simon mann: chokey time

I've written to many prisoners in my time, but today is the first time I've had the urge to send one page after page saying 'HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!'. Simon Mann just got 34 years.

Neo-colonialist mercenary leader Mann was caught with a planeload of weapons and ex-apartheid South African special forces on their way to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea.

Having been banged up in Zimbabwe he was then taken to Equatorial Guinea. Much is, accurately, made of the regime's repressive nature. Still, you've got to wonder if there's any country on earth that would give a lesser sentence to someone who was about to kill the head of state and overthrow the government.

Mann certainly wasn't going there on any humanitarian mission. As with his previous campaigns, it was about clearing out one group so a grateful government - irrespective of its attitude to human rights - would bestow lucrative mineral rights upon him.

Nearly four years ago I wrote an article about Mann and his friends who fight wars in order to claim natural reources.

Six months later I did a post about how the government of Guernsey was blocking investigations into Mann (yes, he's an international terrorist - but where would tax havens be without the money-laundering facilities they offer to international terrorists? Imagine if they let Mann be investigated, what would that do to business? What kind of communist are you to stand there and suggest we help stop terrorists?).

There was also the one that mentioned a fact I've not seen in the recent coverage, something gone into more detail here, that uber-twit Jeffrey Archer chucking a few grand into the coup plan.

This isn't just glee at an arrogant murderous colonialist toff getting jailed (though that in itself is all well and good); this has got to have put the wind up all Mann's ex-colleagues and other would-bes, and somewhere out there is some land and some people that will stay unattacked, the next Bougainville lives on, unplundered.