I predict that the mood will change radically in the days and weeks ahead.

It took the police over an hour and a half to reach the island of Utoeya.

I know that if I were a parent of one of the victims of last week’s massacre I would certainly be demanding to know why it took the police so long to take action to save my child’s life.

These young people were calling and texting their families and friends for the best part of two hours while they tried to evade a gunman who was able to pick them off at his leisure. “Where are the police? When are they coming?” were the questions they asked over and over again.

There is NO excuse for this. This was negligence and incompetence on a grand scale. Norway is a rich and well-resourced country. It has a well-equipped police force and emergency services. It isn’t Iraq or Gaza. There is no shortage of police personnel, cars, or helicopters.

It was the delay in getting armed police to the island that gave the madman all the time he needed to systematically hunt down and execute his victims.

Media helicopters were hovering over the island, filming the killings from the air, long before the police arrived (it takes ten minutes to get from Oslo to Utoeya by helicopter). That is an absolute disgrace.

Norway’s Justice Minister Knut Storberget praised the police for their “fantastic” work after the attacks. Fantastic? Hardly. Unless he was using the word in its original sense of “impossible to believe”.

The police themselves have been defending their dismal performance in responding to the attacks. “I don’t think we could have done this (reach the site of the massacre) faster,” Police Chief of Staff Johan Fredriksen told journalists in Oslo. If that’s true, it’s a damning admission.

If the Norwegian police can’t reach the scene of an ongoing crime less than 20 miles (30 kilometers) from the country’s capital city in less than an hour and a half, and if they seriously believe that they did a good job in getting there in that time, they should all resign without delay, including – and especially – Police Chief Fredriksen.

Even assuming they had to go from Oslo (were there no police closer to the scene?), they averaged approximately 12mph (about 19kmph) – less than the speed of the average cyclist – in response to an emergency in which children were being picked off by a lunatic with an automatic weapon.

By any standards this was a dazzling display of stupidity and ineptitude.

It has been argued that the police didn’t expect anything like this to happen, and that they were “wrong-footed”. That might be true (although “flat-footed” would seem to be a more apt description), but it’s not good enough. Their job is to be prepared for all eventualities. Even allowing – generously – for their having been “taken by surprise”, an hour and a half is at least an hour longer than it should have taken them to get to Utoeya island. No matter which way you cut it, this was a pathetic response, and it almost certainly cost the lives of the majority of those killed. Even the gunman himself commented that he was surprised at how long the police took to get there and stop him.

Engine failure is said to have delayed the arrival of one commando police boat by ten minutes. This is a lame excuse to say the least. They had plenty of boats, and there was no shortage of civilian boats – and helicopters – that could have been commandeered.

This was a Keystone Kops response to an emergency situation that called for competence, preparedness and efficiency. Scores of lives were lost on the island of Utoeya as a result of police stupidity and lack of professionalism.

The families of those who were killed or injured have every reason to be angry and to demand a full public inquiry and, in the meantime, the immediate resignation of the Chief of Police and every senior police officer who contributed to this tragedy of errors.

Press Release

Solo queda una semana para el lanzamiento de mi red holística en at HolisticSpain.net.
Holistic Spain es una red de recursos holísticos que incluye, entre otros, a terapeutas, profesores, programas de formación, retiros y vacaciones orientadas a la salud y hoteles en toda España. También ofreceremos un servicio gratuito de información y referencias. La fecha de lanzamiento es el 26 de julio de 2011. Visite el sitio web para obtener más información.

NOTA DE PRENSA

Apparently a Brazilian woman thought to have been the world’s oldest person has died at the age of 114.

“Reports” like this really annoy me.

Are we supposed to infer that pasties with hot sauce is the recipe for great longevity?

Maybe this old lady – well, dead lady, to be more precise – only started eating pasties with hot sauce a month ago, and that’s what killed her.

