The Linkage post below includes a link to a new study on the accuracy of predictions made by media pundits.
Speaking of which, Crikey's Bernard Keane may wish he hadn't written quite so scathingly last Wednesday about American military incompetence, when he covered Wikileaks' release of documents on Guantanamo Bay:
Still, the mentality behind Guantanamo lives on, in rude health, in many minds. What did Julie Bishop, shadow Foreign Minister and deputy Liberal leader, supposedly one of our senior politicians, find in the Gitmo documents? What, amid reports of innocent detainees, of the details of Al Qaeda’s flight as the Americans went into Afghanistan, of the “extreme duress” that an Australian citizen had been subjected to in Egypt while she was a minister in the Howard Government, did she notice?
She seized on the laughable reports that Al Qaeda had planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Europe, which would only be detonated in the event Osama Bin Laden was captured and killed — proof, if nothing else, that Al Qaeda members have seen the same godawful Hollywood action movies the rest of us have.
Judging by the breathtaking incompetence revealed by the Gitmo files, that bomb will be sitting quietly for years to come.
On behalf of political pundits everywhere, allow me to say: There, but for the grace of God, go I.
