Young women in Chechnya

A compelling piece from the Big Picture.

Love scenes from Egyptian cinema, 1920s to 60s

Not exactly puritanical:


From Arabist.net with this commentary:

A wonderful video in the context of calls for strict censorship in state television and cinema in Egypt. More generally speaking, some of these kissing scenes from the 1940s-60s are more passionate than many scenes of the last 20 years.

Toronto street food -- is there yet hope?

I have lived in Bonfield longer than any other place, but there is part of my soul that is Torontonian -- the result of having been there as a grad student in my 20s. Those were truly formative years.  The result of this connection is that I see T.O. as a microcosm, so full of human  possibilities, so often falling short.  Recently the emphasis has been on falling short, as the city seems to have been infected by the world-wide wave of mean, destructive small-mindedness.

Then I read this article on the movement to bring good street food to the city.  A place known for its extraordinary variety of food ought to have a fleet of trucks serving any number of  different styles of fast food, but small-mindedness has made it nearly impossible to run such a business.

Then comes Suresh Doss to remind longer-settled Torontonians of a simple truth:  more variety is good for everybody.  Specifically, good food trucks bring customers to the bricks-and-mortar restaurants they are parked outside.  As Doss works to make possible legal food truck havens, support among established restauranters grows.

I get a small laugh from the fact that Doss is an immigrant and yeah, a computer engineer.

Prof seeks help

Can any reader help me find a good, accessible book that I can assign my students in next fall's iteration of the History of Islamic Civilization?  I am looking for a book that discusses some aspect of Islamic Civilization in the early modern period.  In the past I have used Juan Cole's Napoleon's Egypt and Daniel Goffmann's The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe; both worked reasonably well.  Good as it is, I don't want to use Ross Dunn on Ibn Battuta, I'd rather lecture on him. Davis' recent book on Leo Africanus is probably too literary for my students.  Any suggestions out there?

My fourth-year seminar, 2012-13

As per usual, next fall I will be teaching HIST 4505, "Topics in Medieval History."

For the benefit of any of my students who stop by here: the topic will be "Chivalry." It's a big subject, especially if you bring in all the various points of view: what poets, chroniclers, preachers, and knights themselves said chivalry was, or should be.

Here's a pre-course reading list for any of you who might be really enthusiastic. It's taken right off the NU library catalogue, and it's just a sample; there is plenty more where that came from. Read one of these, and you have a good head-start; read a second one and you are really off to the races.

CR4509 .B37 1974
Knight and chivalry / Richard Barber.

CR4513 .K34 1996

The book of chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny : text, context, and translation/Richard W. Kaeuper,

CR4513 .K44 1984
Chivalry / Maurice Keen.

CR4519 .K347 2009
Holy warriors : the religious ideology of chivalry/Richard W. Kaeuper

CR4529.E85 K33 1999
Chivalry and violence in medieval Europe / Richard W. Kaeuper

.

CR4529.F8 P3
French chivalry : chivalric ideas and practices in mediaeval France / by Sidney Painter.

CR4553 .H84 2005
Deeds of arms : formal combats in the late fourteenth century / Steven Muhlberger.

DA185 .C64 1996

The knight in medieval England, 1000-1400 / Peter Coss.

DC33.2 .B59 1998
Strong of body, brave and noble : chivalry and society in medieval France / Constance Brittain Bouchard.

DC96.5 .W75 2000
Knights and peasants : the Hundred Years War in the French countryside / Nicholas Wright.

HN11 .D7813 1980

The chivalrous society / Georges Duby ; translated by Cynthia Postan.

Image:  One medieval take on the ideal knight, bearing the symbol of the Holy Trinity.

What my students took away from History of Islamic Civilization

I just finished grading the final exams for History of Islamic Civiliztion. Half of the exam grade was based on essays my students wrote on recent events in the Middle East. They could write on Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen or Iran, and were expected to touch on some of these phenomena: nationalism, sectarianism, Islamism, democracy, secularism, and foreign intervention. Here's what they actually wrote on (in no particular order, my summaries):

           Egypt -- ready for democracy?
           Egypt -- democracy, Islamism, Western concerns
           Tunisia -- instability threatens the revolution
           Iran -- nuclear program and foreign concerns
          Egypt -- significance of the revolution
          Iran -- society on edge, politics divided
          Iran -- if war breaks out
          Egypt -- a corrupt election?
          Egypt -- challenges of democratic transition
          Syria -- why the revolution may not succeed
          Syria -- effects of Syrian crisis
          Egypt -- religion and democracy
          Tunisia -- summary of revolution
          Iran -- the sanction regime
          Iraq -- attacks on Christians
          Iran -- counter-productive Western and Iranian policies
          Turkey -- AKP success
          Tunisia -- summary of revolution
           Iran -- domestic and foreign conflicts
           Iran -- what's at stake in current confrontation

And here's to those students: Well done. You rose to the challenge.

