US Treachery: There Goes Israel's Security

This is a fiasco-in-the-making all know is going to happen. And I think I know one State Department official who may be involved in this.

Steven Smith is a veteran of international policing missions in Bosnia and Serbia and is the lead instructor for the Administration of Justice program at Gavilan College, California.

He was also involved, until he quit, in the training program US General Keith Dayton supervised for Palestinian Authority policemen. I previously on this blog made fun of America's trusting nature of the ability of the Pals. to police themselves and to protect themselves and us from the Hamas and other terrorists out there (not to mention, okay, I will mention, the fact that Pal. policemen themselves kill Jews like the incident near Hebron last December).

To explain why he quit, he published an op-ed which I am reproducing almost in its entirely, otherwise the affect is diminished. After all, this anti-occupation site did so. I emphasized sections by using italics, so pay more attention to these elements.

Too little, too late

The first graduates of General Keith Dayton's Palestinian police-training program will soon hit the hard streets of the West Bank. Unfortunately, they will do so without the firearms, radios and first-aid equipment that they have been promised after graduating from a training program so fraught with problems that it can hardly be called a training program at all.

I was part of that program and watched as nearly a thousand young officers were being put through the motions of an effort that was dominated more by political pressure than by the need to produce well-trained graduates.

Designed by a U.S. contractor in Florida based on specifications written by Dayton and his staff, the plan of instruction calls for a 1,400-hour curriculum that includes human rights law, defensive tactics, first aid, urban and rural small-unit tactics, firearms, mounted- and foot-patrol techniques, crime scene investigations and more...

Unfortunately, when the American monitoring group that I was part of arrived in Jerusalem in January, just two weeks before training was scheduled to begin, not a page of curriculum was ready for our review and nothing had been translated into Arabic.

A Jordanian translation company that had been contracted to translate 300 pages of curriculum per day had to be dismissed...upon translation back to English we found the curriculum had utterly lost its meaning. For example the words "cover fire," a term to describe small-arms fire to pin down the enemy and allow movement, was translated as "extinguish a burning fire."

The site for the training is the Jordanian International Police Training Center, or JIPTIC, located outside of Amman...I watched as frustrated Jordanian instructors abandoned the unintelligible curriculum and improvised instruction inside overcrowded classrooms and gymnasiums. Instruction in defensive tactics for hundreds of students was taught with three practice batons, a few handcuffs, and dummy pistols that were actually novelty cigarette lighters. The students had none of the safety equipment normally associated with police work.

In the classrooms, I watched as students were taught radio communications without radios, driving and vehicle maintenance with no vehicles, foot-patrol tactics without weapons or radios, and mounted-patrol tactics without vehicles.

The spectacle of watching officers pretend they were in vehicles, or had radios or firearms was so ridiculous that it would have been funny were the stakes not so high.

Even when classes were well-delivered students seldom had notebooks, manuals or course handouts. Moreover, fully 10 percent of the students are functional illiterates.

...A State Department official told me that students would be tested at the conclusion of the course; another said that they would be given CD-roms at the end of the course that would contain course handouts. Both measures are too little too late since none of the students I knew even owned computers and an assessment at the end of a four-month course allows no time for remedial training.

Many of the Jordanian instructors were pressed into service and simply didn't have the expertise, equipment, or the time to provide good instruction...The firearms training failed to include failure drills, discretionary shooting, the use of cover and concealment and weapons cleaning. Only a few students demonstrated skill at assembling and disassembling their firearms...

The congressional investigators and journalists I saw were steered clear of any training that was substandard as well-rehearsed students put on demonstrations of police skills designed to impress laymen.

...I can only write these words because I resigned over what I saw as a failed program. Other staff members are kept silent by large paychecks and a promise that they will never work for the State Department again if they speak out.

If it is true that an army fights the way it has been trained, then the young men of the Palestinian security forces are in for a tough time...they return to the West Bank to face Hamas and other organized and well-armed political and criminal gangs ill-prepared and ill-equipped.

I have little confidence in their ability to replace the Israeli Defense Forces without significant retraining with proper equipment and instruction.

I ask all who read this to pass it along. Aggregate.

Pass this along to public-opinion makers and movers, to your elected officials and representatives. Use it to write letters-to-the-editor or op-eds. Your Rabbis and clergymen.

The lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the communities of YESHA as well as Israel, along with others including Arabs, tourists and even diplomats are being endangered if even only one-third of what you read above is true.

I'd like to thank Steve for getting this published.

And as for that American diplomat, I'd like to hear from you on this.

Karsenty Wins

First alert.

Jerusalem Post's Second Thoughts?

“An article in today’s Jerusalem Post about the President’s position on Iran that quotes unnamed sources — quoting unnamed sources — is not worth the paper it’s written on,” the White House press secretary, Dana M. Perino, said in a statement.

The Post later removed its article from its Web site and replaced it with one featuring the White House denial. By then, the report had already stirred considerable discussion online.

The full statement:-

An article in today's Jerusalem Post about the President's position on Iran that quotes unnamed sources -- quoting unnamed sources -- is not worth the paper it's written on.

