The anti-Semitic America-haters at the BBC strike again with some more preposterous agit-prop:

British soldiers secure the site where a military vehicle (background) is buring in the southern city of Basra, on May 20. The BBC reported that at least 1,000 troops have “deserted” the armed forces since the US-led war was launched in Iraq three years ago.

At least 1,000 UK soldiers desert

More than 1,000 members of the British military have deserted the armed forces since the start of the 2003 Iraq war, the BBC has discovered.

It comes as Parliament debates a law that will forbid military personnel from refusing to participate in the occupation of a foreign country.

Some 900 have evaded capture since the Iraq war started, official figures say.

But the Ministry of Defence says the numbers going missing from the army have stayed constant in recent years.

MoD figures show 2,670 soldiers went "absent without leave" in 2001, with the figure rising to 2,970 in 2002 and falling in 2003 to 2,825. In 2004 it rose to 3,050, falling back again in 2005 to 2,725.

Court martial

But BBC world affairs correspondent Jonathan Charles said going absent without leave and desertion were not the same, adding a soldier who has gone absent without leave for more than 30 days could be considered as deserting.

He says figures showed 377 people are still missing after deserting during 2005 alone, with another 189 on the run so far this year.

And Labour MP John McDonnell said "I think what the MoD is saying flies in the face of all the other evidence and the experience of soldiers on the ground."

He believes there are "a lot more seeking to avoid service, through different mechanisms".

On Monday Mr McDonnell told Parliament the number of desertion cases had tripled over the past three years.

There is no hard fact to suggest that our engagement in Iraq is actually causing people to leave the service
Former defence minister Don Touhig

The MoD defines desertion as "going absent intending not to come back", or "going absent to avoid active service".

A spokeswoman said the soldiers currently missing were considered to be "absent without leave", not to have deserted. They would have to be court martialled before they could be found guilty of deserting the army.

She said only one person had been found guilty of deserting since 1989.

Former defence minister Don Touhig told BBC Radio Five Live there were no "hard facts" to suggest the Iraq conflict was prompting increased numbers to leave the forces.

I am approached regularly by people who are seeking to absent themselves from service
Justin Hugheston-Roberts

Our correspondent says it is unclear how many troops are deserting because they do not want to go to Iraq and how many are doing so for personal reasons such as family problems.

Lawyers say they are increasingly being contacted by people wanting advice about getting out of having to serve in Iraq, even if they do not want to desert, our correspondent adds.

‘Illegal acts’

Justin Hugheston-Roberts was the solicitor for Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith who was sentenced to eight months in prison for refusing to follow orders in connection with a deployment to Iraq.

He said: "I am approached regularly by people who are seeking to absent themselves from service. There has been an increase, a definite upturn."

Military law expert Gilbert Blades, who represents soldiers at courts martial, said the numbers leaving because of Iraq were often obscured as they were not counted as conscientious objectors.

"One can’t help thinking that what’s behind every absence is the problem in Iraq and I would think that if the real truth was told, then the Iraq problem has contributed to a huge number of people going absent," he told BBC Radio Five Live.

Our correspondent says there is plenty of anecdotal evidence from military personnel that they are demoralised by the Iraq conflict and by the fact that, despite their best efforts, they see little improvement in the situation there.

There’s a lot of dissent in the Army about the legality of war and concerns that they’re spending too much time there
Ben Griffin

Former SAS member Ben Griffin was allowed to leave the military after telling his commanding officer he was not prepared to return to Iraq because of what he believed were illegal acts being carried out by US forces.

He says: "I was disturbed by the general day-to-day attitude of the American troops. They treated Iraqis with contempt, not like human beings. They had a complete disregard for Iraqi lives and property."

Mr Griffin would never have considered deserting but says his views are shared by many others in the British military.

He told the BBC: "There’s a lot of dissent in the Army about the legality of war and concerns that they’re spending too much time there".

He says Iraq is different to other conflicts because, in other operations, the main aim is to improve life for the local population and he believes that is not what has happened in Iraq.

Mr Griffin says: "There’s contempt for the locals. We don’t even know how many have been killed."

His advice to others is not to desert – but to follow their conscience and speak out if they think the conflict is wrong.

Major General Patrick Cordingley, who commanded the 7th Armoured Brigade Desert Rats in the first Gulf war, said servicemen’s views on Iraq prompted some to leave but "good leadership" would avoid it reaching epidemic proportions.

He said those who had been to Iraq before or whose families were unhappy about them going were among those who might not want to serve there.

"If you have such a person in your unit you have to discuss things with them… you do not necessarily want people with you if they have that particular view," he added.

The documentary Conscientious Objectors will be aired on BBC Radio Five Live at 1830 BST.

Note this paragraph:

MoD figures show 2,670 soldiers went "absent without leave" in 2001, with the figure rising to 2,970 in 2002 and falling in 2003 to 2,825. In 2004 it rose to 3,050, falling back again in 2005 to 2,725.

So the AWOL numbers did not go up, but have been on average the same since the start of the war in March 2003. But those casually skimming the headlines would never know that.

And of course throughout history there have been those who have tried to leave the service when faced with actual combat duty. But the article would never mention that detail.

The headline and the general implications of this article is simply propaganda of the most reprehensible kind.

And so typical of the terrorist-loving BBC, which represents the England of George Galloway rather than Winston Churchill.

From the DNC’s Associated Press:

Ahmed, left, cries, as his mother, right, and aunt, left, attend to his grandmother who lies injured in Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad, Iraq Saturday, May 27, 2006 after a bomb in a parked car exploded near a busy bus station in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora killing at least four civilians and wounding seven, according to police.

Iraqi athletes killed for wearing shorts

By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq – An Iraqi tennis coach and two of his players were shot to death this week in Baghdad because they were wearing shorts, authorities said Saturday, reporting the latest in a series of recent attacks attributed to Islamic extremists.

A U.S. Marine AH-1 Cobra helicopter, meanwhile, crashed Saturday and its two crew members were missing in Anbar province, a volatile area west of the capital where insurgents are active. Hostile fire was not suspected as the cause of the crash, the U.S. military said.

In the Baghdad incident, gunmen stopped a car carrying the Sunni Arab coach and two Shiite players, asked them to step out and then shot them, said Manham Kubba secretary-general of the Iraqi Tennis Union.

Extremists had distributed leaflets warning people in the mostly Sunni neighborhoods of Saidiyah and Ghazaliyah warning people not to wear shorts, police said.

"Wearing shorts by youth are prohibited because it violates the principals of Islamic religion when showing forbidden parts of the body. Also women should wear the veil," the leaflets said.

No one claimed responsibility for the slayings, which come amid worries that Islamic extremism is spreading in the war-torn country.

