#simon mann

[forzaeffingferrari]

Antonio Fuoco, came back from three penalties (one of them completely undeserved) to win in the final fucking lap with a ballsy overtake in GTD Sebring.

I can’t believe I watched a 12 hour race but FORZA FUCKING FERRARI

Also the car did give big Christmas vibes.

PS. My dumbass forgot there were three drivers so big props to Lilou Wadoux and Simon Mann too! 🥳

[1644505183]

[ashley-slashley]

Good Simon Mann be like

Lets not instigate a coup

[vicemag]

Simon Mann Says He Was Asked to Help Start the Iraq War

Simon Mann is a British mercenary, most famous for his failed 2004 coup attempt against Teodoro Obiang, president of Equatorial Guinea. An ex-Special Forces soldier, Simon cofounded the private military company Executive Outcomes, which at its height in the mid-90s ran two African wars and used oil money to fund a full-on air force and thousands of private soldiers.

In 2004, after pocketing millions fighting rebels in Angola and, he says, protecting a free election in Sierra Leone, Simon’s luck ran out. He’d been hired to fly to Equatorial Guinea with 69 South African heavies, capture the airport, and escort an opposition leader to the presidential palace. During a layover in Zimbabwe to collect guns and refuel, he was busted.

He ended up in Chikurubi Prison, one of Zimbabwe’s nastiest, before being extradited to Equatorial Guinea four years later. There he spent a year and a half in solitary at Black Beach prison, one of Africa’s nastiest, before being pardoned. Simon has written a book about his adventures, there’s a movie in the pipeline, and he’s working on a novel he wrote in jail. Between all that, he spoke to me about coups, spies, and kick-starting the Iraq War.

Executive Outcomes in Sierra Leone.

VICE: The world of mercenaries is a pretty murky one. How did you get to the top of it? Simon Mann: Not on purpose. I left the SAS in 1992 and joined an oil company that had one project in Soyo, Angola. I went into the office one day and they said, “This is it; we’re fucked.” UNITA rebels had gone back to war, against the treaties they’d signed, and had captured Soyo, ending our business. I suggested that we retake the town. Two months later, we did. Then the government asked us to take the whole country back. We said “Yep, but it’s going to cost you.” We eventually had 2,000 men under contract and a turnover of $19.5 million every nine months.

A nice little earner. Then you went to Sierra Leone? Yeah. The Sierra Leoneans asked us to go diamond mining there, but there was a problem: a really bad war. So we told the president we'd help him if we could get help applying for a legal diamond concession. It cost us millions to keep fighting, but our money was coming from the war in Angola, which is what made us different from other warlords—we were reinvesting in Africa. Just as we were leaving, the president asked us to stay and secure the election, so it was us—not the UN—who protected that election. We kept asking, “What kind of fucking mercenaries are we?” We were the nicest, most well-behaved bunch ever.

Simon in Namibia, 1993.

Weren’t you also asked to help kick start the Iraq War in 2002? Yes. Someone who said he was friends with the American neocons asked me to come up with ideas to get the war kicked off. The first was to pick an Iraqi city away from Baghdad, go there with a rebel force made up of 6,000 Iraqi émigrés, take the city, then say, “Yah boo” to Saddam. That would have forced him to come get us and be zapped on the road by the UK and US, or let the flag of rebellion spread.

The second was far more criminal. We wanted to buy an old rust-bucket ship, sail it to Karachi, load up secretly with some weapons-grade uranium, or whatever, then sail it into the Gulf with a motley crew, including me. We’d then leak our presence to the Saudis, get the navy to intercept us, sink their ship—hopefully without killing anyone—then sail into Basra. The world would have gone nuts and we’d have had an excuse for war in Iraq. That’s pretty scandalous. Well, yes. We actually got feedback saying that they liked the ideas, but not me. I believed them.

Continue

[bouncebox]

Great documentary about the shady world of Equatorial Guinea and the power plays of rich Etonians. Torrent here: http://extratorrent.com/download/2172370/BBC.Storyville.Simon.Manns.African.Coup.Black.Beach.iPlayer.H264.AAC.dokus4alle.mp4.torrent