After conflicting stories all night, international media and the Israeli government report now that the Israelis have boarded the Rachel Corrie.

Around 1 a.m. EST, Gaza observers on the beach were still reporting watching the ship headed for port.

In the meantime, the United States yesterday called the Gaza blockade "unsustainable":

(Reuters) - The White House said on Friday Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip was unsustainable and urged a Gaza aid vessel sent by pro-Palestinian activists to divert to an Israeli port to reduce the risk of violence.

"We are working urgently with Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and other international partners to develop new procedures for delivering more goods and assistance to Gaza," said Mike Hammer, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.

"The current arrangements are unsustainable and must be changed. For now, we call on all parties to join us in encouraging responsible decisions by all sides to avoid any unnecessary confrontations," Hammer said in a statement.

I love Eastern European politicians. They haven't seen the need to be disingenuous about the real purpose of political decisions. They can be blunt and open about their intentions and desires. That's why we find out, from the Polish foreign minister, that the proposed United States missile defense site for his country really isn't about Iranian or Russian ballistic missiles at all.

When George W. Bush's administration announced its plans to deploy missile defense interceptors in Poland, the system was advertised as needed to counter Iranian missiles headed toward the United States or Europe. The problem was, Bush's plan was designed to counter long-range missiles and actually had little chance of hitting a missile headed from Iran to Europe.

The Obama administration came in and changed the plan, replacing the interceptors with a "phased adaptive approach" that will use smaller, more mobile systems to counter short and medium-range missiles. They advertised that as better suited to protect Europe.

But Sikorski admitted that Poland's real interest in the system is to be an active player in the new emerging security infrastructure in Europe, which includes NATO's endorsement of missile defense.

"Our part of Europe has so far very few NATO installations," he said. "This is the game that seems to be the next project, so we decided to get involved."

Ah, yes, the great game of military power building. So when you hear politicians or defense analysts stressing the need for the US government to spend billions for European missile defense sites because of the Iranian "threat" of a ballistic missile attack, tell them that they're full of crap. Europe doesn't need us to defend it from Iran, and we don't need this site to protect the United States from an Iranian nuke. Poland just wants a US military installation so that it can feel as important as Germany or Italy in playing its part for NATO (but let's not talk about NATO's role in defense issues outside of Europe, it's pretty vague).

I'm hoping that the Obama administration wises up about this half-baked concept, but as long as Obama remains fixated on Iran's nuclear weapons program as a national security threat, he'll probably consider this missile defense site as "leverage" against Iran. But my impression is that Iran's really not going to care, because its ballistic missiles are more for protection against its neighbors than for aggressive, suicidal moves like ballistic missile shots at Europe or America. It's going to single-mindedly keep pursuing the dream, not because it wants to attack anyone or expand its borders, but because it's part of a nationalist agenda to be accepted as a significant player. After all, that's what Poland wants, too.

BBC:

A panel probing fraud claims in the Afghan election has found Hamid Karzai did not gain enough valid votes for an outright win, the BBC understands.

Preliminary results from August's first round had placed Mr Karzai comfortably over the 50% plus one vote threshold needed to avoid a run-off.

But the BBC understands Mr Karzai's vote share has fallen below half, after a number of votes were ruled invalid.

Under poll rules, Mr Karzai now faces a runoff against rival Abdullah Abdullah.

The panel said it had found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" at the polling stations, which were across the country.

It was not clear how Mr Karzai would respond to the ECC findings, amid reports of a possible legal challenge.

Initial results released last month had given him nearly 55% of votes, with former foreign minister Mr Abdullah on 28%.

The Afghan president has insisted he won the election outright, but EU observers have said as many as one in four votes cast were suspicious.

Sources have told the BBC that Mr Karzai is furious over the prospect of a second round.

It makes Rahm Emanuel's comment that we must know if we have a partner in Afghanistan before making a decision on troop escalation that much more pointed and the Republicans pressuring Pres. Obama to make a quicker decision regarding Afghanistan that much more ridiculous and reactionary.

