The CIA, and America, walks away free from the consequences of torture. Obama once again attempts to have his cake and eat it too.
"This is a time for reflection, not retribution," ... So says the 'leader of the free world'. What rubbish. This isn't change i can believe in!!And why this statement applies to American official action, and not the actions of another State, say Sudan, is anyones guess.
Obama fails a moral test, and slides further down the slippery slope. No doubt in his later memoirs he'll write about his greatest regret in not prosecuting, and resolving, Americas practice of torture.

Just finished reading Robert Fisk destroy the BBC over at the Independent. The BBC is a joke. I despair that I regularly check the BBC News website, not to get updates on the news, but to see how many stories they are either ignoring or misreporting. It makes my blood boil that I pay to fund these charlatans.

Kyrgyz MPs vote to shut US base

California: One Vote Short of Averting Catastrophe

Obama, Gates at Odds Over New Whistleblower Protections

Google Earth reveals secret history of US base in Pakistan

We must print more money, says Bank of England

Evidence is mounting that Iran used beefed-up rocket

US commanders at odds over Iraq

Hamid Karzai isolated as Miliband says no more troops

Secrecy and denial as Pakistan lets CIA use airbase to strike militants

..Rice shame-faced by Bush over UN Gaza vote: Olmert

"The United States, Israel's main ally, had initially been expected to voted in line with the other 14 but Rice later became the sole abstention.

"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour," Olmert said.

"I said 'get me President Bush on the phone'. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care. 'I need to talk to him now'. He got off the podium and spoke to me.

"I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour.""

...does Israel really try to avoid civilian casualties?

"Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?

What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands."

..don't pity them, they're Arab. That's why Israel gets away with it.

..why Israel keeps journalists out of Gaza..from CBS News

..look out!

"India confronted Pakistan on Monday with a detailed dossier that it said showed that "elements from Pakistan" were behind the November terrorist assault on Mumbai and said it was inconceivable that no one in the Pakistani government knew of the plans.

India's moves added pressure to the already tense relationship between the nuclear-armed rivals over the assault, in which some 170 people died.

Also in the dossier were telephone intercepts between the assailants and their alleged handlers in Pakistan, data retrieved from recovered GPS and satellite phones and details of "recovered weapons and equipment," India's Foreign Ministry said in a statement."

..Seven children among Gaza dead

Three youngsters died alongside their mother when a tank shell hit their home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood. Elsewhere, seven members of a Palestinian family were killed in a strike on their home at Beach refugee camp.

At a Gaza morgue, where the bodies of three children lay side-by-side, the father of a four-year-old boy killed by an Israeli tank shell, wept: "Get up, boy, get up. Please get up. I am your dad and I need you."

..the smiling diplomats

" Israel Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Monday that the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip was intended to "change the equation" in the region, whereby Hamas fires at Israel and Israel responds with restraint.

Speaking to reporters alongside her counterparts from the Czech Republic, France and Sweden, Livni defended Israel's incursion into the Hamas-ruled coastal territory as a form of "legitimate self-defense." "

..burn all Arabs

"Israel is believed to be using controversial white phosphorus shells to screen its assault on the heavily populated Gaza Strip yesterday. The weapon, used by British and US forces in Iraq, can cause horrific burns but is not illegal if used as a smokescreen."

..Israel Defence Force admits to overestimating Gaza rocket severity

"The threat that Hamas' ballistic capabilities pose to the people of the Negev is less serious than initially presumed and the residents of the targeted areas are not demonstrating signs of panic, according to an interim analysis by the Israel Defense Forces of the situation nearly a week after the launching of Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip."

Quick! Someone alert the MSM!!

..2 children killed by Israeli assassination of Hamas leader

They were little terrorists, says Israel, and deserved to die with their terrorist father, and mother, and brother.

..9 Muslim Passengers Removed From Jet

Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark.

Members of the party, all but one of them U.S.-born citizens who were headed to a religious retreat in Florida, were subsequently cleared for travel by FBI agents who characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, an airport official said. But the passengers said AirTran refused to rebook them, and they had to pay for seats on another carrier secured with help from the FBI.

Kashif Irfan, one of the removed passengers, said the incident began about 1 p.m. after his brother, Atif, and his brother's wife wondered aloud about the safest place to sit on an airplane.

