The diary below was originally posted earlier today in my blog the, Intrepid Liberal Journal.

Two years ago, David Michaelis, an Israeli citizen and Jamal Dajani, a Palestinian-American traveled to their mutual birthplace in Jerusalem and filmed a groundbreaking documentary called "Occupied Minds". The film originally aired in 2005 and powerfully illustrated the widening gulf between two entangled peoples in pain.

Both men grew up in Jerusalem just a few miles apart but in entirely different universes. Jamal's roots in Jerusalem can be traced to the 7th century, while Michaelis was born in Jerusalem to parents who left Germany in the 1920's because of escalating anti-Semitism.

I just had my 30 minutes of fame (or at least one of them) and, like most of us, found it more disorienting than expected.

About a month ago I first started talking about the failure of the Bush administration to deal with the actual people who attacked us: al-Qaeda. In every way Bush and the Republicans have dropped the ball and in some ways have been dropping the ball for years, ignoring and even enabling the rise of an international, Muslim fundamentalist movement that could form what I call the new Caliphate. One version of this piece, on Political Cortex was noticed by BBC news and I was asked to be on their "Have your Say" radio program.

This is the kind of reporting we need from our media.

This clear, albeit dramatic, report shows in detail how the Iraqi War was a done deal from the get go. The information itself isn't enough to technically bring down the administration, but if it can be found that members of the White House staff lied to Congress (especially Condi Rice, who was present at the meeting), then we have something.

After watching this report, I think Mr. Blair is toast. This is the kind of story that ran on our nightly news near the end of the Watergate fiasco.

If Blair does go down over this, the RWCM will be forced to report it and why. Maybe similar outrage  in this country will follow.

by Chris Floyd

Behind the Phosphorus Clouds are War Crimes Within War Crimes (Guardian)

Although George Monbiot gives perhaps undeserved short shrift here to the Italian documentary that reignited the controversy over the American use of incendiary weapons in Fallujah, he has unearthed – along with blogger Gabriele Zamparini – smoking gun evidence of even more barbarity in the Bush-ordered destruction of the city: the use of thermobaric weapons, whose effects are even more horrendous and uncontrollable than white phosphorus.