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You can't go wrong doing the opposite of almost anything Sen. Saxby "Toy Soldier" Chambliss, the man who specializes in smearing real soldiers like Max Cleland, proposes. And Dianne Feinstein, the woman who's never met a war or black-box op she didn't like? Rep. Jim McGovern, on the other hand, is a rare voice of reason:

A roundtable discussion on Afghanistan strategy from This Week with George Stephanopoulous:

STEPHANOPOULOS:There's a report in Newsweek this morning -- it's actually on the cover of Newsweek, where the vice president is pointing out that this year we're going to spend about $65 billion in Afghanistan, about $2.25 billion in Pakistan. And according to the report in Newsweek, this is what the vice president went on to say in the National Security Council meeting: "By my calculations, that's a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question: Al Qaida is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?"

What's the answer?

FEINSTEIN: Well, this whole situation is a bit of a conundrum. I basically agree with Senator Chambliss in what he said. I think reconciliation -- the first thing has to be to stop the violence. It has to be security. The Taliban has to know it cannot take over all of Afghanistan because the next step in Pakistan. And that's very serious.

And the Pakistanis are only recently beginning to show, I think, their mettle. I think Swat was a big wake-up call for them. I listened to the Pakistani foreign minister yesterday, and they -- they seemed to have much more get-up-and-go, to really be -- be able to work with us in securing some of the FATA areas and other -- other areas. So I think that -- that's really critical.

This is not an easy situation. Nothing is straightforward. Our allies have 39,000 troops. That's a lot of people over there. They, I gather, will continue their involvement on that level. I think we ought to press for them to increase it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's not going to happen.

FEINSTEIN: I think obviously -- I know it's not, but financially, we ought to have more financing from the rest of the world community. We cannot be everyone's gatekeeper, everyone's policeman, and I think what's lacking in the world is some universality of putting together movements which can change the dynamics in difficult situations.

STEPHANOPOULOS: General Keane, what do we do now in Pakistan? Three major attacks in the last week. Yesterday, the most brazen attack yet, the insurgents take over their army headquarters. It would be like coming in to the Pentagon. And how do you see the interrelationship between putting more troops in Afghanistan and putting more pressure on the situation in -- in Pakistan?

KEANE: Yes, the elephant in the room with Pakistan -- and, also, to a certain degree, with Afghanistan -- has always been, their lack of understanding that we're going to stay in that region. They -- they're not sure we are.

And -- and given our track record in Afghanistan and also in Pakistan, there's reason for that skepticism. That's why Musharraf and this regime to this day has a hedging strategy with the Taliban. We have to convince them that we're there, that Pakistan's stability is in our national interest. And we also have to prove that, as well, by stabilizing Afghanistan.

I agree with the senators. If we ever lost in Afghanistan, that contributes directly to destabilizing Pakistan. So our actions in Afghanistan relate clearly to Pakistan.

KEANE: The other thing, to get specifically to your point, we're starting to make some headway with Kiyani and the generals in Pakistan, to pull forces away from the Indian front, so to speak. We have great difficulty convincing them that the major threat to the nation-state is, in fact, the ranging insurgency inside the nation- state and not the external threat of India. To us, it's self-evident, but to them it's not.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's not.

KEANE: And that's the reality of it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We're just about out of time. I want to go once around the table with this question: What's the one thing you want President Obama to have in mind as he makes these decisions?

CHAMBLISS: Our troops and the stability of our troops and -- and the fact that we're giving our troops what they need. And I mean, from the top down, we've got to make a decision from the leadership standpoint whether we're giving more troops, but we've still got to make that commitment of making sure that we're enforcing and reinforcing them like we need to.

MCGOVERN: I would urge them to keep in mind that stabilizing Afghanistan should not mean and does not mean enlarging our military footprint there. I think it would be counterproductive.

I also think we're going bankrupt. We have wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, hundreds of billions of dollars that are all going on to our credit card. Our kids and our grandkids are paying for this. You know, we need to be smarter about where we deploy our -- our resources. And I think enlarging our military footprint in Afghanistan would be a mistake.

We need to come up with a strategy that includes an exit strategy because it'll also put pressure on the government of Afghanistan to step up to the plate, which it has not done so far.

Even some of the denizens of the far Right are beginning to work out that the Russians aren't afraid of their bark and may just bite back in return. Witness manly man Mark Hemingway writing at The Corner on NRO:

(T)his should be a big story:

Russia has informed Norway that it plans to suspend all military ties with NATO, Norway's Defense Ministry said Wednesday, a day after the military alliance urged Moscow to withdraw its forces from Georgia.

