google is truth and truth google

I know you want to be a google god. I long to get beyond the persistent feeling that if I just knew how to twist this bloody thing a bit better, I could find a whole vista of truth that none of youse had access to. Just like religion.

I imagine that using google well is like folding up a beach tent - one of those thingummies that swivel up into a circular thang, which twangs open if you so much as allow yourself to think. Some people do it with a flick of the wrist, but I find myself chasing it around the beach in the rising wind, surrouded by flat-eyed teenagers and ecstatically barking dogs.

Tonight the faithful librarywatch brought me a pearler - a cunning catechism on the commandments of google and dozens of commentaries by its deepest devotees. it is an article on Information Today.

Meanwhile, our guardian philosophers sent this apposite remark:

"When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so. There is of course a profound logic in this paradox: genuine knowledge is egalitarian in that it allows no privileged source, testers, messengers of Truth. It tolerates no privileged and circumscribed data. The autonomy of knowledge is a leveller.

Ernest Gellner
--Plough, Sword and Book"

He had it down in one.

by their acts shall ye know them

Alan from Southerly Buster is not a petty person, but I am.

He has produced a thorough post about Howard and the truth about Abu Ghraib, and another follow up.

He records Mr Rudd's Dorothy Dixer to the Prime Minister - "Prime Minister, when were Australian personnel in Iraq, either civilian or military, first made aware of allegations of prisoner abuse in Iraq?"

First made aware. The Prime Minister responds, with this statesmanlike remark - "that is a pretty contemptible and pathetic attempt by the Sydney Morning Herald to imply some kind of guilt by association".. and goes on to say

"Can I specifically go to the substance of this issue: [good idea, answering the question is part of the job description and he is an employee of the common wealth] that I am advised that a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross in October of last year covered general concerns about detainee conditions and treatment. Major O'Kane, as part of his work in the coalition headquarters in Iraq, prepared a draft response to that report."

We now know that Major O'Kane actually helped to prepare a legal brief exonerating the Americans of the need to adhere to the Geneva Convention, but we will put that to one side.

Chastened by the Prime Minister's opinion, the SMH restricted itself to saying:

"The Federal Government's claim that no Australian personnel knew of abuses of Iraqi prisoners until January was demolished during an extraordinary Senate hearing yesterday amid accusations of a cover-up by the Government and military leaders."

In particular, the Senate grilling revealed that Major O'Kane did more than sit in an office with his computer and read reports. The army encourages athletic endeavour in all its members, even relatively senior lawyers trained only to put their ability to justify anything at all on the jungle gyms of their nimble minds.

So it turns out that Major O'Kane, in the heat and at risk of his individual and utterly valuable life, climbed out of a Humvee no less than five times to actually visit Abu Ghraib. Not to torture anyone, you understand, but to somehow look at the place, presumably in order to make absolutely sure that these particular suffering human beings were not subject to the Geneva Convention. That is not a remarkable skill - many coalition soldiers have been trained to understand that wounded civilians are not subject to the need for proper medical care but should instead be carted away in local ambulances while snipers shoot the tyres out.

Sorry... I got away from myself there. I must have been reading that pesky, lying internet again..

It is a matter of record that Major O'Kane

"went to Abu Ghraib "in response to concerns raised by the [Red Cross] about conditions at the prison"...

.. Major O'Kane made more than 10 references to his work with the Red Cross to his Australian military superiors in Iraq in weekly reports but he never expressed concerns that the complaints were serious."

He never expressed concern that the complaints were serious. There's that jungle gym again. Mind you, he may not have thought they were serious because he "advised on interrogation techniques last August".

Now here is the bit where I find myself actually entertained by this squalid, morally repugnant mess.

It turns out that Department of Defence, while it was emphasising the distance between the desk-bound Major and the torture chambers, had a photo on its website of said supple minded lawyer standing outside the prison.

When they realised, Defence officials took it down - an act "endorsed by Chief of the Defence Force, General Cosgrove.. soon after the abuse scandal went public."