Let me respond by reaffirming the policy of the Administration: We, along with our international allies who want peace in the Middle East, remain opposed to Iran's ambitions to obtain a nuclear weapon. To that end, we are working to bring tough diplomatic and economic pressure on the Iranians to get them to change their behavior and to halt their uranium enrichment program.

As the President has said, no president of the United States should ever take options off the table, but our preference and our actions for dealing with this matter remain through peaceful diplomatic means. Nothing has changed in that regard.

More here:-

Q I want to ask you about the denial of the Jerusalem Post story --

MS. PERINO: Yes.

Q -- when you say that the White House's preference is to solve this through peaceful, diplomatic means. That still leaves the door open, though, to planning an attack. I'm not saying you are planning an attack, but by your specifically saying that your preference is to have a peaceful, diplomatic means, doesn't that leave the door open to still --

MS. PERINO: I don't see how that changes -- I don't think that what I said today in response to a Jerusalem Post article that quotes an Army Times* piece that quotes unnamed officials who were quoting unnamed officials -- seems a little bit less than ethical to run that as a big story on their website. So what I said in there was I was restating longstanding Bush administration policy, which is to work with our international allies on a multilateral way to get the Iranians through diplomatic means, bringing economic and diplomatic pressure to bear on the Iranians to get them to change their behavior so that we could sit down at the table with them. And until they halt that nuclear enrichment we're not going to sit down with them.

But what I said in terms of, as the President said before, no President should take options off the table when dealing with any situation. So -- but I don't think I said anything different from what I've said before.

Q But on the -- go ahead.

Q Dana, it doesn't -- you don't deny the premise of the Post article, the Jerusalem Post article, which was that a senior U.S. official said that the President and Vice President were of the opinion that military action is called for in Iran?

MS. PERINO: I have no knowledge of anybody saying that to anybody in Israel, no. And as I said, I will restate that the United States position is to work with our international allies to bring diplomatic pressure to bear, both economic pressure and the diplomatic pressure that comes from working with all of our allies and also the countries in the region who have grave concerns about Iran's ambitions to obtain a nuclear weapon.

And we're going to work with them, and in fact, we're working on a new set of incentives package -- a new incentives package right now that Secretary Rice is helping lead, that would continue to bring that pressure on them, and to show the Iranian people that there is a way that they could be a part of the international community; they wouldn't have to be as isolated as their government has made them. And we want to try to solve this diplomatically.

Q One quick follow on that. A broader question in the story, it also claims that there are sort of two camps in the administration: the President and the Vice President who are leaning more towards an attack, and Secretary Rice and Secretary Gates are sort of pulling them back. Is there any sort of split in the administration?

MS. PERINO: This is something that I have seen reported over the years, and I think it's just people surmising or trying to string along story lines and rumors that aren't based in fact. The President's team is well knitted up.

Mike.

Q Can I ask on this one?

MS. PERINO: On this one still?

Q What about the substance of it, though? Do the President and the Vice President feel that an attack is called for -- whether someone said that in Israel, or not?

MS. PERINO: Keith, I feel that I just answered that question when I talked about what our policy is.

Q Can you answer yes or no to that?

MS. PERINO: I just told -- said what our policy is and that our preference is to solve this diplomatically. And that's what we're trying to do.

Q But that doesn't answer the question.

MS. PERINO: It does answer the question, that that is what we are working with our allies to do. But the President has said -- what I'm saying today in response to the Jerusalem Post is nothing different than from what has been said at this podium for a couple of years now.

Q But it's not quite an answer, because everyone's preference is always for peace, but someone could still think that an attack may be called for.

MS. PERINO: Look, I think that when you have a longstanding policy, such as the President has, and he's working with international allies -- we've already passed three Security Council resolutions; we're now working on an incentives package; we have multilateral agreement that Iran should not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, or get the technology to be able to obtain a nuclear weapon, and we're all working towards that goal. But at the same time, the President has said that no President, no matter who it is, either him or anyone in the future, should take options off the table. It's not a smart way to negotiate.

Q Does the President -- do the President and the Vice President think an attack is called for on Iran? Yes or no?

MS. PERINO: I just said what the United States policy was, which is, our preference is to try to solve this diplomatically.

Q Look, skepticism seems warranted here, because in the run-up to the war in 2003, the line was officially that negotiations were still called for and that there was no decision to attack, when, in fact, subsequent reporting has shown that there probably was a decision to attack well before the attack took place. So why shouldn't we be skeptical of the claim that there's no intention to bomb Iran?

MS. PERINO: Bill, you can be as skeptical as you want to be. I stated what our policy is, and I don't have anything else that I can give you. I'm not going to be able to -- if you're going to be a skeptic, that's your right -- you're fourth estate, go for it.

I'm Taking Bets

How long will this "agreement" last?

The Hezbollah-led Shiite opposition and the Lebanese government backed by the West and Saudi Arabia, reached an agreement on Wednesday to resolve an 18-month political crisis that has crippled the country and recently triggered the worst fighting since the 1975-1990 civil war.

