Tuesday Post

Question: isn't this- I don't know- a tad irresponsible (though not always surprising)?

It is being described as the biggest leak of military secrets in history -- a treasure trove of more than 92,000 highly classified field reports, intelligence assessments and after-action battle reports released on the Internet that paint a damning portrait of the war in Afghanistan.

Yesterday Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the WikiLeaks website, compared his group's release of the AfghanistanWar Logs to the Vietnam War's Pentagon Papers.

The 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War, marked a sea change in public perceptions of the war. They exposed a string of U.S. presidents as liars who deliberately deceived to advance their diplomacy and even fabricated evidence around an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin to speed deployment of U.S. troops to Vietnam.

So far, WikiLeaks' Afghan file contains nothing so explosive. The secret archive of six years' worth of military documents doesn't do much more than add detail to a dark picture of an already gloomy war. The thousands upon thousands of documents don't really tell us anything we didn't already know...

The single most constant complaint running through the U.S. reports is that Pakistan's spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), is the major supporter of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

Report after report claims Pakistan's intelligence agents have met secretly with the Taliban; offered them strategic advice; organized groups to fight foreign troops inside Afghanistan and even plotted the assassinations of top Afghani officials.

One document, dated August 2008, identifies an ISI colonel as plotting with a Taliban official to assassinate Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President.

Another report claims Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who ran ISI in 1987-89, held a top-level meeting to discuss strategy with three senior Afghan Taliban leaders and three "older" Arab men, who were presumably al-Qaeda members, in the South Waziristan capital of Wana in January 2009.

It's no surprise about Pakistan but- in my completely unmilitary opinion- it's probably not a good idea to blab this sort of thing to the papers.


Way to drop the ball, intelligence community.


From thirty years to nineteen for fifteen thousand lives:

In a historic first, a UN-backed court yesterday sentenced a Khmer Rouge prison chief to 30 years in jail for crimes against humanity over mass executions during Cambodia's "Killing Fields" era.

Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, is the first Khmer Rouge cadre to face justice in an international tribunal over the deaths of up to two million people through starvation, overwork and execution under the 1975-79 regime.

But to the dismay of survivors and victims' relatives, the court took into account the years he had served since his arrest in 1999, meaning the 67-year-old could walk free in about 19 years.

"Millions of people were killed, millions of dollars have been spent [on the trial], but the killer could be released," said a tearful Chum Mey, 79, one of only a handful who survived imprisonment and torture at the jail.

Duch apologized during his trial for overseeing the mass murder of 15,000 men, women and children at Tuol Sleng prison, also known as S-21, but shocked the court in November by asking to be acquitted....

"This is a court case, not a football match, so there are no winners or losers. It's really a question of whether justice has been applied," said Bill Smith, the deputy prosecutor.

Tell that to the dead.

A Quebec Court judge is expected to decide this week whether a 38-year-old Dorval woman will be released on bail in a case in which she is accused of attempting to kill her daughter in what police allege was an honour crime.

She'll probably get it, too.

I'm not sure how this going to help but....

A church in Florida is organizing a Burn the Koran Day in remembrance of the victims of 9/11 and "to stand against the evil of Islam," USA Today reported yesterday. Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove Outreach Centre said people were mailing the church copies of the Koran for incineration after news of the campaign was posted on Facebook. In response, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling on American Muslims to host educational Share the Koran Ramadan fast-breaking dinners at which copies of Islam's holy text will be distributed to neighbours, public and law enforcement officials and journalists, the Orlanst news services

Someone is taking the higher road. A far cry from this to be sure.


And they wonder why no one takes them seriously anymore:

An Anglican priest has apologized for offering communion to a dog, but the act has repercussions for a Church already divided by liberalization measures.

"Communion is a symbol of the sacrifice of Jesus's body; he died for all of us," said Cheryl Chang, director of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANIC). "But I don't recall anything from the Scripture saying anything about Jesus dying for the salvation of our pets.''

Marguerite Rea, the interim priest at St. Peter's Anglican Church in Toronto, offered Trapper -- a four-year-old German shepherd-Rhodesian Ridgeback cross --communion during a church service in late June. It quickly became symbolic of an ever-widening theological rift between the conservative brand of Anglicanism observed by ANIC congregations, which, for example, reject same-sex marriage, and a more liberal-leaning Anglican Church of Canada that condones the rite.

Was there ever a time when they devoted their lives to God other than absurdity? Was there?


Hollywood's favourite communist nutjob director apologises for anti-semitic comments:

Filmmaker Oliver Stone has apologized after critics slammed him for making comments that were interpreted as anti-Semitic in an interview last Sunday.


While promoting his documentary “South of the Border” with The Sunday Times of London, Stone not only defended Hitler, but also downplayed the Holocaust.


“Hitler was a Frankenstein, but there was also a Dr. Frankenstein,” Stone, who is half Jewish, told the paper. “German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support. Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people.”


This year, while promoting his Showtime documentary “A Secret History of America,” Stone said “Hitler was an easy scapegoat.”


Later, he complained about the “Jewish domination of the media,” saying, “there’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f**ked up United States foreign policy for years.”On Monday afternoon, Stone issued the following statement in an attempt to appease the situation.


"In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret.


"Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity -- and it was an atrocity."

It wouldn't be the first time Oliver Stone made up some outlandish nonsense to support his skewed view of the world but this one takes the cake. When is he going to be lumped in with Mel Gibson, or is the Hollywood community gladly ignorant of history?



Hollywood's favourite rapist is accused once more:

Another woman has come forward charging that Roman Polanski raped her in 1974....

The woman, who was 21 at the time, reported the alleged sexual assault to the Los Angeles District Attorney in May and was interviewed by authorities.

Edith Michelle Vogelhut, a former model also known as Shelli Paul, told authorities Polanski "handcuffed" her at actor Jack Nicholson's Hollywood house where he was staying, then sodomized her repeatedly, before he passed out...

When you live in Hollywood, only some people can be monsters.