That shows an admirable attention to detail.

the alleged assault on the alleged convention

And just to confirm Major O'Kane's role in the evasion of the Geneva Convention, here is the SMH account:

"In November Major O'Kane was working as a legal staff member of the US-led coalition headquarters in Baghdad when the Red Cross complaints were received.

the gas and oil consortium

It is Memorial Day in the US. As a comment to Whiskey Bar's long and very American post, someone pointed to retired Special Forces master Sergeant Stan Goff and his 'Open Letter to GIs in Iraq'. He gives wise advice:

"So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to survive, however you define survival, while we do what we have to do to stop this thing. But don't surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching fucking military careerist to make his bones on. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium."...

... "They are your enemies--The Suits--and they are the enemies of peace, and the enemies of your families, especially if they are Black families, or immigrant families, or poor families. They are thieves and bullies who take and never give, and they say they will "never run" in Iraq, but you and I know that they will never have to run, because they fucking aren't there. You are."

it helps if you know the background

If you are Not Fond of Freud, Butterflies and Wheels has assembled a chewy collection of hostile articles, which the normally lucid and often delightfully snarky Chun the Unavoidable does not like.

Taylor Van Gogh story grows

The story has everything - Liz Taylor, Van Gogh, Jewish fugitives and shadowy Nazis. The Independent wins the Rush of the Media Beatup Clones for its opening para:

"The saga of a violet-eyed screen goddess, a victim of the Nazis and a masterpiece by a legendary artist may sound reminiscent of a far-fetched Hollywood script. But these are indeed the three elements taking centre stage in a real-life legal drama.

Yesterday, Elizabeth Taylor, doyenne of the silver screen and Dame of the British Empire, launched legal proceedings against the descendants of a Jewish woman over the disputed ownership of a Vincent Van Gogh painting."

This story has been all over the internet. But it is growing and mutating beyond contemporary law into a classy if minor histry-mistry.

unaccustomed as i am

You know I don't post porn. But when Paul Ford of ftrain posts the images of his recent modeling shoot in Corfu, I feel I have no choice.

abandoned and dystopic

"Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called "Gunkanjima" that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together. Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship - so, the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship island."

Gunkanjima must be the ultimate ghost town - at least as strange as Chernobyl. Explore the photographs and work your way back to the front page. It was abandoned completely in 1974, apparently because the management locked out the workers.

More photographs, with a map, can be found here and here.

The island had an extraordinary dystopian history, as its workers dug straight down into the seabed for coal and used the tailings to build the island. Importing everything - the island did not grow even a blade of grass for eighty years - owners Mitsubishi constructed Japan's first apartment blocks. With over eight hundred people per hectare, it was the world's densest ever population, with only a single wooden building - the manager's residence built at the highest point. During the war it was run on Korean and Chinese slave labour, worked to death in an island prison.

The story is effectively described in Cabinet Magazine.

I found this on the extraordinary Things Magazine, while Metafilter provided more links.

several types of trouser snake

Garrick Wales was a family man, married with three lovely children to a Scottish schoolteacher called Pamela.

The strangeness of his life started to emerge when he was walking in Africa several months ago and was bitten by a boomslang snake. Since then he has needed regular blood transfusions. As far as Pamela was concerned, that was his only contact with snakes.

Somehow he ended up in the US. A whole lotta roaming for a family man. There we now know he continued his relationship with "Joanna Jet, who describes herself as a "she-male" with a taste for champagne and sexual depravity, [and] revealed how she enjoyed a "very special friendship" with the father of three - in a world far removed from his family life in Scotland.

"I knew a completely different side to Garrick, the different lifestyle, the different likes and dislikes," she said, speaking by telephone yesterday. "How we came to meet was through similar interests, fine champagne, fine food. It was a completely different world to his family world."

They kept their special feelings secret. As Joanna said "It's not been good for Garrick's family, especially in view of my lifestyle. I don't fit the traditional nine-to-five role model." Presumably they knew he was roaming the States getting blood transfusions.

On the morning of 12th May he visited a Delta Airlines Office to pick up "a box of highly venomous snakes he had ordered from a reptile dealer in Florida - a deadly black mamba, green mamba, forest cobra and African twig snake."

He was found dead behind the wheel of a rented Chevrolet Blazer. The snakes were found dumped on the roadside half a mile away. Unsurprisingly, he had been bitten by a snake.

"The whereabouts of a previous consignment sent to him in Little Rock two weeks previously is unknown."

Joanna Jet said she knew nothing of his reptilian fascination. Secrets within secrets.

