Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W Bush administration official. 

US interrogators of terrorist suspects were instructed to destroy handwritten notes that might have exposed harsh or even illegal questioning methods at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a lawyer for one of the prisoners said. 

Can you imagine the outcry if an Australian city council rejected a proposal to build a Jewish school? You don’t need to imagine. Anyone who dares to utter a single word against it will be labelled “anti-Semitic”. Australian politicians from the Prime Minister and his herd to the herd of the Opposition would be outraged by such an “Un-Australian” decision. However, when an application for an Islamic school was rejected, the support for bigotry was unanimous.

President Bush and top administration officials repeatedly exaggerated what they knew about Iraq's weapons and its ties to terrorist groups as the White House pressed its case for war against Iraq, the Senate intelligence committee said yesterday in a long-awaited report.  

from Crikey ….. 

Hetty Johnston's strange bedfellows 

Bernard Keane writes: 

An Australian doctors' group is pushing to have former prime minister John Howard charged with war crimes for sending troops to Iraq. 

The Medical Association for the Prevention of War said the war was illegal because it was not backed by the United Nations. 

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November. 

It was to be Robert and Lynne Siebert's dream home, but it has turned into the house of doom. 

In the six years since the couple from Skennars Head, near Ballina, watched the foundations being laid, the closest they have come to the house they designed themselves is a duplex 500 metres away which they have been renting since 2003, and now share with their two children Madelane and Grace. 

from Crikey ….. 

Frequent fury: Qantas and customers on war footing 

Ben Sandilands writes: 

‘This is the great war of our times, It is going to take 40 years’. 

Bush said in forty years the world would know if the war on terrorism & conflicts in Iraq & Afghanistan, had reduced extremism, helped moderates & promoted democracy. 

Angling for a vice presidential nod, Hillary Rodham Clinton refused to bow out of the Democratic race Tuesday, hoping to maintain leverage as Barack Obama clinched the delegates needed to secure the party's nomination. 

The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. 

America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father's father and his father's father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable.  

from Crikey 

A year, almost, in the thinking of Brendan Nelson.  

His American jailers spared Al-Ghizzawi the very worst of the worst in the long list of torture techniques now in use. He was not murdered or waterboarded. He did not have a razor blade taken to his penis, nor was he hung from the ceiling by his arms. One might describe Al-Ghizzawi's torture as a kinder, gentler torture. 

from Crikey ….. 

Bringing down Henson: Police, politicians and pester power join forces