Sunni cleric Eid al-Zoubayi denounced the attack.

"Islamic religion is an easy religion and it allows wearing sport shorts as long as they don’t show the forbidden parts of the body, so the acts that are targeting the sport are criminal," he said.

It was the second incident involving athletes in just over a week. Fifteen members of a taekwondo team were kidnapped in western Iraq while driving to a training camp in neighboring Jordan on May 17.

More than 30 people were killed in attacks across Iraq on Saturday, including four who died when a bomb in a parked car exploded near a busy bus station in southern Baghdad. Seven people also were wounded in the blast, which bloodied passers-by and damaged a local restaurant.

The Marine helicopter went down while on a maintenance test flight and search and rescue efforts were under way for the missing crew members, the U.S. command said in a statement.

"We are using all the resources available to find our missing comrades," said a Marine spokesman, Lt. Col. Bryan Salas.

The U.S. military also reported that a Marine was killed Friday by "enemy action" in Anbar province. The death raised to at least 2,466 the number of U.S. military personnel who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Iraqi politicians continued to bicker over candidates for the key defense and interior ministry posts, leaving Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government incomplete a week after it assumed office.

"We hope the agreement will be reached within two or three days," Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi told reporters. "I think that to linger and take some time in choosing the ministers is better than rushing into it."

Filling the two posts is a contentious matter, especially after the recent surge in sectarian violence.

Political parties have agreed that a Sunni will head the Defense Ministry, which controls the army, and a Shiite will run the Interior Ministry, which oversees police forces. But they are struggling to find a consensus on who should get the jobs.

A senior Iranian official visited Iraq’s Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, where he met with Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and radical anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was wrapping up the second high-level visit by an Iranian delegation since the ouster of Saddam Hussein three years ago, praised al-Sistani for his efforts to maintain unity in Iraq amid rising sectarian tensions.

Mottaki’s trip to the southern cities after meeting with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad on Friday highlighted the warming ties between the two countries, both of which have Shiite majorities. Saddam’s regime was dominated by Sunnis, and Iraqi Shiites were repressed during his reign.

Also Saturday, a senior U.S. military official said coalition forces could begin transferring security control over some Iraqi provinces to civilian authorities and police by the end of summer, but Baghdad would not be handed over before the end of the year.

The military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, estimated that provisional control could be handed over to local governors in the relatively peaceful provinces of Najaf, Karbala and Babil by the fall.

In other developments Saturday, according to police and hospital officials:

• Two roadside bombings in Baghdad killed four policemen and wounded five people.

• In four separate shootings in the capital, gunmen killed a garden store owner; a grocer; a taxi driver and his son; and the owner of a glass store.

• Gunmen and Iraqi soldiers fought at a checkpoint west of Baghdad, killing a teacher caught in the crossfire.

• Attackers ambushed the convoy of the office manager of the Diyala police chief south of Baqouba, wounding the colonel and killing five of his guards.

• A former Iraqi army colonel and his nephew also were fatally shot near Baqouba.

• In Baqouba, drive-by shooters killed four policemen and one civilian, while masked gunmen killed four workers and wounded another at a metalworking shop.

• A policeman was shot to death and two officers were wounded north of Tikrit.

• Gunmen stopped a minibus carrying college students from Mosul, killing one of the students.

• A man suspected of belonging to Saddam’s former Fedayeen militia was slain west of Mosul.

• The body of a man who had been shot in the chest was found floating in the Euphrates river near Hillah.

I know that the murder rate in Iraq is probably lower than in Detroit or Washington, DC. But still.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

From the Vacaville Reporter:

A gravestone now marks Casey Sheehan’s resting place at Vacaville-Elmira Cemetery in Vacaville.

Casey Sheehan’s grave receives its headstone

By Julie Kay/Staff Writer

Memorial Day will be different this year at the Vacaville-Elmira Cemetery, where Casey Sheehan, a soldier from Vacaville, lies buried.

Until this week, more than two years after his death in Iraq, Casey’s grave has been marked only by a small plaque. On Thursday, it received a headstone.

The elegant marble slab is thick and emblazoned with a cross and delicate thickets of trees on both sides.

"Our Casey," reads an inscription on the front. "Ever faithful, kind, and gentle, good son, beloved brother, brave soldier, dear friend, you loved your family and lived your life serving others to the end." Six icons grace the other side, representing a military insignia, the theater, Eagle Scouts, Van Halen, the World Wrestling Federation and Superman.

Also on the front are Casey’s name and the dates of his life and death, which reveal an uncanny synchronicity. In addition to Memorial Day, Monday will also be Casey’s birthday, the day on which he would have turned 27.

The installation of the headstone on Casey’s grave is likely to get more notice than the vast majority of such installations. Casey’s mother, Cindy Sheehan, has become a well-known anti-war activist since Casey’s death, frequently in the spotlight in front of a highly divided crowd.

The absence of a headstone on Casey’s grave became fodder for Sheehan’s critics last year, who accused her of being negligent and disrespectful. Sheehan did not publicly respond for the first several months of such charges. But on April 10, she wrote a blog entry excoriating her critics and recounting the torturous experience of burying her son.

"I didn’t want to put a tombstone on my son’s grave," she wrote, capitalizing the letters of the word "tomb." "I didn’t want one more marble proof that my son was dead."

For the first year after Casey died, wrote Sheehan in the entry, she referred to the place he was buried not as a cemetery, but as "Casey’s Park." During that time she visited the cemetery nearly every day, she wrote, placing fresh flowers weekly on Casey’s grave.

Sheehan also said that her estranged husband Patrick had taken on the responsibility of handling Casey’s gravesite.

On Friday, Sheehan answered questions about the headstone via e-mail from Australia, where she has spent the week speaking out against the country’s support of the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq.

Sheehan said she had paid for the tombstone herself and was part of a family effort to put it up, even though its installation saddened her.

"It is important for the rest of Casey’s family to have one," she wrote Friday. "I guess the pain of seeing it etched in marble that he is dead is another pain I will have to deal with."

That pain, said Sheehan, stems from her belief that Casey should still be alive.

"I still feel he was killed for lies," she wrote.

The headstone was very expensive, Sheehan wrote. She said that the government should have paid for it because of its responsibility for his death. But Sheehan said money is not the main issue.

"It’s about the lies that are still killing our children and innocent Iraqis," she wrote. "It’s about unnecessary tombstones all over the world because of the Bush regime."

The new headstone on Casey’s grave won’t impact her relationship with her son, concluded Sheehan.

"Casey’s shell lies in the grave in Vacaville," she wrote. "He is with me always and in the hearts of people all over the world who know his story and are working for peace."

Patrick Sheehan did not return phone calls by press time Friday.