Story reassembled from an article in The Scotsman.

yock jock hootenany ho ho

The Scotsman, a newspaper occasionally prone to lift its kilt above its head and reveal the glories beneath, has a nifty Heroes and Villains column, which is enticingly disrespectful.

"Supporters of our Royal family always claim that they are great ambassadors for the UK. We are told that QE2 and her relatives bring in flocks of tourists and that the Americans, especially, love them to pieces.

Well maybe not all Americans, thanks to the efforts of Princess Michael of Kent.

Princess Pushy, as she is affectionately known by an adoring public, has caused a bit of a stir in the US after a row in a New York restaurant. A table of black diners irritated her by being too loud. Or by not making the correct obeisance. Or perhaps having a boy's name pushed her over the edge.

Either way, they claim that she told them: "You need to go back to the colonies!" (An odd thing to say given that, being in America, they were in already in one of the former colonies).

Oops. (At this point it would be unsporting to point out that her father was in the SS.)

When they complained, they claim she said: "I said 'you should remember the colonies'. Back in the days of the colonies there were rules that were very good. You think about it. Just think about it."

In her defence, the princess vehemently denies making a racist remark.

But if she did tell these diners to "go back to the colonies", she should be immediately relocated to one of our remaining colonies. There aren't many pink bits on the map any more but I think Princess Michael of South Georgia has a certain ring to it.

So why is she this week's hero? Well, by getting embroiled in a row about the "colonies" (regardless of who said what) she has demonstrated to the world what a ridiculously anachronistic load of old codswallop all this monarchy business is.

Put her on the throne and Britain will be a republic in two years.

Gor bless yer ma'am."

Check the right hand side of the page for many others.

defining progress

Details of an occupation:

Dahr Jamail - "What other "progress" can I report? A journo friend visiting a mutual friend of ours in Baqubah gave me a ring on the cell tonight -- so the cellular service now includes Baqubah, which is about 30 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Yet another gas crisis has hit Baghdad. Due to the oil pipeline which feeds the refinery at Al-Dora being blown up on May 12, production has dropped a bit here since Dora provides roughly 30% of the gasoline for Iraq.

Some of the gas lines are now over 5 kilometers long, and Iraqis are NOT happy about it. Sitting in their cars for hours on end in 110 degree temps isn't exactly helping things here, and most Iraqis (remember the 60% unemployment rate) can ill afford to pay the 5-10 times higher blackmarket rate to fill their cars or jerry-cans for their generators (remember that electricity is still far below pre-war levels)."

Raed in the Middle: "I was telling a French friend yesterday how miserable I feel, as a secular Muslim, when I see the current Iraqi political status. I find myself marginalized, as a leftist, by both the American administration and by the right wing mood of the local mainstream.

Bush is helping extremist fundamentalists hijack the flag of Islam from people like me and niki."

Chris Allbritton: "To those who think that reporters aren’t supporting the war effort enough and “refuse” to report good news, well, here’s a shocker: There isn’t much good news to report. The security situation is growing worse. The power is still bad (three hours on, three hours off, or so.) Major U.S. contractors are bypassing Iraqi companies, leading to growing resentment. What kinda sorta good news there is is being pretty well covered. The (maybe) truce between Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and U.S. forces in the south, the coming together, however shakily, of a caretaker government. I refuse to reprint the press releases that pour out of the CPA on any given day. Most of the “good news” they release has to do with passing out free soccer balls to kids. Is this what should be reported when U.S. troops and Iraqis are dying every day?."..

see it to believe it

They Rule "allows you to create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004."

Sliding past the domestic politics and interesting articles about visualisation ideas on the weblog also reveals

Newsmap which visually represents changing news stories. [Interesting though erratic].. it is "a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe. Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media."

Political Friendster is an accreting map of pocket-pissing in the US. (sorry, networks of influence... have to be grown up here..)

There is more in the visualisations section, including a page about an atlas of cyberspace.

One of my favourite visualisation tools is still the visual thesaurus. Of course.

beaned by a moment of inattention

I MISSED IT.

I BLOODY BUGGERY MISSED IT.

MY CREDIBILITY IS GONE. JUST GONE. GEDDIT? GONE.

