Bush’s cornpone sophistry

If, like myself, you have been wondering lately how Bush manages to keep a 30% support base, even with all the scandals, then this article breaks it down nicely. Well worth a read:

James Moore and Wayne Slater introduce the first chapter of their book about Karl Rove, Bush’s Brain, with the following quotation from the ancient Athenian philosopher Plato [1]: "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

It’s a powerful way to start a book about possibly the most effective and infamous political deceiver that has ever lived. For Plato understood well the problems such deceivers cause democracies.

Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave?

Do bears shit in the wood? Is the Pope Catholic? Are Fianna Fail and the PD's going to get their come-uppance at the next election?

Of course Haditha is just the tip of the iceberg. These things go on, I'd say, every day in Iraq.

The shocking truth about the American occupation of Iraq

Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave? The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of America's army of the slums go further?

By Robert Fisk

I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."

John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Charlie Glass, and Seymour Hersh on the failure of the world’s press

The late journalist Edward R. Murrow might well have been rolling in his grave on April 21. That’s because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a lecture that day in Washington, DC to journalists at the Department of State’s official Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists.

For the Bush administration to use the memory of a person who stood up to government propaganda is ironic to say the least. Secretary Rice told the assembled journalists that “without a free press to report on the activities of government, to ask questions of officials, to be a place where citizens can express themselves, democracy simply couldn’t work.”

If we knew more about Ireland, we might never have invaded Iraq

Monbiot telling it like it is again:

That they have not seen his film is no impediment. That it has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes only quickens their desire for reprisals. Ken Loach has been placed in preventive detention and is having his fingernails pulled out.

In the Times, Tim Luckhurst compares him - unfavourably - to Leni Riefenstahl. His new film is a "poisonously anti-British corruption of the history of the war of Irish independence ... The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not just wrong. It infantilises its subject matter and reawakens ancient feuds." I checked with the production company. The film has not yet been released. They can find no record that Luckhurst has attended a screening - and last night he refused to discuss the matter.