Maybe if the reporter who submitted this article had taken the trouble to question members of the woman’s family they’d have told him or her: “She was doing fine until she started eating those damned pasties with hot sauce.”

We just don’t know.

It’s like those non-meat eaters who delight in telling you that GB Shaw was a vegetarian, and he lived to the age of 94 (after which, ironically, he became dead meat himself).

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian too, but they never mention him.

Incidentally, Shaw’s father had a bad squint (is there such a thing as a good squint?) which Oscar Wilde’s father, who was a renowned Dublin surgeon at the time, tried – without success – to correct. So Shaw the elder died with his squint intact. For all we know his family had it framed and mounted.

Anyway, to get back to the point I was making, Shaw was a veggie and he lived to be 94. It’s hardly scientific proof of anything, is it? George Burns smoked fifteen cigars every day for most of his adult life, and he lived to be 100. Are we to conclude that smoking cigars is marginally better for one’s health than living on lettuce?

Turtles are herbivores, and they live twice as long as humans. But are they herbivores by choice, you have to wonder, or because they can’t move fast enough to catch anything tasty? They’re not exactly designed to be effective predators. It’s hard to imagine a turtle sneaking up on a gazelle at a watering hole and lunging for its throat. By the time a turtle crept up on any animal it would already have died of old age.

Unless it was a parrot, of course. Some species of parrot can live up to 100 years. But parrots, like most humans, are omnivores, so their longevity can’t be attributed to not eating meat. On the other hand they don’t smoke cigars, so where does that leave us?

Are we to believe that an executive presidential order was given to kill an unarmed man whose identity hadn’t been ascertained beyond considerable doubt?

Obama implied, in the first interviews he gave after the alleged raid, that he and his national security team – including Hillary Clinton – had watched events unfold via a live satellite link. The White House even put out a photo which appeared to show the president and his team monitoring the raid live on TV. A few days later, however, on on 4 May, the head of the CIA, Leon Pinetta, was forced to admit in an interview on PBS that there had been no live footage of the raid! He said that prior to the commencement of the raid the signal had been cut off, and that this blackout had lasted some 20 to 25 minutes. Quote: “Once those teams went into the compound there was a time period of 20-25 minutes where we really don’t know exactly what was going on.” Which means that president Obama could not possibly have identified Osama bin Laden when he gave the order to kill the man he was only “55/45″ sure was him.

So at what stage did he give the order to kill? This question was put to Leon Pinetta. He replied: “The US navy seals made the final decision to kill bin laden, rather than the president.”
Oh really? I’m sorry, but I find that very hard to believe. The decision on whether to kill bin Laden or take him prisoner had huge political and security ramifications, as well as implications in terms of international law. There is no way that a decision of this magnititude and sensitivity would have been left to a Navy seal. To claim otherwise is nonsensical.

And if the man really was bin Laden, the head of a worldwide network of terrorists and the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, surely the correct course of action would have been to interrogate him at length before – or instead of – shooting him in the head? It is inconceivable to me that they would kill the leader of a global terror network without at least making some attempt to extract information from him. Hundreds of men suspected of being members of al Qaeda have been imprisoned and in many cases tortured for years in CIA detention camps, ostensibly in the hope of extracting information from them that might help to avert future terrorist attacks. And here, in their custody and putting up no resistance, was the alleged Godfather of terrorism, the man who knew everything there was to know about the global terrorist network – and they executed him on the spot?

When I read the initial reports of the raid to kill bin Laden, my first thought was, “What a load of baloney”. And my second thought was, “And next they’ll tell us that he was a few months from carrying out another big terrorist attack”. But then I thought, no, that would be just too corny. People are gullible, but surely they’re not that gullible. But, sure enough, the BBC headlines a few days later announced: “Bin Laden was planning another terrorist attack.” This information was supposedly gleaned from bin Laden’s computer files (this would be the same computer that they initially claimed he didn’t possess). The report stated that bin Laden was planning a bomb attack on the US rail system to mark the anniversary of the 9.11 attacks.