I find this part impossible to believe:

For the first year after Casey died, wrote Sheehan in the entry, she referred to the place he was buried not as a cemetery, but as "Casey’s Park." During that time she visited the cemetery nearly every day, she wrote, placing fresh flowers weekly on Casey’s grave.

In fact within weeks of Casey’s death, Mother Sheehan began spending a lot of her time on the road propagandizing for the people who killed her brave son.

For instance, her appearance in Santa Barbara on Labor Day, 2004.

These parts too are very likely lies:

Sheehan said she had paid for the tombstone herself and was part of a family effort to put it up, even though its installation saddened her…

The headstone was very expensive, Sheehan wrote. She said that the government should have paid for it because of its responsibility for his death. But Sheehan said money is not the main issue.

From earlier accounts, the government would have paid for it, if Cindy could have taken the time to fill out a form.

Moreover, earlier reports from the mortuary owner indicated that Mother Sheehan refused to pay for anything. And that he ended up paying for much of Casey’s funeral expense, even though the Sheehan had received more than a half million dollars in various death benefits.

Also, earlier accounts indicated that her former husband, Patrick Sheehan, had actually taken over getting the headstone. So this was probably his doing.

(Thanks to reader JLO for the heads up.)

The "Paper Of Treason," the New York Times, tries valiantly to rehabilitate John Kerry’s long lost credibility:

May 28, 2006

Kerry Pressing Swiftboat Case, Long After Loss

By KATE ZERNIKE

John Kerry starts by showing the entry in a log he kept from 1969: "Feb 12: 0800 run to Cambodia."

He moves on to the photographs: his boat leaving the base at Ha Tien, Vietnam; the harbor; the mountains fading frame by frame as the boat heads north; the special operations team the boat was ferrying across the border; the men reading maps and setting off flares.

"They gave me a hat," Mr. Kerry says. "I have the hat to this day," he declares, rising to pull it from his briefcase. "I have the hat."

Three decades after the Vietnam War and nearly two years after Mr. Kerry’s failed presidential bid, most Americans have probably forgotten why it ever mattered whether he went to Cambodia or that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accused him of making it all up, saying he was dishonest and lacked patriotism.

But among those who were on the frontlines of the 2004 campaign, the battle over Mr. Kerry’s wartime service continues, out of the limelight but in some ways more heatedly — because unlike then, Mr. Kerry has fully engaged in the fight. Only those on Mr. Kerry’s side, however, have gathered new evidence to prove their case.

The Swift boat group continues to spend money on Washington consultants, according to public records, and last fall it gave $100,000 to a group that promptly sued Mr. Kerry, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, for allegedly interfering with the release of a film that was critical of him.

Some of the principals behind the Swift boat group continue to press their claims. John O’Neill, the co-author of the group’s bestselling manifesto, "Unfit for Command," criticizes Mr. Kerry on television talk shows and solicits money for conservative causes and candidates. In a South Carolina newspaper, William Schachte recently reprised his allegation that he was aboard the small skimmer where Mr. Kerry received the injury that led to his first Purple Heart, and that Mr. Kerry actually wounded himself.

Swift boat message boards and anti-Kerry Web sites still boil with accusations that Mr. Kerry fabricated the military reports that led to his military decorations.

Mr. Kerry, accused even by Democrats of failing to respond to the charges during the campaign, is now fighting back hard.

"They lied and lied and lied about everything," Mr. Kerry says in an interview in his Senate office. "How many lies do you get to tell before someone calls you a liar? How many times can you be exposed in America today?"

His supporters are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group’s charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry’s valor in combat. While it would be easy to see this as part of Mr. Kerry’s exploration of another presidential run, his friends say the Swift boat charges struck at an experience so central to his identity that he would want to correct the record even if he were retiring from public life.

Mr. Kerry portrays himself as a wary participant in his own defense, insisting in the two-hour interview that he does not want to dwell on the accusations or the mistakes of his 2004 campaign. "I’m moving on," he says several times.

But he can also barely resist prosecuting a case against the group that his friends now refer to as "the bad guys." "Bill Schachte was not on that skimmer," Mr. Kerry says firmly. "He was not on that skimmer. It is a lie to suggest that he was out there on that skimmer."

He shows a photograph of the skimmer being towed behind his Swift boat, insisting that it could barely fit three people, himself and two others.

"The three guys who in fact were in the boat all say he wasn’t there and will tell you he wasn’t there. We know he wasn’t there, and we have all kinds of ways of proving it."

Mr. Kerry has signed forms authorizing the Navy to release his record — something he resisted during the campaign — and hired a researcher to comb the naval archives in Washington for records that could pinpoint his whereabouts during dates of the incidents in dispute. Another former crewmember has spent days at a time interviewing veterans to reconstruct every incident in question.

In February 2005, Mr. Kerry’s supporters formed their own group, the Patriot Project, to defend veterans who take unpopular positions, particularly against the Iraq war. One of their first tasks was to visit newspaper editorial boards in defense of John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and veteran whose military record has been attacked by Republicans and conservative blogs since he called for pulling the troops out of Iraq.

The group has sent a letter to Mr. Schachte calling for a meeting with him, Mr. Kerry and two former veterans who maintain — as they did publicly during the campaign — that they were the only other people on the skimmer with Mr. Kerry and that he was wounded in a hail of enemy fire.

Members of the Swift boat group have not seen Mr. Kerry’s newly gathered evidence. But they seem unwilling to cede much.

Mr. O’Neill said he "would be thrilled to look at anything he wants to send." Still, he added, "I’m sorry he never apologized for his 1971 speech," referring to Mr. Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he told other soldiers’ accounts of ravaging Vietnamese villages and citizens. "I think it would have been a very positive thing to do in terms of the many thousands of people who survived Vietnam and felt that was very hurtful."

Mr. Schachte said that he held "no animus," but that "if they crank this thing up again, I’m not going to be quiet." One of the two men who say they were on the boat — he does not recall which — might have been there, Mr. Schachte said, "but I was in that boat with Kerry."

The veterans group, led by Mr. O’Neill, a former Swift boat commander who was recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Mr. Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1971, began its campaign in early 2004 by criticizing Mr. Kerry’s protests against the Vietnam War. But backed by Republican donors and consultants, they soon shifted to attack his greatest strength — his record as a military hero in a campaign against a president who never went to war.

Naval records and accounts from other sailors contradicted almost every claim they made, and some members of the group who had earlier praised Mr. Kerry’s heroism contradicted themselves.

Still, the charges stuck. At a triumphant gathering of veterans in Fort Worth after the election, Mr. O’Neill was introduced as the man who "torpedoed" Mr. Kerry’s campaign; the Swift boat group spent more than $130,000 for a "Mission Accomplished" celebration at Disney World. The president’s brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, sent a letter thanking the "Swifties" for "their willingness to stand up to John Kerry." Even people within the Kerry campaign believed that the attacks had cost their candidate the presidency.