Heinz has opened a restaurant called "Beanz Meanz Heinz" - "the world's first restaurant dedicated exclusively to Heinz Baked Beans".

The address is 19 Fitzroy Street St Kilda, which is diagonally across the road from our place and almost next to the grog shop which I visit late at night seeking Barista inspiration. Jason rools.

chatroom slaughterhouse

Manchester Senior Circuit Judge David Maddison must have a jaundiced view of the internet. In just six months it has given him two seriously perverse murder cases.

"Seward, the court was told, used her power over men to hatch the plot to have Brierley, the father of her children, murdered so that she could start a new life with Previtali.

They all had a perverted interest in sado-masochism and other sex fetishes and Seward was involved in "crush" videos - in which small animals would be killed during sexual activity.

Seward and Previtali had planned "the perfect murder" after reading a book entitled Unsolved murders - Dismemberment of bodies and Seward told her "slaves" she would never be free unless Brierley was killed."

Manchesteronline tells the story - with appropriate mug shots. BUT THERE'S MORE.

for the truth will make you disregarded

Camera/Iraq is a project of Carleton College's Cinema & Media Studies Department and Ratchet Up to gather news sources and commentary about public and personal photographic image practices associated with the War in Iraq. Visitors are invited to send pertinent links or writing".

The site, a useful reference on the changing use of digital imagery, links to Tim Porter's essay which concludes with the question:

almost mutually assured destruction

What were you doing on September 26th 1983?

Try and pin it down. Find some reference moments - birthday, work, study, the dead end of winter, a new lover, children at school, maybe your first day at kinder, perhaps the year before your father died..

Maybe there are some documents. Homework, tickets to a grand final, yellowing cheque stubs, a birth certificate, a music exam, a first communion, a seed packet, newspapers at the bottom of the drawer.

In fact it was the day the world nearly ended. At 12.30 am Soviet Army officer Stanislav Petrov at his console in the Ballistic Early Warning Missile System command and control post saw satellite data that told him a missile had been launched in the US towards Russia. Four more followed immediately.

He was the duty officer in a complex full of people watching him, stupefied. If he gave the order the news would go up to Andropov, who would trigger the entire Russian missile arsenal, deliberately locked into an automated computer system, which would launch a retaliatory wave of missiles.

Petrov refused to do it. He concluded there were only five, and a real attack would involve thousands of warheads. Something was wrong. In fact, a bug in the satellite system had produced a false signal. Over the next few months the Soviets would comb the technology and realise the stupidity of an automated armageddon machine. And Petrov would leave the army, exhausted by the stress.

This story comes from an odd source (not surprisingly - it's a story about the end of the world). The Association of World Citizens is giving him a medal and a small donation of cash, since he is now an impoverished Russian pensioner.

They will give you world citizenship, using their branches mostly in third world countries. They have NGO status at the UN and campaign for world peace, and specific issues like Falun Gong.

A list of media stories about the incident is here. There are some corroborating testimonials from the West, though the details may differ.

anticipating cosiness in the cold

In honour of the approaching ski season, here are the instructions to build an igloo. You will find out why the inside never gets wet and runny, even if you barbecue a walrus inside.

I myself did not take to skiing. In my one attempt to learn the art, I fell down over a hundred times and decided it was too scarey and unpleasant. I salve my self respect with the thought that many fine skiers can't push a bicycle through heavy traffic.

This comes from Exclamation Mark, which has also found the work of fantastical Australian photographer Rosemary Laing with her Unnatural Disasters and Flying Brides. {Melbourne readers will find an answer to a small mystery about a tasteless block of flats on the approach to the Westgate Bridge).

All ultimately via the estimable Boynton.

blowing away reality

Since February, startup American online games company Kuma Reality Games has been presenting shoot-em-ups based on real stories about the war in Iraq.

To me, the whole concept is deeply repulsive. War as entertainment, reality as fantasy, conflicted present as indoctrinatory pap. This is propaganda, and the company is mysterious - a private organisation with no web presence of its own, and seemingly not even an address available on the web. It smells like a front.

So what does Google tell us?

a geography of psychologic

Thank the great false tooth of contingent reality - a laugh.

Which extremity of the world are you?

I am the Atacama Desert.

the last moments before

As Histologian has pointed out, the Beeb has posted screenshots of the wedding at Mogr el-Deeb. The cameraman died too.