Odd, isn’t it, that he waited ten years to carry out a “follow-up” attack. If he was so big into anniversaries, why didn’t he carry out an attack on the first anniversary of 9-11? Or the third? Or the 5th?

And, gosh, how lucky for America that Superman – sorry, Barack Obama – found and killed him just in time to save the lives of all those people! Can we see those files? Don’t be silly. They’re classified – just like the photos, the videotape, the “DNA evidence” and everything else about this fairy tale.

The photographs of bin Laden’s body weren’t released because they were “too gory”. What – like the photos of Uday and Qusay Hussein? “That’s not who we are”, said Obama. No qualms about shooting an unarmed woman in front of a child, but anxious to avoid ruffling the delicate sensitivities of his fellow Americans (maybe) with photos of a dead body. And even this explanation was “revised” twenty four hours later, when the reason for not showing the photos became to avoid inciting his followers to violence!

In fact photos of dead leaders tend, more than anything, to demoralise their followers. And it has always been customary, when wanted criminals are killed, to put their remains on public view to prove beyond doubt – especially to their followers – that they really are dead. This has always been the procedure, from Billy the Kid to Che Guevara. The images don’t have to be gory. A good mortician can do cosmetic miracles with even the most damaged and disfigured features.

By the way, where ARE all these millions of devoted followers we’ve heard so much about over the past ten years? If they really existed they would surely have been on the streets raising hell as soon as reports of their leader’s murder was announced. In the event, Arab reaction to news of bin Laden’s death was muted, to say the least. No doubt there will soon be a “terrorist attack” or two to emphasize the “fact” that the threat has not receded, but the fact is there would have been an immediate reaction from bin Laden’s legion of followers on learning of his death – if they existed, which they clearly do not.

The claim that bin Laden was buried at sea to avoid burying him in a grave that could become a shrine to his followers is also patently bogus, since putting the body on view for a few days – or even for a few hours and inviting journalists to inspect the corpse and take photographs – would not have precluded burying him at sea a day or two later. So what, one has to wonder, was the big rush? Why were they in such a hurry to permanently dispose of that body (if there really was a body)?

Unable or unwilling to provide tangible evidence of bin Laden’s execution, the White House then claimed that DNA testing had established bin Laden’s identity “to 99.99% certainty”. They would have to have had samples of at least two of his closest relatives on hand in order to make a match to that level of certainty. A White House spokesman stated, when asked about this, that the FBI had obtained a DNA sample from his sister, who died in Boston of brain cancer in 2005. So they came prepared with a DNA laboratory and specimens of the DNA of members of his family? And they had the foresight to have a molecular geneticist on board the ship? This would seem to suggest that they knew in advance that bin Laden’s face would be unrecognizable. And while it is theoretically possible to match DNA in a matter of several hours (they claim to have done it in two) – assuming you have all your equipment, samples and experts to hand – this would involve a lot of forward planning, and even then the results would be unreliable. It is not possible to make a reliable DNA match – the kind that would stand up in a court of law, for example – in two hours.
Furthermore, as they admitted themselves, they had samples of DNA from bin Laden’s relatives, obtained from hospitals. Isn’t it highly probable, therefore, that they also had bin Laden’s DNA? He was, after all, a patient at the American hospital Dubai and would have given blood samples. And before he became the world’s most wanted man he worked with the CIA. So they had numerous opportunities to take samples of his DNA.

And so Barack Obama was able to launch his re-election campaign at Ground Zero, the hero of the hour. All thoughts of the US’s precarious economic situation had been pushed out of the collective American mind. How lucky for him that he’d been able to track down and kill bin Laden just a few months before the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, and just days before the commemoration ceremony! According to the polls, his approval rating – which had been plummeting in recent months – jumped 25% overnight. A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn’t have come up with a better plot line.