Some of Mr. Kerry’s friends and former Swift boat crewmembers made advertisements during the race to try to shoot down the group’s charges. But the campaign declined to air them widely because some strategists said that directly challenging the charges would legitimize them.

They approached Mr. Kerry after the election with the idea of setting the record straight.

So they have returned, for instance, to the question of Cambodia and whether Mr. Kerry was ever ordered to transport Navy Seals across the border, an experience that he said made him view government officials, who had declared that the country was not part of the war, as deceptive.

The Swift boat group insisted that no boats had gone to Cambodia. But Mr. Kerry’s researcher, using Vietnam-era military maps and spot reports from the naval archives showing coordinates for his boat, traced his path from Ha Tien toward Cambodia on a mission that records say was to insert Navy Seals.

Mr. Kerry’s supporters have also frozen frames from his amateur films of his time in Vietnam and have retrieved letters and military citations for other sailors to support his version of how he won the Silver Star — rebutting the Swift boat group’s most explosive charge, that he shot an unarmed teenager who was fleeing his fire.

Another photograph provides evidence for Mr. Kerry’s version of how he won the Bronze Star. And original reports pulled from the naval archives contradict the charge that he drafted his own accounts of various incidents — which left room, the Swift boat group had argued, to embellish them.

Mr. Kerry’s defenders have received help from unlikely sources, including some who were originally aligned with the Swift boat group but later objected to its accusations against Mr. Kerry. One of them, Steve Hayes, was an early member of the group. A former sailor, he was a longtime friend and employee of William Franke, one of the group’s founders, and he supported the push to have Mr. Kerry release his military files. But Mr. Hayes came to believe that the group was twisting Mr. Kerry’s record.

"The mantra was just ‘We want to set the record straight,’ " Mr. Hayes said this month. "It became clear to me that it was morphing from an organization to set the record straight into a highly political vendetta. They knew it was not the truth."

Mr. Hayes broke with the group, ending a 35-year friendship with Mr. Franke, and voted for Mr. Kerry. He has provided a long interview to Mr. Kerry’s supporters, backing their version of the incident for which Mr. Kerry received the Bronze Star.

Of course, plenty of disappointed and angry Democrats would like to know why Mr. Kerry did not defend himself so strenuously before the election. He had posted some military documents on his campaign’s Web site and had allowed reporters to view his medical records but resisted open access to them as unnecessarily intrusive.

Mr. Kerry and his defenders say that they did not have the extensive archival material, and that it was too complicated to gather in the rapid pace of a campaign. He was caught off guard, he says; he had been prepared to defend his antiwar activism, but he did not believe that anyone would challenge the facts behind his military awards. "We should have put more money behind it," Mr. Kerry says now. "I take responsibility for it; it was my mistake. They spent something like $30 million, and we didn’t. That’s just a terrible imbalance when somebody’s lying about you."

By the way, The Times posted a sidebar with various little blurbs which are meant to disprove the Swiftboat Veterans’ claims. Such as this:

The Swiftboat Veterans For Truth claimed that the boy who was shot was probably not armed…

And yet John O’Neill wrote in Unfit For Command (p. 83):

Kerry’s boat moved slightly downstream and was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade… A young Viet Cong in a loincloth popped out of a hole, clutching a grenade launcher, which may or may not have been loaded… Tom Belodeau, a forward gunner, shot the Viet Cong with an M-60 machine gun in the leg as he fled… Kerry and Medeiros (who had many troops in their boat) took off, perhaps with others, and followed the young Viet Cong and shot him in the back, behind a lean to.

The Times shows a photo which they purport to be the boy, which they crow proves that the boy was not in a loincloth but in a shirt and shorts. (Very important point there, NYT!)

And because the VC is lying face up in the photo (which, however, is very hard to tell), The Times claims the boy was shot "while approaching." Meaning Kerry could not have shot him in the back.

Unfortunately for Kerry and his lickspittles at The Times this does not comport with accounts from Kerry’s own allies, such as Fred Short. Nor does it match the official after action report:

AND MOVED IMMEDIATELY TO ASSIST. PCF 94 BEACHED IN CENTER OF AMBUSH IN FRONT OF SMALL PATH WHEN VC SPRUNG UP FROM BUNKER 10 FEET FROM UNIT. MAN RAN WITH WEAPON TOWARDS HOOTCH, FORWARD M-60 GUNNER WOUNDED MAN IN LEG. OINC JUMPED ASHORE AND GAVE PURSUIT WHILE OTHER UNITS SATURATED AREA WITH FIRE AND BEACHED PLACING ASSAULT PARTIES ASHORE. OINC OF PCF 94 CHASED VC INLAND BEHIND HOOTCH AND SHOT HIM WHILE HE FLED CAPTURING ONE B-40 ROCKET LAUNCHER WITH ROUND IN CHAMBER. OINC’S OF PCF’S 43 AND 23 LED ASSAULT PARTIES THROUGH BRUSH AND JOINED WITH PCF 94 GROUP. PARTIES FR[O]M 3 ACF’S [PRO]CEEDED TO SWEEP AREA AND [ILLEGIBLE]

The rest of Kerry’s new "proofs" are similarly dishonest or irrelevant.

This is the best he and his "researcher" could come up with after all this time?

From the local ABC affiliate ABC11TV:

Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong

Police Report: Alleged Victim Changed Story

By Darla Miles

(05/26/06 — DURHAM) – The woman who accused three Duke lacrosse players of raping her changed her story and appeared to fake being unconscious, according to a police report obtained Friday by Eyewitness News.

Among the documents is a supplemental report, written by Sgt. J.C. Shelton of the Durham Police Department on April 9.

"I was a few blocks away from 610 N. Buchanan," Shelton wrote. "I responded and was on scene first."

After finding the house dark and quiet, Shelton cleared the scene. He then was called to the Kroger store, where Kim Roberts stated that the alleged victim would not get out of her car. Roberts said she didn’t know the woman, but that she picked up the woman after seeing white males yelling racial slurs at her.

"[Roberts] said that she did not know if the female was drunk or high and she was afraid of what the white males might do to the woman," Shelton wrote.

He then walked over to the car and saw the alleged victim.

"She was wearing a see-through red outfit, with no undergarments and one high-heel shoe," Shelton wrote. "She was unconscious."

Shelton says he got an ammonia capsule from his patrol car.

"When I used it, the female began mouth-breathing, which is a sign that she was not really unconscious," he wrote. "My experience is that unconscious people wake up rather quickly when exposed to ammonia capsules.