Image: Canadian students, but not actually mine.

British eccentricity put to good use

Thanks to the BBC.

Everything you know is wrong

"Did you know that Indians can travel through time?  That they invented the wire recorder?"

Those statements may not be true outside the Firesign Theater universe (where it is possible to run for President on the platform "Not Insane"), but equally unlikely things may be.

Matt Gabriele directed me to a long article at Spiegel Online International on the Samaritans, then  and now.  The Samaritans are the heirs of the Kingdom of Israel which broke away from Judea after the death of Solomon, and which included 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel.  That kingdom was the big deal Israelite kingdom until it was defeated by the Assyrians, who deported much of the population ("the ten lost tribes of Israel").  At least, that's the commonly accepted story. This article references research that seems to indicate that up until about 150 BCE, the city of Samaria, or nearby Mount Gezirim, was still the big center of Israelite worship.

Working behind security fences, the archaeologist has been digging on the windswept summit of Mount Gerizim.

His findings, which have only been partially published, are a virtual sensation: As early as 2,500 years ago, the mountain was already crowned with a huge, dazzling shrine, surrounded by a 96 by 98-meter (315 by 321-foot) enclosure. The wall had six-chamber gates with colossal wooden doors.

At the time, the Temple of Jerusalem was, at most, but a simple structure.

Magen has discovered 400,000 bone remains from sacrificial animals. Inscriptions identify the site as the "House of the Lord." A silver ring is adorned with the tetragrammaton YHWH, which stands for Yahweh.

All of this means that a vast, rival place of worship stood only 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Jerusalem.

It is an astonishing discovery. A religious war was raging among the Israelites, and the nation was divided. The Jews had powerful cousins who were competing with them for religious leadership in the Holy Land. The dispute revolved around a central question: Which location deserved the honor of being the hearth and burnt offering site of God Almighty?

 Well, we will see.  But if it is so, it certainly qualifies as a case of "everything you know is wrong."

Then there is this:  early medieval historians have for a very long time considered the 7th century CE to be the bottom of a great post-Roman depression, a period of economic primitiveness, where among other things, coins were few and hardly qualified as money.

Well, Jonathan Jarrett reports on a paper by Michael Metcalf that reveals something quite astonishing to me (the more astonishing in that I used to keep up with this stuff:

For example: we can now identify nine hundred dies used in the striking of the surviving corpus of seventh-century thrymsas. There are various well-established means for multiplying these figures up towards an estimate of the whole coinage, which when applied here reasoned for three million plus coins total, on a multiplier of five thousand coins per total extrapolated dies, and more probably something like a million in circulation at once.⁷ Of the gold. If we use modern parishes as a guide to how many villages there were (and you see here what I meant by ‘adventurous’), we might then expect there to be 300-odd gold coins in any given village at once! Now, I am pretty dubious about this kind of arithmetic, as you will know, although even if you halve these figures and double the number of ‘villages’ (a thing that didn’t really exist in the seventh century but let’s just assume it means ‘district’ or ‘area’ and that’s fine⁸—and one point that came up in questions that I’d never considered is that one thing that must be missing from distribution maps of coin finds is settlements, at least where they have continued, because you can’t metal-detect in towns!) that is still quite a lot of gold to spread out. All the same, even if the actual numbers are rubbish, one point is still true: doing the same maths with the same multipliers for later Anglo-Saxon England nets you much much less. Unless there was something specifically weird about the way money was produced in one or other period (and there certainly was about the later period, given how widely and in what small quantities it might be minted, but that ought to exaggerate the later figures, not shrink them), England was more monetised in the seventh century than it was even in the eleventh.

And how is it that everything we knew was wrong?  Somebody invented the wire recorder, I mean, the metal detector.

Interesting times.