Which led me to a sustained post about custodial deaths in Iraq.

"Even a lay person knows that "brain stem compression" although an immediate cause of death, is itself an effect of something else. Claiming that Professor al-Izmerly died of "brain stem compression", as it that's a freestanding explanation, is rather like giving a cause of death as "hypotension" without explaining that the reason the person had fatally low blood pressure at all was, in fact, due to exsanguination from multiple gunshot wounds. Being run over by a car, dropped from a roof or shot out of a cannon into a brick wall might also cause "brain stem compression"."

-----------------------

I must say I can't get round Kimmit's line about "None of the bodies had identification of any kind on them, no ID cards, no wallets, no pictures". Those pesky desert Arabs, refusing to carry their driver's licenses when they ride their camels. And as for their wallets - what if the children wanted to go to Macdonalds in the middle of the wedding?

Touting "a white powder" which "could have been cocaine" as evidence of guerilla activity is a tad desperate. If Kimmitt is trying to say they were smugglers, that doesn't justify the attack anyway. I am sure there would have been at least one soldier in his entourage who could have sucked a smidgin up his nose to find out if it was sugar or laundry detergent. Mind you, it couldn't be - tribals don't use that stuff, everyone knows that.

windbag waywardly wafting

Occasionally I like to gloat.

""Dear Robert,

Before you rang me the other day, I had been contemplating whether I wished to retain any connection with the Sydney Morning Herald, and with the increasingly chaotic and badly managed Fairfax company. Your courteous call the other day, followed by a discourteous silence despite the promise of a further call, only helped to hasten my decision.

This is to sever my relationship with the SMH. I am supposed to give three months' notice. But before your call I had already bought and paid for my ticket to Europe in July, during which I intended to take leave, and I am not prepared to change this arrangement. Therefore, I would like to resign effective as of the end of June. If you wished me to serve out the full three months' notice, I would feel obliged to work during August and September, but would prefer not to.

I offer you my commiserations on the situation in which you find yourself. It is not only your fault, but that of the SMH and Fairfax journalistic staff generally.

Yours sincerely,

Padraic Pearse McGuinness, AO
Editor, Quadrant"

Yes, he has resigned. As noticed by Crikey and Quiggin, both of whom have some inexplicable affection for the.... I don't know what to call him. Sadly, I am sure he will pop up somewhere else.

Bad people have celebrations, too

Did the Americans shoot up a wedding party in the western Iraqi desert town of Mogr el-Deeb or not?

Was it the wedding of Azhad Nayef and Rutbah Sabah, or a staging post for guerillas bound for the fighting further east? Were the 45 dead innocent civilians or evil Islamic mercenaries?

Deputy Director of Coalition Military Operations in Iraq, Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt had no public doubts. He "showed slides of military binoculars, guns and battery packs which could be used to trigger roadside bombs found by US troops at the site.

He also said "terrorist manuals" telephone numbers for Afghanistan and foreign passports, including one Sudanese, were also recovered there.....

He said suspicious materials included about 300 sets of bedding, 100 sets of prepackaged clothing as well as a "medical treatment room." He said the clothing could have been for infiltrators seeking to disguise themselves as Iraqis.

He said white powder had been found which could have been cocaine. The area is a popular route for smugglers.

"None of the bodies had identification of any kind on them, no ID cards, no wallets, no pictures," he said.

"They had watches, and that was about the only way you could identify one person from another."

"'"There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration..

...There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too."

(The fullest list, presented in the most credible way for Kimmitt), seems to be at CNN).

In Washington, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers told Congress that "we feel at this point very confident that this was a legitimate target, probably foreign fighters" who may have ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian wanted for allegedly organizing attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq on behalf of al-Qaida.

Associated Press Television News - your bog standard Western news outfit - was in the area twenty four hours later, and found "fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans, and brightly colored beddings used for celebrations, scattered around a bombed-out tent."

Unfortunately for Kimmitt, APTN was given a wedding video which purports to cover the party, and offered it for broadcast last weekend.

Could the video have been a substitute? There's plenty of them around. However, the same water tanker can be found in the wedding scenes and in the subsequent news footage. Even worse, the video shows a famous wedding singer and his band. Now they are dead. The singer was buried at the very time Kimmitt was showing his gun and powder photographs to the media.

