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host · 08-31-2006, 11:11 AM

At least John Stewart has his "outrage" priorities in logical order. No outrage by the folks who embrace the zombietime blog garbage, when it comes to the MSM failure to widely report the lies and misleading statements that led the US to invade Iraq:
http://www.overspun.com/video/DailyShow.cheneylies.rm
.....but plenty of indignation over this bullshit that affects no one in the US.
Seaver's OP is nothing more than a commercial for Murdoch's News Corp.

Your own, "fair and balanced", Murdoch controlled, foxnews Australian clone printed this, yesterday:

Quote:

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...94-401,00.html
Red Cross slams Downer's hoax claim

By Mark Dodd and Martin Chulov

August 30, 2006 07:33am
Article from: The Australian

THE International Committee of the Red Cross has rebuked Foreign Minister Alexander Downer <b>for relying on an unverified internet blog</b> to claim an Israeli missile strike on one of its ambulances in southern Lebanon was a hoax.

A spokeswoman for the ICRC in Geneva said yesterday there was no evidence to support Mr Downer's assertion that the international media had been duped in reporting that Israel had deliberately targeted the ambulance.

An image of the roof of the ambulance showed what was purportedly an entry hole allegedly made by an Israeli rocket which had pierced the centre of the red cross symbol.

The July 23 incident, in which two ambulances were fired on, injuring six people – including one man who lost his leg in the attack – provoked worldwide condemnation of Israel's apparent direct targeting of an ambulance in breach of the Geneva convention.

Israel apologised for the incident but made no admissions.

The blog site, Zombietime.com, claimed photographs of the interior of the ambulance showed there was not enough damage to have been hit by a missile through the roof, as claimed.

On Monday, in a speech to the National Newspaper Publishers Conference on the Gold Coast, Mr Downer criticised the Australian and international media for sloppy reporting and failing to check facts in their coverage of the Lebanon conflict.

He accused the media of being hoodwinked by Lebanese claims that "Israel had bombed deliberately a (Lebanese) Red Cross ambulance". And he accused "some of the world's most prestigious media outlets", including Time magazine, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Australian of falling for a hoax.

"After closer study of the images of the damage to the ambulance, it is beyond serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax," he said.

In an internal report, a copy of which was obtained by The Australian, the ICRC claims that on July 23 near the village of Qana, two Red Cross ambulances were "struck by munitions".

Last night, the group manager of the first-aid team for the Lebanese Red Cross, George Kettneh, insisted that two LRC ambulances had been attacked on the night of July 23, near Qana in southern Lebanon.

"I was on duty that night and every ambulance that moved in Lebanon I had to know about," he said.

"I received phone calls from the ambulance drivers and it took us one hour to negotiate a ceasefire through the International Committee of the Red Cross."

Ambulance driver Qassem Shalim was closing the doors of the ambulance when the vehicle was hit.

"I am sure the missile was fired from a drone. The blue light was flashing on our roof, the red cross was clear and there was a light on the Lebanese Red Cross flag above me. Everything I said happened did happen," he told The Australian in Beirut.

But yesterday, Mr Downer's spokesman, Tony Parkinson, said the minister was standing by his comments.

"Those (website) pictures do not show an ambulance that has been struck by a missile nor do they sustain the argument the ambulance was struck by a missile."

Federal Opposition foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, said Mr Downer needed to come clean on his sources.

Quote:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...307128,00.html
Downer's unfounded faith in the internet
The Foreign Minister has been hoaxed by a callous blog, writes Middle East correspondent Martin Chulov
31aug06

LATE in the evening of July 23, Qassem Shalin, a volunteer member of the Lebanese Red Cross for 13 years, set off in his ambulance for a cross road near the village of Qana in southern Lebanon. His job that night was to collect, with a second ambulance, six people who had suffered minor injuries the day before during fighting between Hezbollah and Israel.

It was a call-out that almost cost Shalin his life and, according to Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, has since cost him his reputation as an impartial protector of war's wounded.

