Google Saves Australian Hostage's Life

SYDNEY, Australia — Iraqi militants who kidnapped an Australian reporter in Baghdad and threatened to kill him Googled his name on the Internet to investigate his work before deciding to release him unharmed, the journalist's executive producer said Tuesday.

John Martinkus (search), the first Australian confirmed as having been abducted in Iraq, was seized in Baghdad early Saturday and held for about 24 hours before being freed.

Amazing that they released him, considering that he exposed the muslim terror against christian East Timor !
Australian journalist John Martinkus first went to East Timor in 1994, and has written the first comprehensive eyewitness account of events before and after the ballot.
He says that it was immediately obvious that the so-called militia in East Timor were in fact a creation of the Indonesian military - the TNI - but it was difficult to make this clear in news reports, because the TNI also had a sophisticated media strategy ...

Here’s an excerpt from a book review he wrote. It can be found here

Reporting the wave of suicide bomb attacks and the Israeli counter-offensive in Israel and the occupied territories, McGeough delivers some of the best material in the book. But, as one of the victims of the Matza restaurant bombing in Haifa says: They say the Arabs are crazy but it's not true. It's someone who saw the same pain that I saw today, and he did it out of what he saw. They also feel pain. Those who blow themselves up are not terrorists; they are soldiers. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not part of the war on terror; identifying it as such only plays into the hands of certain politicians. McGeough's account of the aftermath of the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp describes in vivid detail the destruction wrought by Israeli forces. It also sheds light on why this cycle of conflict has continued from 1948 until now. But this has nothing to do with planes hitting buildings in Manhattan, and it is misleading to link the two, especially if it is only to add an action-packed chapter to your book. McGeough makes the distinction and his analysis clear in the final chapters on Iraq. As well as detail about dealing with the authorities in Baghdad, we get the frank judgment that countries such as Indonesia, Chechnya and Palestine are more likely to be breeding grounds for terrorists than Iraq. His last line rings true: 'But George W. Bush was determined to march on Baghdad. Somehow the president was in the wrong place, fighting the wrong war.' And somehow this book is not really about the war on terror. It is about what Paul McGeough has been doing since it began, whilst he finished his morning coffee one bright September morning in Manhattan.

Sounds like a lefty to me.

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