Flit

WORMTONGUE STRIKES AGAIN In yet

WORMTONGUE STRIKES AGAIN

In yet another... interesting move, Eric "Wormtongue" Margolis claims that Gen. Tommy Franks will make up evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons if inspectors don't find any:

Do it like we used to make moonshine back home: just mix up some ol' chemicals that stink real bad - try floor wax remover, ammonia, anchovy paste and garlic powder - let 'em marinate in the sun a few days, then call a press conference. Those dumb journalists won't know nerve gas from hair tonic.

HERBERT TAKES ANOTHER WHACK Bill

HERBERT TAKES ANOTHER WHACK

Bill Herbert takes a whack at me again. He's right about one thing: I unfairly maligned the UK Mirror two posts below... it didn't say that the Pentagon drill had to deal with a hijacked airliner, either. Evidently Michael Ruppert's timeline started that lie, and Global Howler repeated it. Here's the original Mirror article in question. Now that we've got a bit of a dialogue going between all three sites on Flitters, I'd hope that the Howler will correct that error, too... either that, or prove that they should be lumped into the Rivero camp once and for all.

As for Enron's pull out of Qatar, about which Bill Herbert writes:

Please note that the "event" in global howler's timeline is dated April 1999, and yet Enron pulled out (and not the other way around) of its deal with Qatar two years later. I suppose it's possible that Enron had both lost it's deal with Qatar and gained it back within that two-year period, and only the Albion Monitor caught this amazing story (there is no reference to it on Lexis-Nexis), but I think I'm going to have to call this a lie.

A story based on the original Enron announcement, in April 1999, is here. An Indian business paper's story on how this impacts Dabhol, dated May 1999, is here. In this case, it appears Global Howler is right, and Herbert's source, the L.A. Times, is not. (Probably because they're talking about two different things. The first is the collapse of an Enron gas liquefication plant project in Qatar, which forced Enron to look for alternate sources of natural gas for its India projects back in late 1998. The second is the pipeline project from the Qatar fields to plants in Oman and Abu Dhabi (codenamed Dolphin) which ultimately replaced those earlier plans for a new plant of their own, but which a troubled Enron later also had to pull out of as well. It's true some gas destined for Dabhol could some day be extracted using the Dolphin pipeline, however.)

Again, I don't think Enron's troubles getting natural gas to India are in any way significantly relevant to the events of Sept. 11. They do exemplify the continued and growing interest of Western oil producers in the subcontinental market, however, for whatever that's worth. But that just makes the entry in question irrelevant, not dishonest, as Herbert claims.

OUR LATEST TRICK The latest

OUR LATEST TRICK

The latest site my team here at U of T has completed was launched this morning... www.nationalreport.utoronto.ca. It's basically a university annual report at its heart (and an annual project for us), but we worked this time to take a little advantage of the blogging revolution with the site's "Great Minds Debate." Basically we've got a group of quasi-bloggers from the university, who can debate issues amongst themselves, and space for comments from everybody else as well. Anyway, it's an experiment: the team is eager to hear feedback, as always.