other countries (say, France and Mexico), who for some reason had a better military might and the willpower to deal with the problem, decided that they were going to come in and fix things for us. To "liberate Texas" for us. So they massed French and Mexican troops around Texas, and moved in. The fighting was intense, many Taliban died, and many Americans died in the crossfire. Some Americans who liked it better under the Taliban fought bitterly against the French & Mexican "invaders," and those were the ones that really tore our hearts up -- on the one hand, we wanted to see the land liberated. On the other, we hated the thought of fellow Americans being killed by foreigners. Plus there was also a sense of, "As Americans, we're good fighters. Surely we can fight off somebody like the French!" Many of the Americans in Texas though chose not to fight, and would hide in their homes, hoping that the fighting woul... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]