Having now seen the footage of the HUGE and DIFFICULT to manouvre Japanese ship, and the 'tiny' and EASY to manouvre Greenpeace 'boat', and watching the Arctic Sunrise slowly CRASH into the Jap ship.... whether or not they were in reverse at the time is not really relevant.

What IS abundantly clear, is that any responsible person aboard the Arctic Sunrise would have had AMPLE warning of imminent collision with the VERY much larger Jap ship, because it is so easy to see, because it is so HUGE etc etc etc.....I saw a perpendicular crash, no attempt to swerve by Artic Sunrise.

I draw the inescapable conclusion that Greenpeace orchestrated the crash, 'managed' its physical impact for MAXIMUM propoganda value, and were mainly responsible for allowing the collision to occur..

and by the way, I don't like the idea of whales being harpooned and eaten. I also don't like ideological organizations, which are obviously well funded (by ?) "creating" news in their favor dishonestly, to further their cause, and deceive the already emotional public on the issue !

Boaz_David, you state that having seen the footage "I draw the inescapable conclusion that Greenpeace orchestrated the crash". It seems that you have privy to footage that I certainly did not see because NO inescapable conclusion could be drawn from the footage that has been shown on many television channels of late.

Given that the Japanese are clearly lying when they state that they slaughter the 1000 odd whales for 'scientific research' - even pharmaceutical labs don't kill that comparable number of research animals in one season over one line of research - then personally I couldn't give a damn if by chance, Greenpeace were found to be in the wrong. Somehow, though, given the politics of the situation and the form of the Japanese, I tend to doubt their claims. However, in the current climate of claim & counter claim, the whole question of culpability is incredibly muddied to say the least and so I must suspend my natural scepticism about Japanese motives and their fellow journeymen's claims .

However, I think the shouts of the politically correct like Graham against their straw men of the ABC and Greenpeace should be taken in context. It certainly appears more like the desire to take a cheap shot at those he dislikes. This makes the so called 'Howard haters' mere accolytes to his mastery of this detestable form.

All I can suggest Graham is to take a Bex & have a good lie down, now there's a good chap.

"So, the author cannot understand why no one's making any noise about Green Peace's lies "

Excuse me What exactly is the BIG DEAL here ?
The media has for THREE YEARS obediantly published whatever it was TOLD to publish by the U.S. Govt vis a vis Iraq,(and now Iran, which we KNOW are lies) eventually we all discovered it was all LIES, you may well ask, WHY HAS NO ONE MADE ANY NOISE ABOUT THEM, and in that case, THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE DIED, no matter, that did NOT cut the ice with many people either.
So why should anyone get all worked up over Green Peace's events over some whale buchery ?

Itchyvet,

You have a point, but you are choosing a funny way to express it.

Your point (that the media have fallen into the habit of repeating propaganda, citing a different, and you think more egregious example than Graham's) merely reinforces the points made in the original article. Which is that reporters and publishers are doing a particularly poor job in separating out the spin, bull..t and obfuscation from reality in their efforts to describe and interpret the world around us.

Tony Blair's Alistair Campbell was apparently the world's first Grand Master at the art, but it is now commonplace for all major companies, organisations and political bodies to shape their public pronouncements through (extremely highly paid) spinmeisters. Witness the Donna Stanton fiasco at CSIRO.

The "spun" way of viewing the world was in significant part invented by Greenpeace, whose slogan might well be "The ends justify the spin". Wide public support exists for behaving in such ways, as shown by the large numbers of subscriptions that still flow into Greenpeace coffers, for use in the creation of environmental "hot button" scare stories and tactics to publicize them. The current whaling imbroglio is an all-too-characteristic example.

Cathy.

It is not unusual for the editors in our media to present falsehoods and distort facts, It just compounds the difficulty people have distinguishing some truth, (Not everyone though) some like the lies to feed their own egos, even if they do realize it is a phonies story.
Irf and co will not like this, but read this link and prompt your memory, although not Green peace, the philosophy and premise are of the same shape and kind. Cover up. The evils of the perpetrators triumph.

http://newsisyphus.blogspot.com/2006/01/misogyny-day.html