I suggest Monkey Boy challenges Putin to a Judo match to the death. The winner gets Cheney as a butler as long as his batteries last.

Meanwhile, investigators began to look into allegations of atrocities committed in South Ossetia, where the war broke out Aug. 8. Human Rights Watch reported that researchers had witnessed “terrifying scenes of destruction” in four deserted ethnic Georgian villages and said they had been looted and burned by South Ossetian militias.

The immediate Russian media blitz justifying its actions was intensive and amazingly coordinated alleging genocide and war crimes:

In South Ossetia, Human Rights Watch researchers saw houses of Georgian civilians set on fire by Ossetian irregulars and saw militias looting the homes of Georgians who had fled the fighting.

Anna Neistat, one of the researchers, said by telephone from Tskhinvali that they had found no evidence so far to substantiate Russian claims of widespread brutality by Georgian troops.

Human Rights Watch has been able to confirm fewer than 100 deaths – a far cry from the death toll of 2,000 regularly cited by Moscow.

International Herald Tribune.

But since the server that directed at least some of the attacks was here in the U.S., maybe that’s the kind of thng Condi “couldn’t” have known.

Hattip Laura Rozen’s blog.

What happened on the night of Aug. 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against “small, defenseless Georgia” is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity.

Here is the MSM mouthpiece echoing Condi (God I’d hate to have to tell these lies, and I wonder what they bribed him with to say such stuff in public).:

… members of the Georgia army unit assigned to a training program under American advisers did not show up for the day’s exercises. In retrospect, American officials said, it is obvious that they had been ordered to mobilize for the mission in South Ossetia by their commanders.

“This caught us totally by surprise,” said one military officer who tracks events in the region, including the American-Georgian training effort. “It really knocked us off our chairs.”

Imagine the reaction if the Russians had returned Iraqi troops from anywhere to Iraq as the 2003 U.S. invasion was beginning…

At the same time the Russian air force started to bomb Georgian air fields. At least four Georgian planes were destroyed on the ground. Two Russian planes were shot down by SA-5 anti air missiles which Georgia was not known to have. These weapons were possibly manned by Ukrainian mercenaries.

I’ve seen something else re. Ukraine involvement but can’t find it. Recall that the missiles were from Ukraine. Loosing two planes was probably a shock to the Russian mil.

Forgive this for being peripheral. In a previous thread I added a comment about the Polish president’s trip to Tbilisi (with other heads of state), pointing out that he’s a Bush pal and saboteur of the current (sane) government (no link in English).

Then I saw this strange story about a feud between the Polish president and Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Radek Sikorski (who is married to Anne Applebaum). It included this bizarre accusation:

According to the daily’s publication, the president implied that FM Sikorski had betrayed Polish interests in the negotiations, and accused him of coming to an agreement with US Democratic Party officials that a deal on the shield would be signed after the November US presidential elections.

I think that’s ridiculous (I don’t trust Sikorski to like Democratic foreign policy, for example, being married to Applebaum). It seems to me, instead, to be a case of the lady protesting too much: I swear Kaczynski must be working in cahoots with the Republicans and is only accusing his political opponents of the same crime of which he’s guilty (a very Rovian tactic). That’s our politics in the region.