The president was eager as a beaver to make a link between Osama bin Laden and the 9-11 attacks. “The terrorist leader that struck our nation 9/11 will never threaten American again,” he said. The crowd cheered, and nobody cared – or cared to remember – that there was never any evidence implicating Osama bin Laden in the 9-11 attacks. He wasn’t wanted in connection with these attacks, and in fact the FBI stated explicitly that they had been unable to find evidence linking him with 9-11. Obama, who formerly practiced as a lawyer, was well aware of this. Nevertheless he milked the bogus association for all it was worth. His performance was reminiscent of that of his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose ratings soared after Saddam Hussein’s capture. The Bush administration had, by that time, managed to convince more than 50% of Americans that Saddam was behind the 9-11 attacks. As that master of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, said: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.”

The mainstream media, to their eternal shame and discredit (yet again), dutifully repeated this spurious association without question or qualification in their coverage of bin Laden’s alleged killing, with one news report after another referring to Osama bin Laden as “the man responsible for the 9-11 attacks”. There was no “suspected of being”, or “believed by some to have been”. No, it was simply “Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for the 9-11 attacks”. Did the media know something that the FBI, after a five year investigation, had never been able to find out?

As for the alleged raid itself, the details given out by the White House changed every few hours when the previous details didn’t add up. Proof was on the way, they assured us, in the form of photographs of bin Laden’s dead body. Two day’s later, however, the photos had failed to materialize, and in response to demands for proof they released what they said was “home movie” video footage of Osama. This turned out to be a few brief video clips of a bearded man sitting in an armchair watching TV with his back to the camera.

The sound had been removed, making it impossible to identify “bin Laden” from his distinctive voice. (Previous fake videos of “bin Laden” had been debunked because people who knew him personally said that it wasn’t his voice.) The person who shot the video took great care to shoot from an angle that only showed the side of “bin Laden’s” face, and the footage was interspersed with old stock footage of bin Laden, presumably to give a sense of continuity. “Bin Laden” himself studiously avoids looking directly at the camera.

The first question that comes to mind – or at least to my mind – looking at this footage is: why would anyone take video footage of someone watching TV coverage of Osama bin Laden – unless they were trying to convince viewers that the person in the video was bin Laden? If the video had been made by devotee’s of bin Laden – which they’d presumably have to be if they were in his secret hideout – making videos for posterity, wouldn’t they make sure to get their leader’s face in every shot? Look at Adolf Hitler’s hiome movies for comparison. In one shot we see Adolf drinking coffee. In another he is patting a dog. But always he is clearly identifiable. There is no question whatsoever that it is Adolf Hitler we are looking at.

If the “bin Laden” videos are supposed to be “home movies”, the same objection applies. Who would make home movies while being careful not to film the face of the subject? Go and have a look at your own home videos, and see how many clips you can find that only show the backs of people’s heads. And why take footage of bin Laden watching himself on TV? And why is he on every channel? Are we meant to believe that he’s watching live news reports of himself (in a house with no satellite dish and no TV cable)? And why is this “bin Laden” using his right hand to operate the TV remote control when bin Laden was left-handed?

This whole performance is as fake as it is farcical. It wouldn’t fool a two year-old. Or so you would think. But incredibly, it has fooled millions of people. Even normally intelligent and astute observers like Noam Chomsky have accepted this blatant pile of hooey as fact.

If the alleged killing of Osama bin Laden were merely a pretext for ending the “war on terror” – a way of tying up loose ends, as it were – and removing all the paraphernalia of surveillance, security checks, body scans at airports and so on, we might even roll our eyes and go along with the yarn. But no, the alleged death of bin Laden is being cited as justification for stepping up these “security measures” and increasing the number of troops on the ground in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan. No sooner had the supposed killing of bin Laden been announced than the US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, was telling a press conference in Rome “Let us not forget that the battle to stop al Qaeda and its affiliates does not end with one death,” she said. “We have to renew our resolve, not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan but around the world.”