"I grabbed the female and attempted to pull her from the vehicle. She grabbed the emergency brake with her left hand and would not come out of the car. At this point, I applied a bent wrist come-along [maneuver] to her right-hand arm? once she was out of the car, I released the pressure and she collapsed to the ground."

Shelton says the woman would not speak with police officers, so they decided to take her for involuntary commitment at the Durham Access Center. A short time later, Shelton got a call from another officer that made him go back at talk to the alleged victim again.

"He called me and stated the female stated she had been raped…Once at Duke [Hospital], I spoke to the female, who was now cooperative," Shelton wrote. "She said some of the guys from the party pulled her from the vehicle and groped her. She told me that no one forced her to have sex."

Then, Shelton says the alleged victim’s story changed again.

"Within a few minutes, I was told that she told the [doctor] that she had been raped? I returned? and asked her if she had or had not been raped. She told me she did not want to talk to me anymore and then started crying and saying something about them dragging her into the bedroom."

The report also shows inconsistencies with the story from the second dancer, Kim Roberts. The alleged victim called her "Nikki" that night. According to the report, neither woman told police that Roberts also performed at the lacrosse team’s party.

Why do these kind of stories only get reported in the local press?

They never make it onto the mainstream media’s wires.

Does our one party media have some kind of agenda?

The Washington Post tops the New York Times, who only reported that Gonzales threatened to resign:

A Defiant Stance In Jefferson Probe

Justice Dept. Talked of Big Resignations If White House Agreed to Return Papers

By Dan Eggen and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 27, 2006; A01

The Justice Department signaled to the White House this week that the nation’s top three law enforcement officials would resign or face firing rather than return documents seized from a Democratic congressman’s office in a bribery investigation, according to administration sources familiar with the discussions.

The possibility of resignations by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales; his deputy, Paul J. McNulty; and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III was communicated to the White House by several Justice officials in tense negotiations over the fate of the materials taken from Rep. William J. Jefferson’s office, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Justice prosecutors and FBI agents feared that the White House was ready to acquiesce to demands from House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and other lawmakers that the materials be returned to the Louisiana congressman, who is the subject of a criminal probe by the FBI. Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, David S. Addington, was among the leading White House critics of the FBI raid, telling officials at Justice and on Capitol Hill that he believed the search was questionable, several sources familiar with his views said.

Administration officials said yesterday that the specter of top-level resignations or firings at Justice and the FBI was a crucial turning point in the standoff, helping persuade President Bush to announce a cease-fire on Thursday. Bush ordered that the Jefferson materials be sealed for 45 days while Justice officials and House lawmakers work out their differences, while also making it clear that he expected the case against Jefferson to proceed.

Spokesmen for the White House, Cheney’s office, the Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment, saying they would not discuss internal deliberations.

White House officials were not informed of the search until it began last Saturday and did not immediately recognize the political ramifications, the sources said. By Sunday, however, as the 18-hour search continued, lawmakers began lodging complaints with the White House.

Addington — who had worked as a staffer in the House and whose boss, Cheney, once served as a congressman — quickly emerged as a key internal critic of raiding the office of a sitting House member. He raised heated objections to the Justice Department’s legal rationale for the search during a meeting Sunday with McNulty and others, according to several sources.

The talk of resignations adds another dramatic element to the remarkable tug of war that has played out since last Saturday night, when about 15 FBI agents executed a search warrant on Jefferson’s office in the Rayburn House Office Building.

The raid — the first physical FBI search of a congressman’s office in U.S. history — sparked an uproar in the House, where Hastert joined Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in demanding that the records be returned because they viewed the search as an illegal violation of the constitutional separation of powers.

Hastert wrote in an article published in USA Today yesterday that House lawyers are working with the Justice Department to develop guidelines for handling searches of lawmakers’ offices. "But that is behind us now," Hastert wrote. "I am confident that in the next 45 days, the lawyers will figure out how to do it right."

Also yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) met with Gonzales at the senator’s Capitol Hill office.

"We’ve been working hard already, and we’ll continue to do so pursuant to the president’s order," Gonzales told reporters on his way into Frist’s suite just off the Senate floor.

Jefferson, 59, has been under investigation since March 2005 for allegations that he took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for using his congressional influence to promote business ventures in Africa. Two people have pleaded guilty to bribing him, including Brett Pfeffer, one of his former aides, who was sentenced yesterday to eight years in prison by a federal judge in Alexandria.

An FBI affidavit released this week alleged that Jefferson was videotaped taking $100,000 in bribe money and that a search of his Washington apartment turned up $90,000 of that money wrapped in foil inside his freezer. Jefferson, who has not been charged, has denied any wrongdoing.

The unprecedented FBI raid on Jefferson’s office triggered an extraordinary chain of events. Hastert, long one of the president’s staunchest allies in Congress, and his chief of staff, Scott Palmer, were immediately angered by the tactic. On Monday, Hastert pushed Bush strongly on the issue during a trip the two shared on Air Force One coming back from Chicago. "Hastert was white-hot," said a senior administration official.

Bush expressed sympathy but did not take sides, the official said: "He did not say, ‘I share your view.’ He said, ‘Look, we’re going to try to work with you to help resolve this.’ "

The view of the emerging political landscape was notably different at Justice, where officials feared they were quickly losing the debate. Prosecutors and FBI agents felt the materials were obtained from Jefferson through a lawful and court-approved search and that returning them — as demanded by Hastert and others — would amount to an intolerable political intervention in the criminal justice process.

Justice had one ally at the White House in Frances Fragos Townsend, the homeland security adviser and former prosecutor, who spoke in defense of the raid’s legality at a meeting on Monday, according to two sources familiar with her remarks. Townsend was not invited to participate in subsequent discussions on the issue, however. A senior administration official said she would not normally be involved in the topic.

At a particularly contentious meeting Monday night at the Capitol, Palmer angrily upbraided William E. Moschella, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, and two other Justice officials, saying they had violated the Constitution, several sources said.

As the week progressed, the confrontation escalated further. At some point in the negotiations, McNulty told Palmer that he would quit if ordered to return the materials to Jefferson, according to several officials familiar with the conversation.

McNulty, a former Alexandria prosecutor who was recently named Gonzales’s deputy, was a central player in the contentious negotiations with Capitol Hill and the White House, sources said. He had also worked in the House for 12 years, as chief counsel for both the majority leader’s office and a crime subcommittee.

A message that McNulty might quit was passed along to the White House, along with similar messages for Gonzales and Mueller. Sources familiar with the discussions declined to say which Justice officials communicated those possibilities to the White House.

The discussion of Gonzales and the others resigning never evolved into a direct threat, but it was made plain that such an option would have to be considered if the president ordered the documents returned, several sources said. "It wasn’t one of those things of ‘If you will, I will,’ " one senior administration official said. "It was kind of the background noise."

