RT On Air

Saturday, 11 February 2006

Boonie not impressed with this beer



Got this in an email the other day, very amusing. Most Aussies will know who David Boon is and the relevance of this.

Chris Rock Never Scared, on HBO

"Bush sent that girl to Kobe's room, Bush sent that little boy to Michael Jackson's house. Bush killed Laci Peterson. Bush was fucking Paris Hilton in that video. All to get your mind off the war. Bush lied to me, they all lied to me: "we gotta go to Iraq because they're the most dangerous country on earth, they're the most dangerous regime in the world." If they so dangerous, how come it only took two weeks to take over the whole fucking country? Shit. Man, you couldn't take over Baltimore in two weeks."

Thursday, 9 February 2006

Wikinews investigates Wikipedia usage by U.S. Senate staff members

Staff members of the offices of United States Senators, using Senate-linked IP addresses, have been editing Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that allows its users to edit its content. In some cases, they have removed facts from the articles.

Using the public history of edits on Wikipedia, Wikinews reporters collected every Senate IP address from which Wikipedia edits had been made as of February 3, then examined where the IPs came from and the edits that were made from computers connected at those addresses. IP, or Internet Protocol, addresses are unique numbers electronic devices use to communicate with each other on an individual basis.

read on

Monday, 6 February 2006

Seeing Only Evil

Chronogram - Seeing Only Evil - Feb 2006

The first time I went to see Syriana, the friend who accompanied me left after the first half hour. We haven't really talked about why.

Three years of watching friends' eyes glaze over while spewing the multitudinous minutia of knowledge I have acquired working in Iraq have silenced me.

Talk about torture. I loved the film, went to see it a second time-alone-and want to see it again. It felt familiar, as one's home does when returning to it after an absence. And it made me want to talk about Iraq with Robert Baer, a former case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. It is Baer's memoir,
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism (Crown Publishers, 2002), that Syriana is based upon. Baer served mostly in the Middle East-Beirut, Lebanon and Iraq-as well as in Sudan, Morocco, and one tour in Paris. His job was to "run agents or sources across the Middle East gathering Intelligence." An Arabic speaker, he was considered one of the best on-the-ground field officers in the Middle East. In See No Evil, Baer says that there is evidence linking Iran to attacks on American interests, including the Khobar Towers bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 US soldiers in 1996. He says that Iran has been mishandled by US diplomats since the 1980s, and that American foreign policy regarding the Islamic Republic is based on myths and misinformation.
I spoke with Baer by phone from his home in Colorado.

read the interview