It is worth reminding ourselves that this is the woman who claimed, when she was vying for nomination as a presidential candidate, that on a trip to Bosnia she had come under sniper fire and had to make a desperate dash for the airport building. She was forced to admit that she had lied – or “mis-spoke”, as she put it – when CBS video footage of the trip showed her standing on the tarmac, smiling and obviously perfectly safe, while a group of children read poetry to her. So we know for sure that Hillary is no stranger to the concept of inventing heroic tall tales as a popularity booster.

But the most depressing aspect of all this isn’t the fact that the story is patently bogus from start to finish – we have come to expect this kind of thing from the American government – but that it has been accepted unconditionally by so many people, and in particular journalists who ought, at this stage, to know better. The media have become little more than the mouthpiece of the US government and the Pentagon, publishing press releases verbatim and without any attempt at critical evaluation.

The alleged raid to kill Osama bin Laden has been widely reported as fact without any corroborative evidence to support it, when it is as plain as the nose on your face that the details given out by the White House simply do not stack up. This is really disgraceful and represents a new low in journalistic standards. The most basic rule of journalism – that information must be checked and independently verified before it is presented to the public as fact – appears to have been completely abandoned. Clearly no lessons have been learned from previous occasions when the media failed to scrutinize claims emanating from the White House – including the claim by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was six months from launching a nuclear attack on the US. Colin Powell stood up in front of the UN and the world to make this claim, brandishing “photographic evidence” of chemical weapons factories, missile launch pads, planes that had been redesigned to launch chemical weapons and even audio tapes purported to be of Iraqi generals discussing plans to attack America (in English). At least a quarter of a million people died as a result of the military action that was taken on the basis of that piece of fiction. The invasion of Iraq was only possible because it had popular support, and that support largely came about as a result of uncritical media coverage. And now we are seeing the same thing happening again.

The issue here is not whether Osama bin Laden is dead, or whether he was killed. Most of the people who are skeptical of the US government’s version of events accept that he is dead (indeed, many believe he has been dead for years). The question is, when and how did he die? Who killed him? Why was he killed? How and when did US intelligence learn of his whereabouts? When did Obama know? Why did Obama give order to kill a man on the basis of “55/45″ identification? How was he positively identified if, as it is claimed, the house was in darkness? Why wasn’t bin Laden interrogated? Why was his wife handed over to the Pakistani authorities (who are suspected of colluding with al Qaeda), instead of being taken into US custody and questioned? How did she sustain a gunshot wound to the back of her leg if she was shot lunging towards a SEAL? Where is al Qaeda? Why did the US government produce and release a fake video? Why did they release a fake photo? Why did the US dispose of the body so hastily? Where is the evidence linking bin Laden to the 9-11 attacks? Which countries refused to take bin Laden’s body?
These and many other questions have still to be answered.

: )

Now we look to you to do the right thing by your neighbours under siege in Palestine.

Health officials say they have stepped up disease prevention measures and are “racing against time”, with medics “administering intravenous drips to patients” etc.

So what’s wrong with this picture?

Just this: While the health authorities are supposedly “doing everything possible” to fight this outbreak, there has been no mention at all of what would appear to be the most obvious and simple solution: make the cholera vaccine available to those most at risk.

There are several cholera vaccines available, including Dukoral (which can be taken orally).

So why hasn’t the vaccine been made available? Why allow all these people to die if there is a vaccine that can give them instant immunity from the disease?

The vaccine isn’t being made available for the same reason vaccinations are never made available during the early stages of epidemics: they don’t work, and it would quickly become apparent that they don’t work, because the number of cases would continue to rise.

No vaccination program has ever stopped a viral or bacterial epidemic in its tracks (cholera is caused by a bacterium), and the cholera vaccine is no exception.