The run sheets that night of the Lebanese Red Cross in Beirut and the International Committee for the Red Cross, who were working closely with them, show the two ambulances waited at the intersection just north of Qana for another ambulance carrying wounded from the village of Tibnin.

Just after 11.30 a large explosion thundered into Shalin's ambulance. Both drivers were wearing body armour and had just loaded two stretchers carrying Ahmed Mohammed Fawaz and his 14-year-old son, Abdullah.

Shalin is not the only one to have come under attack in the wake of the incident. Representatives of the world's media who covered the aftermath, including this correspondent, are in the Foreign Minister's sights for reporting that the ambulance had been struck by an Israeli missile, in a serious contravention of the rules that govern warfare.

In a speech to Australian newspaper publishers this week, he accused us all of willingly falling for a Hezbollah-contrived conspiracy, our eagerness to do so being dishonest and irresponsible and, according to Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, fuelled by an anti-Israeli bias.

"What concerns me greatly is the evidence of dishonesty in the reporting out of Lebanon," Downer said, adding later that "it is beyond serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax".

<h3>The source of his findings was a right-wing Florida-based website, zombietime.com, which had devoted 28 pages to discredit the story and lambasted the world's media for covering it.</h3>

Downer finds the blog to be a compelling condemnation of the foreign media's competence and ideological stance in Lebanon. Key planks of zombietime.com's allegations are that a missile would not cause the type of damage done to Ambulance 782; rust around the damaged roof showed the damage was done some time prior; neither driver was seriously injured; Shalin's injuries seemed to heal miraculously; and the Israeli apology was merely a matter of course.

I was in Tyre on the night of the attack and investigated the incident closely the next day. On July 24, with photographer Stewart Innes, we spoke to Qassem Shalin, who was recovering from a minor wound to his chin that nurses had bandaged to stop it from turning septic. We also visited Ahmed Mohammed Fawaz, whose lower left leg had been amputated and whose severe burns ironically had saved his life by sealing blood vessels and arteries. His son writhed in pain nearby, his stomach riddled with shrapnel and the rear of his scalp opened up.

We inspected both ambulances, whose mangled roofs were not rusting at the time. By the time the photos used on the blog site were taken, rust had appeared. But this is entirely normal in Lebanon's sultry summer climate, where humidity on the coast does not drop below 70per cent.

Downer's spokesman, Tony Parkinson, said on Tuesday: "Those (website) pictures do not show an ambulance that has been struck by a missile nor do they sustain the argument the ambulance was struck by a missile."

He is wrong. The damage done was consistent with ruined cars and vans that I saw elsewhere in Lebanon and earlier in Gaza, which had been hit by a missile fired from a drone. The Israeli-made drones have many types of missiles, but the most regularly used has a small warhead designed for use in urban areas. It aims not to kill anyone outside a small zone and rarely leaves a calling card outside its target.

Downer and Parkinson should know this. The Australian Government last year signed a deal to buy drones from Israel. They would surely have come with a buyer's guide.

The small warhead partly explains the driver's lack of serious wounds. But more telling is the fact that Shalin was lifting the rear ramp of the ambulance when the missile hit. His colleague was stepping into the side door. The concussion wave from the missile easily dispersed through the open spaces. Shalin was protected as he fell under the ramp. The other driver was blown out the side door.

Working in the Lebanese Red Cross operations room in Beirut the night the ambulances were hit was field manager George Kettaneh. "Every ambulance that moved in Lebanon I had to know about," he said. "I received phone calls from the ambulance drivers and it took us one hour to negotiate a ceasefire through the ICRC."

The man doing their bidding for them was Antoine Bieler, the field co-ordinator for the ICRC who yesterday confirmed to Media that he had negotiated a ceasefire with the Israeli Defence Force. "Yes absolutely, that happened," he said from Beirut. The ICRC in Geneva later said there was nothing to support Downer's claim that the events of that night were an anti-Israeli hoax.

I returned to Tyre on Saturday to speak again to Qassem Shalin and inspect the damaged ambulances. "Everything I said happened that night did happen," he said. "There was not a sound in the sky before the explosions. And after that there was a battle for the next hour. We hid in a building nearby convinced we were going to die. It was only when George (Kettaneh) called me that we could leave safely."