"One of the reasons the president did what he did was these types of conversations and other types of conversations in the House were escalating," the official said, referring to murmured threats by some House Republicans to call for Gonzales’s resignation.

The desire to do something before the Memorial Day recess also created an "artificial deadline" that Bush considered counterproductive. "As the week moved on," the official said, "there’s no question emotions were running high on both sides. . . . People had a gun to their head, and it was really making people not more flexible but more intense. It was his view to say let’s get more time."

The White House grew especially concerned about a House Republican Conference meeting scheduled for 11 a.m. Thursday and later rescheduled for 3:30 p.m. In the heat of the moment, it could have gotten out of hand and wound up with some sort of resolution demanding that Gonzales step down. "You never know what’s going to happen in a conference," the official said.

Bush decided to head off the situation. He summoned Cheney, Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, counselor Dan Bartlett, legislative director Candida Wolff, White House Counsel Harriet Miers, Deputy White House Counsel William K. Kelley and some other staff members to the Oval Office on Thursday morning and announced that he had decided to seal the Jefferson documents.

"I’m going to put an end to the escalation," one official quoted Bush as saying. "We’ve got to calm this down."

Bush directed Cheney to inform Hastert, while Bolten told Gonzales.

Bush aides were also worried about a war with the Republican House if the president did not act.

"If you tell the House to stick it where the sun don’t shine, you’re talking about a fundamentally corrosive relationship between two branches of government," the senior administration official said. "They could zero out funding; they could say, ‘Okay, you can do subpoenas, so can we.’"

Good for them.

  Update!

CBS News has done its part to further the DNC’s agenda with their latest story on this subject:

Of course Rep. William Jefferson is a Louisiana Democrat.

(Thanks to Crosspatch for the heads up on this.)

From the terrorist loving folks at Reuters:

Judge rejects reporter CIA leak case subpoena

Fri May 26, 2006

By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A judge rejected a request by former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby on Friday to force ex-New York Times reporter Judith Miller to turn over all her notes, telephone records and appointment calendar.

After reviewing the documents in private, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton granted a request by Miller’s attorneys to throw out Libby’s subpoena.

He ruled the requests for Miller’s appointment calendar and her telephone records from June 7 to July 14 in 2003 "appear to be nothing more than a fishing expedition."

Libby’s lawyers already have parts of two notebooks that Miller gave special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald about the CIA official whose identity was disclosed, her diplomat husband and his trip to Africa.

But Libby’s lawyers wanted the entire notebooks, without any deletions.

Walton said he examined every page in the notebooks and agreed with Miller’s lawyers that the deleted parts would not be relevant to Libby’s defense.

Libby is charged with lying to investigators as they sought to determine who leaked the identity of CIA official Valerie Plame after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence to build its case for invading Iraq.

Plame’s identity was made public by conservative columnist Robert Novak in July 2003.

The prosecutor relied on the testimony of Miller, Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine and Tim Russert of NBC News in bringing the perjury charges against Libby in late October.

Walton rejected the argument by the journalists and their news organizations that they cannot be forced to provide any of the requested documents because of a privilege under the First Amendment and the law protecting reporters from such disclosures.

The judge upheld a different subpoena by Libby’s lawyers for earlier draft articles by Miller and Cooper.

Although Walton concluded The New York Times, NBC News and NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell have relevant documents, they will not be required to turn them over until he issues a final ruling on their admissibility during the trial, which is scheduled to begin in January.

It’s very difficult to see how Miller’s notes are not relevant to Libby’s case if Cooper’s and Russert’s notes are.

Fitzgerald at one point seemed to think Miller’s information was the lynchpin of the whole investigation. Which was why he compelled her to testify by way of giving her jail time. Now her notes don’t matter?

I don’t believe it.

I can’t resist posting some of the photos from Olympian Online which show what happened to the "peace activists" who tried to block the delivery of Stryker armored vehicles to our troops in Iraq:

   

  

Shouting, “don’t do that again” a truck driver hauling a military cargo container cautions one of approximately 40 Iraq war protesters after the protester slammed his sign down on the driver’s semi fender.

Of course they will do it again. School’s out, and what else is there to do that will get your photos in the paper?

Still, they are images to savor over the Memorial Day weekend as we remember those who gave their lives for freedom. And not just freedom for the United States but for other nations around the globe.

The US military is the greatest force for good in the history of the world.

And that seems to drive some people insane.

(Thanks to JohnX for the photos link.)

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Stryker vehicles headed to Iraq make it to port

Peace activists tried to hold up Army convoys

Friday, May 26, 2006

P-I STAFF AND NEWS SERVICES

OLYMPIA — At least 16 people were arrested in Olympia this week as peace activists used civil disobedience to try to thwart convoys of Army combat vehicles headed to the Port of Olympia for shipment to Iraq.

Thursday, however, was quiet as the last two of 20 convoys of 300 Stryker Brigade combat vehicles made it to the port without incident.

Peace activists with the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace, who have held regular vigils over the past two years to protest the port's use to transport military equipment, said no further action is likely to occur until a ship arrives to receive the vehicles.

Authorities routinely decline to name the ship for security reasons.

The shipments are preceding the return to Iraq next month of the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division.

The 4,000-member Fort Lewis unit, named for its lightly armored, eight-wheeled combat vehicles, was the first Stryker unit to serve in Iraq. It was there for a year from late 2003 to 2004.

Up to 20 peace activists mingled near the route to the port Thursday, but things were generally quiet, Olympia police said.

Protesters decry port policies that allow military shipments, saying the war in Iraq is "illegal and immoral," said Larry Mosqueda of Olympia Movement for Peace and Justice. A fact sheet Mosqueda circulated contends shipping such military equipment through the port essentially makes the port "complicit in these war crimes."

The Port of Olympia resumed military shipments in 2004 after a 17-year hiatus.

More vigils will be held around the evening rush hour from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. until the vehicles and their ship move out, Mosqueda said.

At least nine people were arrested Wednesday for trying to obstruct the convoys; the biggest confrontation occurred as some people were carried to a police van, The Associated Press reported.

"The level of the force we use is pretty much based on the response of the individual we're dealing with," police Cmdr. Tor Bjornstad said. "We don't use any more than is necessary."

Protesters also blocked the gate for a time when another convoy arrived by a different route on Franklin Street, but no one else was arrested.

Meanwhile, City Hall and the city jail were locked for about an hour and a half after the arrests to prevent disruption of city business by those who were arrested and their supporters, Sgt. James Partin said.

The next time you hear these "peace activists" talk about how they support the troops and are so concerned about their safety, remember this article – and the hundreds of other stunts they have pulled to hurt our military.

Remember all their crocodile tears at the "lack of body armor" and "unprotected humvees"?