... the NATO-Russia Council which has been active and productive for a number of years now. Russia severing ties with NATO is a significant step, and not necessarily for the better.

No, really? Could you explain it to the White House, where Bush is still trying to bluff on a busted flush? Today he told Russia they must leave Georgia "now" and the Russians basically replied "Gonna make us? You and which army?" And then there's this:

It was unclear if there would be any impact on a crucial aspect of NATO-Russian cooperation: the deal under which Moscow allows aircraft supplying the NATO-led force in Afghanistan to fly through Russian airspace.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow was "not going to shut the doors" on cooperation with NATO, but he pointedly raised the issue of Afghanistan transit.

"After the famous NATO meeting (when the alliance froze contacts with Russia), some leading alliance officials were whispering in my ears: 'You are not going to halt the Afghanistan transit, are you?,"' he said.

As I say, busted flush.

Will Bunch:

This footage of the rioting in Tibet is raw and harrowing. It's also, for the most part, not being seen in China where authorities have blocked access to YouTube.com, which has many videos on Tibet.

The Internet as a liberating force? Not always. [..]

The whole thing is a bloody mess as the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing draws near. I think a vast majority of people have no stomach for another boycott -- most Americans would rather defeat evil on the athletic field, as Jesse Owens did in Berlin in 1936, than take our ball and go home, as Jimmy Carter did in 1980. That said, I'd like to see freedom-loving people, from the U.S. and elsewhere, figure out how to make some kind of statement this August.

This is something:

PARIS (AP) - Moves to punish China over its handling of violence in Tibet gained momentum Tuesday, with a novel suggestion for a mini-boycott of the Beijing Olympics by VIPs at the opening ceremony.

Such a protest by world leaders would be a huge slap in the face for China's Communist leadership.

France's outspoken foreign minister, former humanitarian campaigner Bernard Kouchner, said the idea "is interesting."

Sadly, I can't see anyone in the Bush administration going along with that idea...especially when we owe China so much. I guess that oppressing their citizens, violence and actual weapons of mass destruction, that's not so important, when they underwrite your loans.

Sidney Blumenthal writes that President Bush knew Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction before the invasion of Iraq. Or, at least, he was briefed on this but chose to disregard the briefing.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Note in particular (emphasis added):

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD. …

Keep reading --

(Photo of soy latte art via tonx.)

The Sunday Talking Head line-up is ready for reading. It looks like all Iraq, alla time, based on the scheduled guests: Gen. David Petraeus, commanding general, Iraq; Tom Friedman of The New York Times; Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.; Lee Hamilton, co-chairman, Iraq Study Group; Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zabari; Seymour Hersh; and so on.

Hint: Iraq? Not going well.

Do yourself a favor, and take a peek at the political cartoons Bob Geiger has gathered together this weekend. Everyone needs a Sunday morning laugh. So, what's catching your eye on the blogs or the news this morning?

Remind me again how the Republicans and the Bush White House are supposed to be stronger on national defense?

Telegraph UK:

Senior Pakistani officials are urging Nato countries to accept the Taliban and work towards a new coalition government in Kabul that might exclude the Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
Pakistan's foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, has said in private briefings to foreign ministers of some Nato member states that the Taliban are winning the war in Afghanistan and Nato is bound to fail. He has advised against sending more troops.
Western ministers have been stunned. "Kasuri is basically asking Nato to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban," said one Western official who met the minister recently. Read on...

(h/t Rasputin)

Ukraine Parliament Calls Election Invalid

By YURAS KARMANAU, Associated Press Writer

KIEV, Ukraine - Ukraine's parliament on Saturday declared invalid the disputed presidential election that triggered a week of growing street protests and legal maneuvers, raising the possibility that a new vote could be held in this former Soviet republic.

Parliament's vote came amid a flurry of domestic and international support for the possibility of a revote. A European Union envoy — Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot — said new elections were the "ideal outcome" for the standoff between Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Yushchenko. Asked if new elections were the only solution, Ben Bot answered: "Yes." ..read

I guess exit polls really do work!