With some exceptions - like Corrente which provides a good account of the whole story - the blogosphere is fairly quiet about this. It is just too mind boggling, but it does seem to be caused by a misunderstanding. Arabs in the border desert wave weapons and gather in a group in a place the Americans wouldn't choose for a celebration, aircraft whack them from the air, the administration lies increasingly desperately, news shows dead and mutilated children - it is all very predictable. (Misunderstanding and predictable don't come close to expressing the reality of this, but I can't find better shorthand terms).

But there are some details of this story that are truly chilling, and mean that "Mogr el-Deeb" may be about to enter the language as a true atrocity story.

After the bombing, US soldiers went into the wrecked village, as Kimmitt acknowledges. They must have encountered the immediate aftermath. Here is part of the Associated Press account:

"Haleema Shihab, 32, one of the three wives of Rikad Nayef, said that as the first bombs fell, she grabbed her seven-month old son, Yousef, and clutching the hands of her five-year-old son, Hamza, started running. Her 15-year-old son, Ali, sprinted alongside her. They managed to run for several yards when she fell - her leg fractured.

"Hamza was yelling, 'mommy,'" Shihab, recalled. "Ali said he was hurt and that he was bleeding. That's the last time I heard him." Then another shell fell and injured Shihab's left arm.

"Hamza fell from my hand and was gone. Only Yousef stayed in my arms. Ali had been hit and was killed. I couldn't go back," she said from her hospital bed in Ramadi. Her arm was in a cast.

She and her stepdaughter, Iqbal - who had caught up with her - hid in a bomb crater. "We were bleeding from 3 a.m. until sunrise," Shihab said.

Soon American soldiers came. One of them kicked her to see if she was alive, she said.

"I pretended I was dead so he wouldn't kill me," said Shihab. She said the soldier was laughing. When Yousef cried, the soldier said: "'No, stop," said Shihab."

And: "Survivors said shells rained down until nearly sunrise.

Two helicopters landed and about 40 soldiers searched the house where the women had stayed and a second, vacant house. Soon after, the two houses were blown up — although witnesses offered differing accounts of how. Some said the houses were attacked by helicopters. Others said the Americans detonated them with explosives.

"They asked us no questions," said Adel Awdeh.

Some of the men tried to approach the Americans but were driven back by gunshots, the survivors said. The troops took money and jewelry the dead women had brought for the party, survivors said."

So what did the soldiers actually do? We know they collected the evidence that Kimmins would produce to justify his claims of a staging post. They admit they searched the dead, finding nothing but the wrist watches they used to tell the bodies apart. I presume this means the bodies were badly damaged, most likely in the large goatskin tent which held the male guests and the band.

The place must have been chaotic. Perhaps it was on fire. Shortly afterwards the villagers would find dead and wounded children. The soldiers must have spent some time there, first securing the area before carrying out the search which revealed how many sets of bedding and clothes were in the camp. After all, they must have been looking for evidence to establish the group as terrorists, and to find particular people. Evidence of Al-Quaeda would have been prized.

Despite all this activity there is no evidence the soldiers helped anybody. Medical aid, transport, digging out survivors - none of this is mentioned. The survivors said they took the wounded to Karbala hospital in trucks.

I cannot imagine what the soldiers thought, as they picked through the bleeding, wounded women and children, searching for weapons and false passports, picking up white powder. If they blew up the buildings at this stage, did they drag the wounded outside? Some of them are probably married, with their own children.

The foregoing account mixes the evidence from both sides, which was coming out at the same time. After the wedding video appeared, Kimmit was forced to change his line.

"He also referred to the APTN video, shot Thursday in Mogr el-Deeb, as well as separate APTN footage from Wednesday in Ramadi that showed a headless body of a child and other bodies of children.

"What we saw in those APTN videos were substantially inconsistent with the reports we received from the unit that conducted the operation," Kimmitt said. "We're now trying to figure out why there's an inconsistency.

"We're keeping an open mind as to exactly what happened on the ground. That's why we're continuing to try to gather all the facts; that's why we're not ruling out anything based on information coming forward," he added."

Photos taken from the wedding video are here, while truly sad images of the survivors are here.