The events of July 23 and the reporting that followed was newsworthy and important. The ICRC has documented two other occasions when Lebanese ambulances were hit during the war and to report the incidents does not reflect anti-Israeli bias. The blog site's attempts to create a smokescreen around a shameful truth fail on tests of scrutiny that Downer was happy to overlook.

Beyond serious dispute? Only if you want to believe it, Minister.

Quote:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/...817034562.html
Weapons: Downer admits being told

Marian Wilkinson
September 1, 2006

THE Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, has confirmed for the first time that he was personally told by a senior Australian weapons inspector that the US-led weapons hunt in postwar Iraq was seriously flawed.

But he denies suppressing a damning six-page letter by the inspector, John Gee, who resigned from the Iraq Survey Group in March 2004.

The letter outlines in detail interference by the CIA and the Bush Administration in first reports about the weapons hunt to avoid finding that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

Dr Gee, one of Australia's leading chemical weapons experts, briefed Mr Downer on his concerns after his resignation. He bluntly told him that he believed Iraq had no such weapons.

While praising Dr Gee as "a serious person", Mr Downer said yesterday: "I personally gave no instructions that it [his letter] was to be or wasn't to be distributed."

"As far as I knew, people around the Government were very well aware of Dr Gee's concerns. We had no reason not to want to hear what he had to say."

But Dr Gee repeated his belief, reported in the Herald yesterday, that when he returned from Iraq in March 2004, Mr Downer issued instructions that his letter not be be distributed outside the Department of Foreign Affairs....

Since Wiki is a site comprised of articles assembled by the public, and anyone is invited to edit the content with "neutral", factual material, if you disagree with the articles on the two "wacks" who are the total basis for Seaver's OP argument, have at it!

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Bolt

Andrew Bolt is an Australian columnist, who writes predominantly for the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Limited stable of newspapers. Politically conservative and religiously agnostic, Bolt is a columnist and associate editor of the Melbourne-based Herald Sun. He regularly appears on the Nine Network's Today programme and the weekly Australian Broadcasting Corporation panel programme, Insiders. In 2005, Bolt released his first book, The Best of Andrew Bolt - Still Not Sorry.....

....He is married to fellow Herald Sun columnist, Sally Morrell. They have three children.
[edit]

Controversy and criticism

Bolt is an outspoken exponent of conservative political and social views. His statements are sometimes controversial; however, he says his columns are well researched and based on fact, rather than popular opinion. He denies the existence of the stolen generation of Australian aborigines, based on the 1995 report "Bringing Them Home: the stolen children report." He downplays the threat of global warming and strongly supported the Iraq War in 2003.....

.........Critics of Bolt include Crikey founder and ABC presenter Stephen Mayne and Sydney Morning Herald writer and former presenter of the ABC program Media Watch David Marr. They say that Bolt makes many sensationalist claims which are rarely substantiated, and that the evidence he does provide is highly questionable. His critics dismiss many of the references Bolt provides as irreputable for personal reasons, to which Bolt responds by asking them to respond to and rebut the facts provided rather than the people who provide them....

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Downer

.....He has been a firm supporter of the legality of the war in Iraq and he vociferously defended the claim that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq to justify the 2003 invasion of that country, long after this claim was abandoned by many others [1] [2] [3]

In August 2004 he made a provocative claim that North Korea could launch a ballistic missile to hit Sydney, although this claim is unsupported by any expert opinion. [4]......

.....As Australian Foreign Affairs minister, Downer supported the U.S.A in the incarceration of two Australian citizens, David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib in the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Habib was eventually released without charge and Hicks remains imprisoned having recently made application to the British governement for British citizenship on the basis of his mother's birth. Downer also supported the Bush Administration's position on the special military commissions that were to be used to try Hicks. The commissons were ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2006. [8]

Michelle is also pushing the "zombietime OP". When was the last time that she was correct about anything that she pushes?
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005802.htm