This is outright sedition. And of course it is highly illegal. But, as usual, it won't be punished beyond the mildest slaps on their wrists.

They are just trying to get our soldiers killed. What's wrong with that?

More highly entertaining photos can be found at the Olympian Online.

(Thanks to JohnX for the photo link.)

Brian Ross of ABC News is the reporter behind the story that Rep. Dennis Hastert is being investigated by the Department Of Justice. Ross is sticking to his charges despite vehement denials from both the DOJ and Hastert himself.

Some may recall that Brian Ross has been involved in past journalistic controversies. Just last week, Mr. Ross reported he was tipped off by unnamed "senior federal officials" that his cell phone was tapped by NSA.

Last month, Ross was one of the first (if not the first) to report that Rush Limbaugh "had been arrested." Reports which turned out to be greatly exaggerated, but which Ross never corrected.

In January, Brian Ross was the first to promulgate the claims of the self-proclaimed NSA whistleblower, Russell Tice. Ross treated Tice has a highly credible source even though Tice had been cashiered from the agency due to "psychological problems."

But all of these recent achievements pale in comparison to Mr. Ross’s earlier journalistic lapse, if an earlier entry in Wikipedia is to be believed. For it claimed Ross who was responsible for Dateline NBC’s rigging of truck fuel tanks in 1993.

Here is how the earlier Wikipedia entry for Dateline NBC used to read, via their mirror site at Answers.com:

Controversy

On 18 February 1993 Dateline NBC aired an investigative report about General Motors pickup trucks allegedly exploding upon impact during accidents, because fuel tanks were badly designed. Although there were fuel tanks design problems with GM cars before, Dateline’s film showed a sample of a staged low speed accident with the fuel tank exploding. Dateline NBC did not disclose the fact that this accident was staged, or the fact that the only reason there was an explosion was that the vehicle contained planted explosives. The viewers were never told about it. It appeared to be a major discovery of investigative reporters. GM investigators discovered a mistake by a study of the Dateline film. GM subsequently filed an anti-defamation lawsuit against NBC. The lawsuit in question was quickly settled by NBC and as a result Brian Ross and a few persons responsible for the incident were fired from NBC, and Ross found employment with ABC News, where he continues to work to this day.

But this is how Wikipedia Dateline entry reads currently:

Controversy

On February 18, 1993, Dateline NBC aired an investigative report about General Motors pickup trucks allegedly exploding upon impact during accidents, because fuel tanks were badly designed. Although there were fuel tanks design problems with GM cars before, Dateline’s film showed a sample of a staged low speed accident with the fuel tank exploding. Dateline NBC did not disclose the fact that this accident was staged, or the fact that the only reason there was an explosion was that the vehicle contained planted explosives. The viewers were never told about it. It appeared to be a major discovery of investigative reporters. GM investigators discovered a mistake by a study of the Dateline film. GM subsequently filed an anti-defamation lawsuit against NBC. The lawsuit in question was quickly settled by NBC.

The following Dateline NBC producers were dismissed: Jeff Diamond, executive producer; David Rummel, senior producer; and Robert Read, producer of the report on the pickups. The reporter involved in the segment, Michele Gillen, transferred to Miami station, WTVJ. Michael G. Gartner, president of the news division, resigned under pressure. Source: Kolbert, Elizabeth (Mar. 23, 1993). "NBC Admits Bad Judgment in Truck Report". The New York Times, sec. D, p. 23.

Even though the new incident was staged it inspired many highly publicized lawsuits, and GM greatly reduced the fuel capacity of their trucks as a result. The publicity also drove other automotive companies to make similar changes and even destroyed the high capacity third party fuel tank market that thrived up to then. Today its almost impossible to improve a truck’s fuel range by adding a tank that is designed to be mounted under the vehicle.

Note the conspicuous deletion of any reference to Brian Ross.

Several sites, including Free Republic, cited the Wikipedia article vis a vis Ross as recently as Dateline’s NASCAR incident last month.

Perhaps it is a correction of earlier misinformation. But the records of those involved in the Dateline scam seem to be quite scarce on the internet.

From the DNC’s house organ, the Washington Post:

Libby Told Grand Jury Cheney Spoke of Plame

Vice President May Be Called as Witness

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 25, 2006; A01

Vice President Cheney was personally angered by a former U.S. ambassador’s newspaper column attacking a key rationale for the war in Iraq and repeatedly directed I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then his chief of staff, to "get all the facts out" related to the critique, according to excerpts from Libby’s 2004 grand jury testimony released late yesterday by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Libby also told the grand jury that Cheney raised as an issue that the former ambassador’s wife worked at the CIA and that she allegedly played a role in sending him to investigate the Iraqi government’s interest in acquiring nuclear weapons materials. That issue formed the basis of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV’s published critique.

In the court filing that included the formerly secret testimony, Fitzgerald did not assert that Cheney instructed Libby to tell reporters the name and role of Valerie Plame, Wilson’s wife. But he said Cheney’s interactions with Libby on that topic were a key part of the reason Libby allegedly made false statements to the FBI about his conversations with reporters around the time her name was disclosed in news accounts.

"The state of mind of the Vice President as communicated to defendant is directly relevant to the issue of whether defendant knowingly made false statements to federal agents and the grand jury regarding when and how he learned about Ms. Wilson’s employment and what he said to reporters regarding this issue," he said.

The prosecutor also left open the possibility that Cheney will be called as a witness at Libby’s trial, scheduled to begin next year, and denied an assertion last week by Libby’s lawyers that Cheney would not be called.

Fitzgerald was appointed in late 2003 to investigate the disclosure of Plame’s name to the media after the CIA complained that it was an illegal act because she was an undercover officer. His probe has led to a series of disclosures about efforts by the White House to rebut Wilson’s published critique, but no official has been directly charged with leaking Plame’s name.

Instead, Libby was accused of making false statements, obstruction of justice and perjury, mostly based on his statements that he did not confirm Plame’s employment at the CIA and alleged involvement in Wilson’s trip when he was talking with two journalists. Libby has denied wrongdoing and said in court filings that he may have forgotten what he said to the journalists because of the press of other business.

Fitzgerald, in contrast, has sought to build a case that Libby was preoccupied with the task of rebutting Wilson’s July 2003 column, which accused the White House of twisting intelligence to support its invasion of Iraq — and that this preoccupation stemmed from Cheney’s intense focus on Wilson’s assertions. While yesterday’s filing largely concerned a side issue — whether Libby’s attorneys are entitled to see more government documents — it provided the first detailed look at what Libby told investigators about his interactions with Cheney on this issue.

According to the excerpts from testimony on March 5, 2004, Libby recalled that he and Cheney discussed Wilson’s article on multiple occasions each day after it appeared. Cheney, Libby said, "often will cut out from a newspaper an article using a little penknife that he has" and "look at it, think about it."