Image:  an early 7th century thrymsa or gold shilling.

Could be good...

I am actually looking forward to grading the final exams in my History of Islamic Civilization class.

The reason?  About a month ago I  told the class that half the final exam would be devoted to an essay on the events of the last year or so.  They would be responsible for researching media sites and blogs (some of which I directed them to) and would write on how events in a selected country reflected themes we had discussed in connection with the modern history of the Middle East.  In this period of dramatic change, the opportunity to really focus on how the past impacted the present was just too good to pass up.

I permitted them to bring a certain amount of their source material -- 10 pages worth -- into the exam room, to be handed in with the exam.  So, as the last few determined souls finished up, I was able to quickly look at the notes used by the people who were done.

It was then it really hit me that for once I might have a really good indication of what my students got out of one of my courses.  They had a lot of time and freedom to plan the essay, and they chose the themes that made the most sense to them.  And as far as I can tell, they rather liked the prospect of the challenge.

This could be good!

Things you learn while invigilating an exam

Mosul in Iraq is called "Nineveh" in Syriac and Kurdish. Because, you know, it is.

Andrew Taylor's upcoming book: this could be really good

In short order, Boydell and Brewer will be releasing a book by my old friend, Andrew Taylor.  Andy is witty, learned, and an original thinker, and though the book is pricey and not in my usual line of work, I am interested.

Here is some of what B&B has to say:

Richard Sheale, a harper and balladeer from Tamworth, is virtually the only English minstrel whose life story is known to us in any detail. It had been thought that by the sixteenth century minstrels had generally been downgraded to the role of mere jesters. However, through a careful examination of the manuscript which Sheale almost certainly "wrote" (Bodleian Ashmole 48) and other records, the author argues that the oral tradition remained vibrant at this period, contrary to the common idea that print had by this stage destroyed traditional minstrelsy. The author shows that under the patronage of Edward Stanley, earl of Derby, and his son, from one of the most important aristocratic families in England, Sheale recited and collected ballads and travelled to and from London to market them.

I know a fair number of people who will also be tempted.

The Kingdom of Lo (Mustang)

A Big Picture feature on an isolated Tibeto-Nepalese community -- just before the highway opens it up.
Click for a good look.

Duncan Black (Atrios) sums up the politics of the last decade

Eschaton: 

There's rarely a problem that can't be solved by killing people somewhere or impoverishing your granny. Might makes right, bitches!

The Nero and Herod of Bonfield, Ontario

Last weekend the Lions Club of Bonfield held a Medieval Night to raise money to rebuild a footbridge in the park.  My wife and I put on our own medieval duds and went on over.  It was a lot of fun.  The Lions -- an international men's service club --supplied custom-made dinnerware, hats and other costume accessories, and really good food, featuring barbeque chicken and excellent, meaty ribs.

Part of the festivities was the presence of King Harold and Queen Tamela.  King Harold, who I bet had played this role before, spoke well and without too much phoney medievalesque affectation.  His main job was to raise money by finding excuses to put people in the stocks and then putting them up for auction. You could pay to release someone or to keep them imprisoned.  This worked very nicely.  Since I have just finished up teaching Gregory of Tours, I was delighted to hear King Harold addressed as "Herod," to which he quite naturally objected.  I don't know if the mistake was really a mistake or not.  This is a country township full of French Catholics and I am sure that a fair number of the attendees know perfectly well who King Herod was.  At least, that he was a bad man.

The Brueghel painting above was suggested by my wife who thought the whole scene was reminiscent of the Flemish painters, in large part because it was an old crowd (us included).  Speaking of age, after 20 years here, someone still felt compelled to comment on our funny accents.  True enough, we don't sound like North Bay area people, but still...

I heard something quite odd from one of those same people.  She said that when she moved to Bonfield from North Bay, some decades back, that she was warned  to buy a big mean dog and not go out at night.  I was surprised because she was too young to be talking about the really remote past, and in my 20 years there's never been anything happen to make  me feel that this is a rough place.  There used to be fights between French and English, but this was in the historic past by the time we got here.

Paddy cultivation, near Kuala Lumpur, March 2012

This reminds me of my father -- a financial executive -- working in the fields in South Korea during rice transplantation time.  It was a big communal event and the only unusual thing about his participation was that he was a 6'4" white American.   From the Big Picture.

