Some empires never learn.

While the UK Guardian and other press are reporting that Wikileaks logs are showing over 2000 people on an elite task force’s “capture or kill” hit list, the New York Times is reporting a figure of only 70.

“Actually it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know it’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up with you. I like brawling.”

The discovery of another “secret prison” in Baghdad is alarming. There are fears that this one is linked to the Interior Ministry and that the campaign against former armed forces members is re-starting.

Journalist Allan Nairn, renowned for surviving having his skull fractured by US-trained Indonesian soldiers in the 1991 Santa Cruz Massacre in East Timor, saving colleague Amy Goodman by throwing himself upon her, is reporting that charges against him are imminent for the crime of reporting a crime.

This morning Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn broke the news that Obama plans to resume US funding for Indonesia’s military death squads. Nairn describes how the death squads that once terorrized occupied Timor are up and running – and killing – peaceful opponents to Indonesia rule in Papua and elsewhere. Change? Last year Obama chose Admiral Dennis Blair – who had defied the chain of command and civilian authority to keep funding Indonesia’s death squads in Timor. At least Obama’s consistent: his Attorney General left the DOJ for a white shoe law firm where he successfully protected Chiquita’s CEO’s from responsiblity for paying for and running guns to Central American death squads. Change we can bloody well believe in, no?

When you count all the Christian families who have fled their homes in Mosul in the last few days and not just those who fled to Tal Keef as we have done and as Bishop Emil Shimoun Nona, Chaldean archbishop of Mosul, has done then the scale of the catastrophe engulfing Mosul’s Christians becomes clear.

With all that is going on, it is easy for yet another revelation of Bush Administration lawlessness to seem unimportant, but the CIA Death Squads program is a really a serious issue, even compared to everything else we know about.

18 – that’s the number of journalists murdered in Irak in 2008.