Low Earth Orbit

So many holes the credibility doesn't know which way to drain

Yet more on the BBC fake rescue story gathered by Instantman. John Kampfner of the BBC has backed off the original claim of a fake rescue and now just accuses the Pentagon of generating propaganda from the effort. As Instantman says, “Duh!”. This is news? But the best statement is from Instantman read Bill Adams:

If the American forces arrived firing blanks and playing tapes of explosions to create a great p.r. film, where's the film? Kampfner complains that the U.S. suppressed the "rushes" and only supplied a "professionally-edited" final tape, but note the complete logical disconnect: that edited tape, the tape the military's press managers presumably wanted to put out from the get-go, doesn't show Americans firing wildly in response to explosion noises. So Kampfner's claim is—what?—that they faked combat in order to the fool the world, but then didn't show any of the fakery in order to fool the world.

Journalist ethics

CNN recently showed a segment on “assault weapons”. During the segment, they showed the results of firing at a cinder block with banned semi-automatic long arm (big holes) and with an unbanned semi-automatic longarm (no holes). However, it turns out that for the latter the shooter did not actually shoot at the cinder block. The question everyone has to ask about any CNN segment these days is “Are they lying, on the take or just stupid?”. [source]

French choice

Francoise Thom explains the reasons behind the apparently irrational diplomatic choices made by France. [source]

And therefore the goals that Chirac’s foreign policy has set for itself are the struggle against American unilateralism, the transformation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy from a statement of intentions to an institutional reality and the elevation of France to the status of a power whose voice is heard on the global stage.

In every one of these aims, France has obtained results that are the opposite of those it had been pursuing.

[…]

In its foreign policy, France has in a way put on the boots of the defunct Soviet Union:

• same obstructionist policy at the UN
• same third-world-ist demagoguery
• same alliance with the Arab world
• same ambition to take the lead in a coalition of “anti-imperialist” states against Washington