That’s what Cheney did with the column, Libby said, because Cheney saw it as attacking his credibility. "He wanted to get all the facts out about what he had or hadn’t done, what the facts were or were not. He was very keen about that and said it repeatedly. Let’s get everything out," Libby testified.

A previous court filing by Fitzgerald revealed that Cheney had annotated his copy of the column with this question about Wilson: "Did his wife send him on a junket?" Cheney’s defense lawyers said in a subsequent filing that Libby had testified he never saw those annotations until the FBI showed him a copy. In Libby’s actual testimony, as released by Fitzgerald, he said, "It’s possible if it was sitting on his desk that, you know, my eye went across it."

An apparently key issue to be contested at trial is precisely when these conversations took place: Did they occur before or after Libby’s discussions with reporters that included Plame’s name? And did Libby have reason — as his attorneys have asserted — to forget some of what Cheney said about Plame and her employment at the CIA?

The grand jury excerpts record Libby as saying at one point that he did not recall Cheney asking about the Plame connection "early on . . . although he may well have." Libby also said that he did not recall such a discussion with Cheney before he heard Plame’s name from reporter Tim Russert — a conversation that Russert has disputed in his own testimony.

I guess Grand Jury testimony isn’t secret if it is thought it could hurt Republicans. This article is so replete with falsehoods and biased reporting it is laughable.

For instance:

Vice President Cheney was personally angered by a former U.S. ambassador’s newspaper column attacking a key rationale for the war in Iraq and repeatedly directed I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then his chief of staff, to "get all the facts out" related to the critique, according to excerpts from Libby’s 2004 grand jury testimony released late yesterday by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

So Cheney wanted to get the facts out. That does sound criminal. You don’t want to expose Joe Wilson as a liar. And since when was Iraq having dealings with Niger a "key rationale" for the war?

And this:

Instead, Libby was accused of making false statements, obstruction of justice and perjury, mostly based on his statements that he did not confirm Plame’s employment at the CIA and alleged involvement in Wilson’s trip when he was talking with two journalists.

There’s nothing "alleged" about Plame’s sending Joe to Niger. It’s documented in the 9/11 Commission’s report.

But notice that the Washington Post never uses "alleged" when it is leveling the most preposterous charges against Libby and Cheney.

If there was ever any doubt that Fitzgerald is a political whore, this should clear that up. There is no reason on earth for him to have released this information to the press. It is just more of the DNC’s smear machine at work.

(Notice that this was released on Thursday, since so many will take Friday off for the long weekend. So our one party media will have four days to repeat it.)

Great job, Mr. Fitzgerald! Have you signed that book deal yet?

By the way this is the photograph that the AP is currently featuring with stories about Cheney and the possiblity (that is, their hope) that he may be called to testify before Fitzgerald’s latest star chamber:

Vice President Dick Cheney delivers a speech at a luncheon held for congressional candidate Brian Bilbray at the Sheraton Hotel and Marina Tuesday, May 23, 2006 in San Diego, Calif.

What media bias?

From the Durham Herald-Sun:

Bill Patterson, right, with the Coalition for Alcohol and Drug Free Teenagers, holds a sign in protest alongside a member of the New Black Panthers before a hearing for Duke lacrosse player Reade Seligmann at the Durham County Judicial Building Thursday, May 18, 2006, in Durham, N.C.

Gag order sought in lacrosse case

BY PAUL BONNER: The Herald-Sun
May 24, 2006

DURHAM — A lawyer with the state NAACP said the civil rights organization intends to seek a gag order in the Duke lacrosse case, and a journalist who participated in a forum with him on Wednesday said media coverage of the alleged rape may deprive the alleged victim of her legal rights to a fair trial.

Al McSurely, an attorney who chairs the Legal Redress Committee for the state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he generally respects the defense attorneys in the case as colleagues. But they are violating the State Bar’s rules of professional conduct that discourage comments outside court that are likely to prejudice a case, he said.

The NAACP will try to intervene in the case to file a "quiet zone/let’s let justice work" motion. That is otherwise known as a gag order, he acknowledged, although he said he doesn’t like that term.

McSurely’s comments came amid the first-ever Durham Conference on the Moral Challenges of our Culture at First Presbyterian Church downtown. The session gave the approximately 150 people who attended a chance to hear a series of talks and discuss among themselves sexual and domestic violence, racism, class distinctions and the media.

The Duke lacrosse rape case has sparked a broader and long-overdue examination of some of those issues, said people who participated in the forum, sponsored by the state NAACP and Durham clergy.

Cash Michaels, a journalist with The Carolinian newspaper of Raleigh, said, to applause, that lawyers for the three lacrosse players charged in the case "are playing the media like a banjo."

Leaks of case information intended to impugn the alleged victim’s credibility, and resulting news coverage and analysis, cloud her right to have the allegations tried in court, Michaels said.

"We are seeing powerful forces trying to remove that right from her," he said, and questions about the accuser — an exotic dancer — are amplified by the media.

Conversely, he said, a Web site he oversees has received words of encouragement for her from as far away as China. The site, www.ourheartsworld.com, calls her, "our sister survivor."

Monica A. Coleman, director of womanist and religious studies at Bennett College in Greensboro, told the gathering that sexual assault is underreported because of society’s skepticism and intimidation of its victims, both subtly and not-so-subtly.

"Rarely do people say, ‘I don’t believe you,’ " Coleman said. "More often than not, it’s something like, ‘Well, are you sure?’ ‘Well, what were you wearing?’ ‘What were you doing there?’ or ‘What did you expect?’ What woman would knowingly, willingly, open herself up to that kind of scrutiny?"

William C. Turner Jr., an associate professor of the practice of homiletics in Duke’s Divinity School, traced "racism’s ontological root" to 19th century exponents of white superiority who attributed the belief to God’s will for the natural order. Even though their arguments have long since been repudiated, the sentiments still exert an effect on religion and society, he said.

"Even when the discourse is removed … it’s rooted in the very foundation of our understanding of God, and it is woven into the fabric of our social philosophy, Turner said. "It remains even when people stop using that language."

The session was announced May 5 by the Rev. William J. Barber II, state conference president of the NAACP, and other ministers including First Presbyterian’s pastor, Joe Harvard. It included a roundtable discussion accompanied by presentations from perspectives in theology, civil rights and journalism. It was especially designed to include voices of advocates and workers who address domestic and sexual violence.

"This is not just about one incident but about a whole reality in which many have been affected," Barber said.

I guess they don’t like the facts coming out. They’ve got their story and they’re sticking to it. Besides, the truth could hurt their fundraising.

But whatever happened to "no justice, no peace!"?