"My brother and his wife were discussing some aspect of airport security," Irfan said. "The only thing my brother said was, 'Wow, the jets are right next to my window.' I think they were remarking about safety."

Irfan said he and the others think they were profiled because of their appearance. He said five of the six adults in the party are of South Asian descent, and all six are traditionally Muslim in appearance, with the men wearing beards and the women in headscarves. Irfan, 34, is an anesthesiologist. His brother, 29, is a lawyer. Both live in Alexandria with their families, and both were born in Detroit. They were traveling with their wives, Kashif Irfan's sister-in-law, a friend and Kashif Irfan's three sons, ages 7, 4 and 2.

AirTran spokesman Tad Hutcheson agreed that the incident amounted to a misunderstanding. But he defended AirTran's handling of the incident, which he said strictly followed federal rules. And he denied any wrongdoing on the airline's part.

"At the end of the day, people got on and made comments they shouldn't have made on the airplane, and other people heard them," Hutcheson said. "Other people heard them, misconstrued them. It just so happened these people were of Muslim faith and appearance. It escalated, it got out of hand and everyone took precautions."

..the Arab the West wants

..The Rotten state of Egypt: "The true disgrace of Egypt, however, is not in its response to the slaughter in Gaza. It is the corruption that has become embedded in an Egyptian society where the idea of service – health, education, genuine security for ordinary people – has simply ceased to exist. It's a land where the first duty of the police is to protect the regime, where protesters are beaten up by the security police, where young women objecting to Mubarak's endless regime – likely to be passed on caliph-like to his son Gamal, whatever we may be told – are sexually molested by plain-clothes agents, where prisoners in the Tora-Tora complex are forced to rape each other by their guards."

Thank God for Robert Fisk. Give me Fisk at the Independent any day rather than the mousey metrosexuals at the Guardian.

..Israel kills Hamas leader

...and...."Nine other people, including two of Rayan's four wives and four of his 12 children, also died, say Palestinian health officials."

Not a mention of these deaths anywhere..not on BBC, not CNN...nowhere. Who else can murder civilians, women, and children, with such impunity, and under such a conspiracy of silence by the MSM?

..believe me, not your lying eyes

"At a meeting in Paris, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told her French counterpart Bernard Kouchner on Thursday that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel Radio reported."

From The Belfast Telegraph: Charity fears for health of Gaza children: "Thousands of children in Gaza are facing a battle to stay alive due to acute food shortages, a British-based charity said today."

From Australia's ABC: Hit by blockade and airstrikes, Gaza's hospitals in crisis: "The International Committee of the Red Cross says Gaza's hospitals are in crisis as the enclave reels under the onslaught of Israeli bombing raids."

..believe me, not your lying eyes

"At a meeting in Paris, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told her French counterpart Bernard Kouchner on Thursday that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel Radio ,reported.'

..Obama's silence

..killed by Israel..Palestinian mourners carry the body of four-year-old Haya Hamdan in Gaza

..Israel's kind of fight.

"Palestinian officials said the death toll since the Israeli bombing began on Saturday had risen to at least 310, with more than 600 injured.

Militants in Gaza fired rockets into southern Israel, killing one Israeli and injuring several others in a mid-morning strike on Ashkelon, a city just north of Gaza. Two Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rockets since Saturday.

In total, Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza have killed around 18 people in southern Israel in the past eight years."

..do not avert your eyes

..Israel's victims. Children.

More on the bloodbath..

As the Israeli New Year bloodbath on the Palestinians continues I feel that this is the time to acknowledge the main players that enabled this Israeli action..

First and foremost the spotlight must shine on the Israeli people without whose approval non of this would be possible. The Israeli people can always be counted on to rejoice in the spilling of Palestinian blood, in "retaliation" , of course, for all the "deadly Hamas rockets raining down on empty fields.

Second, George W Bush, Richard "Dick" Cheney, Condolezza Rice, and Tony Blair. The four horsemen of the Palestinian apocalyse. They are the ones that help to confer respectability to the actions of Israel in the occupied territories, and it is they that delegitimise all acts of resistance by the Palestinians as terrorism.

Thirdly, the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Jordanians. The lickspittle Arabs that complain more about cartoon than about the murder of their own people, and moan and complain about Iran as the great threat.