Nowruz in Kabul, a bit late

That's some topography.  Thanks to the Big Picture.  Click to see it big.

To Afghanistan -- March 2012

From the Big Picture:

Click to see it big.

AlJazeera's "The Stream" interviews various observers of the Malian scene

Here it is.

Grassroots democracy in Egypt's villages

Why do Egyptian villagers vote for the people they do? How do they choose, in particular, between the Muslim Brotherhood (the oldest and best organized Islamist party) and the Salafists (who have a reputation as fundamentalists and extremists)?

Yasmine Moataz Ahmed at the Egypt Independent web site has a detailed answer.  Highly recommended.  Some excerpts:

Despite the common perception that Salafis are strict followers of Sharia compared to the Muslim Brotherhood, many of my research participants often talked about Salafis as religiously less strict than the Ikhwan. From the work of Ikwani leaders in the village, the villagers have noticed the strict hierarchy that informs the work of the Brotherhood members on the ground. In other words, the villagers understood the Brotherhood’s adherence to the dictates of the Guidance Bureau, or the Murshid, as an orthodoxy that made the Brotherhood stricter than the Salafis. They often said to me: “How come Ikhwan grassroot leaders all agree on the same things?” An incident that they often referred to is the insistence of Muslim Brotherhood members to force people to pray outside of a mosque, not build by the Brotherhood, during the Eid al-Fitr prayer last September.

Salafis, on the other hand, are seen as religiously flexible. “Aren’t we all Salafis?” many Nour supporters often repeated to me. For them, Salafis represent a religious understanding that seeks to closely follow the times of the Prophet and his followers — the Prophet was married to a Coptic woman, his neighbors were Jews, he dealt with each situation on a case-by-case basis, hence the perception that Salafis are, believe it or not, lenient. This was reflected on the ground; Salafis, at least in the village where I worked, appear to be more laid-back compared to the Ikhwan, and hence, more sensitive and open to the local context.Class was also a factor that often worked against the Brotherhood’s candidates. Due to being the most educated cluster, Ikhwani leaders are strongly present in professional occupations in village-level bureaucracies; they are the teachers, the lawyers, the engineers, and more importantly the personnel of the most funded NGO: Al-Jam’eya al-Shar’eya. Ikhwan leaders often use their positions, particularly in the NGO, to promote the Freedom and Justice party through coercing the poorest of the village into long-term charity and debt relations; they fund kidney dialysis operations, pay monthly stipends for orphan children, and distribute money and goods for ad-hoc lists that they prepare once they get orders from their leaders in Cairo.

Although these services seem necessary in the absence of a state-service provider, many rural dwellers (even ones who receive support from the NGO) see this relationship of indebtedness to the NGO as unhealthy. This informs why many villagers are weary of voting for the Ikhwan’s party. “We need a government that recognizes our rights as citizens, not as recipients of aid! We need people that would help us get our stolen rights. If the Muslim Brotherhood come to power, they will be both the mediators and the government.”

As Ahmed says, these are not gullible people. They have their own issues.

Image:  an Egyptian village, copyrighted by Historylink101.com & found at Egyptian Picture Gallery.

An unusual 13th century deed of arms

Dr. Beachcombing reports.

Pounding iron to "Smooth Criminal" -- life in the present

Occasionally I have mused on " life in the future" AKA "I never expected the future to be like this.". But since the unifying element here is firmly in the past, indeed lapped in nostalgia for iron age technology and classic music videos, that title seems inappropriate. Twice as fast just to keep up, indeed.

This is what I am talking about: http://warehamforgeblog.blogspot.ca/2012/04/and-now-for-something-completely.html

An Auckland beach

Image of Auckland by Cuba Gallery

Phil Paine on bad news from Timbuktu

Phil reports:

I have a personal interest in Timbuktu (see blog for Mar 7, 2006), so I have followed, as best as I can, the recent events in Mali that affect it.  After the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, several hundred young Tuareg who had been serving as mercenaries in his army have returned to Niger and Mali. Along with them came a large stock of weapons.  This re-ignited the low-level civil war which had come to an apparently satisfactory peace settlement in 2009.  Disatisfaction with the response to this renewal of violence seems to have triggered a coup d’état by the country’s military against the democratically elected government. As a consequence of the instability following the coup, the “National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad” (MNLA) quickly occupied the three largest northern towns (Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal) and declared an independent state of Azawad, cleaving away the thinly populated northern half of Mali.

