Stormed a mosque

The inevitable Susan Sontag piece on the Abu Ghraib photos. 'Cuz, like Chance the Gardener, she likes to watch.

From the Daily Telegraph: “A group of hunting enthusiasts is setting up its own "church" in an attempt to stop the Government from banning their favourite field sport. The founders of the Free Church of Country Sports, whose supporters include a barrister, a publisher and several businessmen, claim that fox hunting is part of their religion and that legislation to ban it would be an infringement of their rights as a religious minority. ... "We baptise our children by blooding them with the blood of that which we kill. Is this any more strange than dressing them in white and totally submerging them in water?" ... "If you look at it from a Race Relations Act point of view we are ethnically and culturally different. We feel that there is a considerable element of discrimination against us.’”

“Inbred” is not an ethnic group.

They blamed Bush’s little mountain bike accident on the recent rain in Crawford. There has been no recent rain in Crawford. Do they have to lie about absolutely everything?

That was a rhetorical question.

American troops stormed a mosque today. That sort of thing always goes down well, doesn’t it? So many eras of peace, stability and democracy have begun with the phrase “stormed a mosque.”

Spike Milligan’s headstone is finally put up. “I told you I was ill.”

From the Guardian: “The original US autopsy said [Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush] had died of a heart attack. It now appears he was suffocated during interrogation when a CIA officer put him in a sleeping bag and sat on him.”

The Bush daughters have graduated, Jenna with a degree in English, Barbara with one in humanities. Their father, of course, lacks both.

The Sunday Times (London) says that the Israeli army has a hit list of 1,000 Palestinians to be assassinated in Gaza before the withdrawal.

The Sunday Times also has an article about Nick Berg’s death and the conspiracy theories around it. Given British libel laws, you have to know how to read between the lines of such stories; it seems to me they’re strongly suggesting that the tape was in part faked, made in Abu Ghraib or someplace like it, that he was in fact executed by Americans. It actually makes a sick kind of sense. The timing was good (i.e., distracting) for the Bushies. Details for the conspiracy minded: the orange jumpsuit, one of the killers has an American cap and, evidently in frame 9,306, a rather pale ear, the can’t-be-a-coincidence connection between Berg and Zacarias Moussaoui (who used Berg’s email password), his father appearing on a right-wing site March 7 on a list of enemies of the country but listing the son’s company, that the US still isn’t admitting that they were the ones holding him, although he was released one day after his parents filed a writ, that the sound on the tape may be dubbed and the accent is wrong.

AP has a video of the wedding the US bombed. The US is still denying that it bombed a wedding.