So here we see yet another epidemic running its deadly course and causing hundreds of deaths while the purported antidote isn’t being made available. We recently saw the same thing with the swine flu vaccine, whose distribution was mysteriously delayed until the disease had already lost its potency.

What is the vaccine supposed to be for, if not to prevent the disease from spreading? What’s the point of spending billions of dollars researching and developing vaccines if they are not going to be used when they are most needed? When hundreds of people are dying from the disease that the vaccination is supposedly able to prevent?

The health authorities know perfectly well that vaccination doesn’t work, and would have no effect on the course of this outbreak. As always, the vaccine will be made available (if at all) when the disease has run its natural course and people are no longer dying from it. Then the health authorities will point to the disappearance of the disease as evidence of the effectiveness of vaccination – as they have with every other infectious disease.

The risk of a cholera outbreak in Haiti has been known for some time, following the earthquake. Back in January Pier Luigi Testa, emergency co-ordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), warned that an outbreak of cholera was to be expected. The authorities had more than enough time to organise a mass vaccination program. In fact this could have been done in just a few days, given that the vaccine can be administered orally, in a drink or on a sugar cube, making it far easier to distribute and administer than vaccines which have to be injected by trained medical personnel.

If the cholera vaccine works, as the manufacturers claim, why hasn’t it been made available to the people of Haiti, or at least to those who are most at risk of contracting this wretched disease?

Update 20 November

It is over a month since the start of the cholera epidemic in Haiti, and the death toll has now reached 1,200 – and still there is no mention of the vaccine. Why not, if, as we are told, it gives protection against the disease? If the vaccine works, why were these people allowed to die?
According to the BBC website today, the outbreak has now spread to Haiti’s largest jail, the national prison in Port-au-Prince, which houses around 2,000 prisoners. Thirty prisoners are infected with the disease, and thirteen have already died. This is a relatively small, isolated group of people. It would take less than a day to vaccinate all the prisoners (the cholera vaccination can be administered orally). Why hasn’t this happened?
The disease has also now spread into neighbouring Dominican Republic.
Again, the medical authorities – including the World Health Organization and the US Center for Disease Control – have endorsed the cholera vaccine, as, of course, have the various companies that manufacture it.
The truth is, vaccines are only ever made available when there is no immediate threat from the disease against which they are supposed to offer protection. They are never made available when they would supposedly save hundreds or thousands of lives – ie, while epidemics are ongoing. That’s because they don’t work; and the fact that they don’t work would be apparent if vaccinated populations continued to become infected.

This was the best opportunity it has ever had – or is ever likely to have – to bring the conflict to an end.

If Israel wanted peace, all it had to do was agree to withdraw to the 1967 borders and stop building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

The fact that it has consistently refused to do so makes Israel’s true long-term intentions abundantly clear: it plans to continue with its strategy of ethnic cleansing, ghettoization and land-grabbing until it has taken over all the land that was Palestine.

Complete domination of the entire region has always been Israel’s aim.

Again and again it has deliberately scuppered efforts made by US presidents and others to find a resolution to the problem.

And what successive presidents have failed to understand is that there is no problem, as far as Israel is concerned.

The sporadic missile attacks by Hamas do very little damage (more Israelis are killed by being struck by lightning than are killed by Hamas rockets), but they provide Israel with the pretext it needs to justify the increasingly brutal “security measures” it inflicts on the Palestinian people.

One or two deaths a year is a small price to pay, from the Israeli government’s point of view, for complete control and ownership of the whole of what used to be Palestine.

Israel is not, and has never been interested in peace. In fact peace is the last thing Israel wants, since without the ongoing hostilities it would have no grounds for building barriers, separating Palestinians into cantons that are really open prisons, bombing populated areas of Palestine and Lebanon, grabbing more and more land, torturing prisoners and imposing a vicious siege on Gaza.

And without the ongoing Arab “threat”, Israel would find it difficult to justify the $4bn in aid it receives from the US government each year.