Few events in the last few years have depressed me as much. Mali had lifted itself by its bootstraps from an intensely repressive Marxist dictatorship, heavily involved in the slave trade, to become West Africa’s most promising democracy. Now that promise is evaporating.

More here: http://www.philpaine.com/?p=4439

My review of Bell et al. The Soldier Experience in the Fourteenth Century.

From The Medieval Review:


Bell, Adrian R., Anne Curry, Adam Chapman, Andy King, and David
Simpkin, ed. The Soldier Experience in the Fourteenth Century.
Series: Warfare in History. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011. Pp.
232. $90. ISBN: 978-1-84383-674-2.

 Reviewed by Steven Muhlberger
     Nipissing University
     steve.muhlberger@gmail.com


This attractively and carefully produced volume features, aside from
its introduction, ten articles originally presented at a conference
held at the University of Reading in July 2009, "England's Wars, 1272-
1399."  All of the authors use prosopographical methods in hopes of
creating a much fuller picture of late medieval military recruitment
and service than has been possible in past.  The current best example
of what is possible by using this approach is the web-based, openly
available database, "The Soldier in Later Medieval England." [1]  The
connection between that project and this book is direct: the chief
investigators behind the database, Adrian Bell and Anne Curry, were
the chief editors of The Soldier Experience.

These articles rest upon our current ability to organize and analyze
vast amounts of data through computerization.  This allows diligent
researchers not only to track the careers of individual warriors with
greater accuracy and convenience than before, but also to reconstruct
military retinues and study how recruiting related to landholding and
other important aspects of medieval social life. The Soldier
Experience, like many another report from a programmatic
conference, is in part an argument for the value of a methodology and
in part a series of demonstrations of how the methods used by the
participants can be used by others.  The volume is successful in
making those points because the demonstrations are worked out in
detail and the claims made for the methodology are not overblown.  The
authors are not under the illusion that computerization solves all
problems; they know quite well that every source and every technique
has its puzzles and limitations.  Yet they show us how a combination
of intelligent database design and data crunching ability offers us
the opportunity to re-create an important aspect of medieval life,
military organization and military service, in an amazing degree of
detail.  That use of detail, however, results in some very dense
discussions which are not easily summarized.  In the rest of this
review I will restrict myself to indicating briefly the chief
arguments of the individual articles.

It is appropriate that the first article is Andrew Ayton's "Military
Service and the Dynamics of Recruitment in Fourteenth-century
England."  Ayton is the author of the extraordinary study, Knights
and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy underEdward III, in which he showed how a collection of dry
administrative documents, the horse inventories, could cast an
unexpectedly bright light on Edward III's armies, illuminating many
aspects of the practical workings of those forces, including the
careers of otherwise obscure warriors and the changing role of horses
over the course of the fourteenth century. [1]  Ayton's article, by
far the longest in the collection, credits the prosopographical
approach for taking military studies beyond treating armies as
"characterless numerical abstraction[s]" (10).  He also argues for its
potential to contribute to an understanding of other aspects of local
and national politics and cultural life.  Ayton goes beyond such
assertions, however, to discuss in detail the mechanics of retinue
formation and what a specific set of data shows us about that process
and how it changed over time.  Ayton's article serves well as a primer
on the challenges and rewards of the research typical of this group of
scholars.

David Simpkin's "Total War in the Middle Ages? The Contribution of
English Landed Society to the Wars of Edward I and Edward II" is an
attempt to integrate landholding records with military service records
to understand recruiting and the degree of militarization in England
at various times.  It is based on a study of Cambridgeshire and
Nottinghamshire and select localities within them. 


 Andrew Spencer's "A Warlike People? Gentry Enthusiasm for Edward I's Scottish
Campaigns, 1296-1307" brings a prosopographical perspective to bear on
the well-known falling off of support for Edward I's Scottish wars; it
is based on landowning records from eight counties, which are compared
to military records for the campaigns.  


David Bachrach in "Edward I's Centurions: Professional Soldiers in 
an Era of Militia Armies" discusses a neglected career track for 
gentry in Edward I's armies. Centenarii were men of 
the stratum just below the knightly
class, who might have served as heavy cavalry, but who instead became
effectively professional officers leading organized units of one
hundred foot archers.  Other such men led smaller units of
crossbowmen.  Bachrach notes how important the extensive experience of
such men would be in maintaining discipline and tactical control.


