from today's sydney morning herald .....

‘New evidence claiming five young Australian journalists were executed by Indonesian troops in 1975 was hearsay and might not be accepted in court, says an Indonesia expert.

A statement from a leading lawyer, George Brownbill, contravenes the official line that the five were killed inadvertently by crossfire while reporting on Indonesia's invasion of East Timor.

Mr Brownbill said that in 1977 he was shown an Australian intelligence report of monitored Indonesian military communications in which a senior Indonesian officer said the five had been shot in accordance with instructions.

By British standards, it was hardly an impertinent question, but the inquiry from the veteran correspondent was enough to make several members of the White House press corps gasp: Was George Bush, the president of the United States, "in denial" about the state of Iraq today?

The answer was as blunt & folksy as the president himself. "It's bad in Iraq. That help?" snapped Mr Bush before unloading on the man who flew in from London the night before, like many others scenting a potentially historic turning point in the bloody story of Iraq & the US' war on terrorism.

The Iraq Study Group met with President Bush this morning to present its 79 recommendations, which include moving "most U.S. troops out of combat roles by early 2008."

‘Remember when narrow-minded Republican know-nothings launched a hate campaign against French President Jacques Chirac and everything French because Paris would not go along with George Bush’s jolly little war in Iraq?

Well, it turns out that Chirac’s warnings in 2003 that a US invasion of Iraq would set the Mideast on fire, encourage terrorism, and produce a disaster have been tragically born out by events.

‘Britain would be prepared to use nuclear weapons against countries who allowed their own nuclear technology to fall into the hands of terrorists, Tony Blair said yesterday.

The Gates of Change

from the Centre for American Progress …..

‘The carnage continues to intensify in Baghdad, but the long national nightmare of Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as Secretary of Defense is almost over. Tomorrow, the Senate will consider the nomination of Rumsfeld's presumptive replacement, Robert Gates. The desire to replace Rumsfeld, who will serve until his successor is confirmed, is so great that "no senator has indicated opposition to Gates' nomination," and his nomination is expected to easily clear the Senate. The hope is that Gates "would boost morale at the Pentagon, where outgoing defense chief Donald Rumsfeld often clashed with the top brass." But the AP reports that Gates "may bring more of a change in style than substance to the Pentagon and the fractious debate over Iraq." His hearings present an important opportunity to ensure that's not the case by pressing Gates on his approach to Iraq and other critical problems facing the Pentagon.

John “moustache” Bolton, who had to be appointed UN Ambassador while even a rubber stamp republican congress was out of session, won't be back after his term ends. Both Democrats & Republicans opposed him & bushit "accepted" Bolton's resignation because he knows he can't win.

Bolton was an arrogant loony toon, who was meant to be the ambassador to an institution he loathed. He was an American triumphalist & brat.

‘"They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind" ~ Hosea 8

President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki met in Jordan to discuss the steadily deteriorating situation in Iraq; neither has faced the reality that as far as controlling future events in Iraq are concerned, both are irrelevant. Bush, like many other factional leaders in Iraq, has his own militia, arguably no longer the largest, but is in the unenviable position of being the one all the others see as occupiers and targets of opportunity. Prime Minister al-Maliki has nothing but his status as a puppet for the most hated entity currently involved in the debacle that is Iraq.

‘Amidst all the comparisons of the Vietnam War with the occupation of Iraq, people seem to be ignoring an important question: Why not invade Vietnam too?

After all, everyone knows that Vietnam is not a democracy. In fact, unlike Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime in Iraq, the Vietnam dictatorship is communist, and as U.S. officials reminded us throughout the Vietnam War, communists are committed to burying America. Moreover, let’s not forget that the Vietnamese communists killed almost 60,000 American men – that is, many more Americans than Saddam ever killed and, in fact, 20 times the number of Americans killed on 9/11.

‘The same legal scholars who established beyond doubt earlier this year that the vast majority of Guantanamo Bay detainees are not threats to our national security after all are back with comprehensive new findings -- again from our own military's official records -- that obliterate the main premise of the White House's efforts to block judicial review for the terror suspects being held in Cuba.

"It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service in this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." 

‘A 1999 study by the National Resources Defense Council of more than 1,000 bottles of water found that, while most bottled water was safe, some brands violated strict state standards on bacterial contamination, while others were found to contain harmful chemicals such as arsenic. The report concluded that bottled water was no safer than water taken from the tap.

‘There are over a half-million foreign students at American colleges and universities; the U.S. borders, for all practical purposes, remain wide open; only 6 percent of the shipping containers are checked; and there is still an overgenerous number of legal immigrants admitted.

I offer this as an antidote to the Bush administration's boogeyman stories about the threat of terrorism. There is a threat, of course, but it is far less than the administration would have you believe. Americans are much more likely to die in automobile crashes or from falls or at the hands of a 100 percent American criminal than they are from a terrorist attack.

‘As Malcolm Gladwell recounts in his book The Tipping Point, Kitty Genovese was viciously assaulted, stabbed three times, and finally killed, on the way to her Queens, New York, home one night in 1964. Thirty-eight neighbors heard or watched her ordeal, but no one called the police until the attack was essentially over. The murder was universally seen as a horrifying example of modern-day indifference to the plight of others. But, Gladwell explains, psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley conducted experiments that led to a far different explanation: "When people are in a group . . . responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will make the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem . . . is not really a problem." Ironically, then, it was not that no one called to help Kitty Genovese "despite the fact that thirty-eight people heard her scream; it's that no one called because thirty-eight people heard her scream."