Let there be no misunderstanding about this: Israel has no intention of ever giving back the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies. The plan is, and has always been, to take over the entire region and eventually get rid of the indigenous Palestinian population altogether.

In a statement moments after the end of the 10-month partial freeze on the building of settlements, Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu asked Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to continue seeking a “historic” deal. How absurd. Do the Israelis really expect the Palestinians to agree to a deal in which Israel continues to illegally occupy Palestine and carry on building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land? Of course not. This is a classic Israeli ploy to shift the blame for the breakdown to the Palestinians. By pretending to want to carry on talking, the Israelis hope to make the Palestinians appear to be responsible for the breakdown. If the Palestinians walk away from the talks, the Israelis can say, “See? We were willing to keep talking, but the Palestinians walked away!” But if the Palestinians carry on talking despite the resumption of work on the settlements, this will be taken as a tacit acknowledgment that they are willing to accept less than they are demanding.

Sakineh Ashtiani

Yesterday, in the face of mounting international condemnation, the Iranian government “commuted” Sakineh’s sentence from death by stoning to death by hanging.

Iran has now imposed a media blackout on reporting of the case, but the death sentence is believed to be “imminent”.

You can help save this woman’s life by emailing the Iranian public relations office at:

Info@Ad.gov.ir

and letting them know how you feel about their barbaric laws and their reprehensible treatment of women.

And/or by signing this petition:

http://www.petitiononline.com/Ashtiani/petition-sign.html

If you are on facebook, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Save-Sakineh-Mohammadi-Ashtiani-from-being-Stoned-to-Death-in-Iran/123908540984923?ref=search

You can find out more about this case at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/10565103.stm

Anna Chapman - Spymistress?

I was particularly interested in her because, like me, she ran – and, as far as I can see, continues to run – a successful real estate portal. Her website – which markets Russian property – is at: www.domdot.ru

I wondered if she had a facebook page (doesn’t everyone, these days?), and, sure enough, it only took me a minute to find her profile here.

Chapman gives her favourite quotation as “Trust no one”, while her “Likes and Interests” are listed as: “Corrections officer, Federal Bureau of Investigation”.
Under “Books” she has “Agatha Christie Novels”, and under “Movies” she’s written “Spy Games”.
For “University” she’s written “Jail”.

Quite the wit for a person in her predicament, facing, we are told, the possibility of life in prison. You’d think she’d be too busy getting water-boarded by the CIA and rehearsing her story with her defense lawyers to take the time to add jokey comments to her facebook page.

Could it be because she knows perfectly well that she isn’t going to spend more than a wet day in jail and is looking forward to a stellar career as a highly-paid TV talk-show guest (or even host)? I’ll give you odds of 100-1 that this savvy spy will be back in Moscow in time for Christmas, where she will be feted as a heroine and a sex symbol.

But hold the fone, Joe! Isn’t Chapman charged with being a dangerous spy? An enemy of the state? In which case how come she’s still at liberty to access the Internet to update her social network profile? Not to mention run a business in Russia? Surely she could be sending all kinds of information and secret messages to all kinds of people in the Kremlin?

Given the high level of security that has prevailed in the US in recent years – in which people have been locked up in solitary confinement just for “looking foreign” or taking part in peaceful public protests – isn’t it a bit odd that Ms. Chapman – or, to use her real name, Anya Kuschenko – is being allowed so much freedom of movement?

And why doesn’t the US president have anything to say about this whole business? So far he has made no comment other than to express the hope that the uproar would not damage the friendship and trust that has developed between the US and Russia.

Friendship and trust, eh?

If Obama bends any further backwards to appease Vladimir Putin, he’ll qualify for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records in the Limbo Dancing category.

It seems to me that there’s something decidedly fishy going on when the FBI catches a network of Russian spies operating in the United States, and it is the Russian president who expresses his outrage!

The (commie?) plot thickens…