Iain A. MacInnes, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Bruce? Balliol Scots
and 'English Scots' during the Second Scottish War of Independence"
re-examines the Scots who supported Edward Balliol's attempt to take
the Scottish throne from the Bruces, and suggests that more research
may revise the common view that Balliol's invasion was doomed to
failure by a general lack of support.  


Adam Chapman's "Rebels,Uchelwyr, and Parvenus: Welsh knights in the Fourteenth
Century" discusses the Welsh contribution to England's wars in the
fourteenth century.  Chapman explains how Welsh knights were
exceptional figures in a Welsh context but quite comparable to English
knights of the time.

Michael Jones' "Breton Soldiers in the Battle of the Thirty (26 March
1351) to Nicopolis (25 September 1396)" is one of the few articles
focusing on an area outside Britain.  It discusses the family
connections, military careers and diplomatic service of the men who
fought with Beaumanoir in the famous deed of arms.  The Breton
families whose members participated are surprisingly well known both
before and after the battle itself, and their activities are well
documented.  The article ends with an appendix giving details about
Beaumanoir and his companions and the Bretons who fought on the other
side. 


Guilhem Pepin's "Towards the Rehabilitation of Froissart's
Credibility: The Non-Fictitious Bascot de Mauléon" will interest many
people who approach the Hundred Years War through chronicle accounts.
In the last decade there has been speculation that one of the most
memorable military men sketched in Froissart's Chronicles, the
Bascot de Mauléon, was invented by the chronicler.  Pepin refutes the
suggestion by documenting the mercenary captain's career from archival
records. 


Rémy Ambühl, in "The English Reversal of Fortunes in the
1370s and the Experience of Prisoners of War" explores the fate of
English and English-obedient Gascon prisoners of war during the 1370s,
and discusses the involvement of the crown and warrior community in
the liberation of prisoners.  Ambühl concludes that solidarity within
the warrior community proved more helpful to captives than royal
patronage. 


 Adrian R. Bell's article, "The Soldier, 'hadde he riden,
no man ferre,'" seeks to establish how extensive and far-ranging the
travels of average and exceptional soldiers were.  Bell makes a point
of showing that even such prestigious sources as statements made in
the Court of Chivalry have to be compared to the relevant archival
records or the researcher will end up with an incomplete
reconstruction.

This book is not for everyone.  It is designed to appeal to a
restricted audience: those who want to dig deeply into the details of
medieval military service, and how service and recruitment reveal the
structure of royal armies and, in fact, society at large.  Indeed, its
primary audience is likely to be other researchers in the same field,
especially those using or considering using similar research methods.
For them, however, it may be extraordinarily rewarding.
----------

Notes:

1. http://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/soldier/database/

2. First published in 1994 by University of Rochester Press; a new
paperback edition appeared from Boydell Press in 1999.

WMD Lies -- for the record

Just in case anyone has any doubts yet, see this article from the Independent. 

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.
"Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.
He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression."
The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.
But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."
US officials "sexed up" Mr Janabi's drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's former chief of staff. "I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he says, adding how "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy".
As for his former boss: "I don't see any way on this earth that Secretary Powell doesn't feel almost a rage about Curveball and the way he was used in regards to that intelligence."

Image:  I'd run one of Janabi, but that would distract us from the big fish, Bush, Blair, Cheney and, yes, Powell.

An Irishman can't help himself -- scorn for Game of Thrones

John Doyle in the Globe and Mail:

A second reason is an aversion to medieval-fantasy material that is ludicrously inauthentic when compared with real history and genuine mythology and legend. I’ve no problem with the Arthurian legends because they arise from a bona fide cultural impulse. As an Irishman of a certain age, I could talk to you till your eyes fell out about the magic of An Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid at Cooley), the central story of the Ulster cycle of legends. It’s about an attempt to steal a particularity fertile bull. But it teems with warriors and magicians, dominated by the god-like warrior Cú Chulainn. There are even ravens swirling in the mist. It shares much with Game of Thrones in surface detail but there’s a powerful, authentic poignancy to An Táin, and a rawness to the action, the work of many hands and storytellers, generation after generation. In comparison, Game of Thrones is slick and contrived.