Television stations reported that the agreement, negotiated in five days of talks in Qatar, calls for the election of Gen. Michel Suleiman, the commander of Lebanon’s army, as president, the formation of cabinet in which Hezbollah, which is supported by Iran and Syria, and its allies will enjoy veto power and a new electoral law that will provide better representation in the country’s sectarian system of power-sharing.

This May Be A Repeat

But it's a worthwhile repeat.



This sticker reads:

This is how Tel Aviv is Seen from Samaria

We Must Be in Homesh or

Rockets will be in Tel Aviv

Is It Tied Down?

That ladder above is on the mirpeset of a building on King George Street here in Jerusalem, three floors up.

I only hope it is tied down because if it is disturbed or maybe even a strong wind, if it falls, it can be deadly - and fatal.

Civilian Targets

This Yesh Gvul sticker below I saw this morning



and it reads:-

CITIZENS ARE NOT A TARGET

and is intended to protest the occasional and unintended collateral damage caused by air strikes and artillery shelling of terrorists who hide amongst a civilian population.

I was wondering, does the same sticker appear on walls and telephone and electricity poles in Gaza in Arabic?

If not, would that not be a morality problem?

The Poster War Continues

Another Daniella Weiss/Women in Green Pro-settling poster (and anti-Moetzet Yesha):-

On Benny Morris

But, just as the Arab world’s rejection of the 1947 partition plan pushed Israeli leaders toward an even harsher view of their adversaries, Yasir Arafat’s rejection of the peace proposals proffered by Ehud Barak in 2000 at Camp David and at Taba, Egypt, coupled with the second intifada, which followed, disillusioned Benny Morris to the point of embitterment. Morris, who has always voted for parties on the left, said that Arafat had “defrauded” the Israelis, and he decided that the Palestinians had no intention of forging a compromise. Morris was not at all persuaded by explanations and press reports claiming that Clinton and Barak had offered Arafat an unfair, hastily prepared deal. Even if Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders, Morris concluded, the Palestinians would consider that only a step in a “phased plan” to eliminate a “crusader state” from sacred Arab lands. After 2000, he said in a 2004 interview with Ha’aretz, “I understood that they were unwilling to accept the two-state solution. They want it all. Lod and Acre and Jaffa.” Morris did criticize the Israeli government for continuing to build on occupied territory, but, especially in his role as pundit and polemicist, he was no longer giving equal weight to two “righteous victims.”

In the Ha’aretz interview, Morris took a tone that was in scant evidence in his earlier journalism or scholarly work. He spoke of a “deep problem in Islam,” of a world in which “life doesn’t have the same value it does in the West.” The Arabs belonged to a “tribal culture” in which “revenge” played a “central part,” a society so lacking in “moral inhibitions” that “if it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use them.”

Morris was hardly the only Israeli liberal dispirited by Arafat’s behavior in 2000 and the suicide bombs and re-occupations that followed; nor was he alone in his gloom after September 11th. But his new language came as a shock. He described the Arab world as “barbarian,” and said that the Israeli massacres committed in 1947-48 were “peanuts” compared with those in Bosnia. Then, there was his call to build “something like a cage” for the Palestinians: “I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no other choice. There is a wild animal that has to be locked up in one way or another.” Upon reflection, even Morris was appalled by those words and later apologized.

To some extent, Morris has been writing the same book throughout his scholarly life, and one theme that has been pronounced is that of “transfer.” In all his work, he has explored the thorny question of whether or not Ben-Gurion and his colleagues explicitly endorsed a policy of “transferring”—exiling—the Arab population from Israel.

By the time of the 2004 Ha’aretz interview, Morris had adopted a harsher, more prescriptive tone that was sometimes chilling to the liberal audience that had first welcomed him. Fearing the loss of a Jewish majority and the rise of an Arab fifth column, some right-wing politicians have advocated transferring either the Palestinian Arabs or the Israeli Arabs, or both, to Jordan—a country they refer to as the true Palestinian state. (That was once a theme of Ariel Sharon’s.) Although Morris does not endorse such a policy—“It is neither moral nor realistic”—he does say that, historically speaking, BenGurion “faltered” in 1948. “If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job,” he told Ha’aretz. “I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all.” Morris acknowledged that ethnic cleansing was “problematic” but later pointed out catastrophic situations in which it could be “beneficial for humanity.” He cited the Turkish expulsion of the Greek minority, Greece’s expulsion of its Turkish minority after the First World War, and the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War.

Source

The Rafi Eitan Interview On Pollard

Rafi Eitan, currently a Minister in Ehud Olmert's Kadima-led coalition government, and previously a Mossad agent and ultimate handler of Jonathan Pollard, was interviewed in the Maariv weekend magazine this past week.

Below is a scan of most of the section devoted to the question of his involvement and thoughts on the case:-



Here are some highlights (the official Pollard site, that is, the one run by Elaine/Esther doesn't mention it):-

"...the reason I took upon myself the entire responsibility for the case is that I already had it all on my head. I couldn't have been smacked around more than I had been. America is closed to me. I left my position [at LAKAM]. And we can't repeat what happened in 1954, with the [Lavon] Affair and with the question who gave or didn't give the order...and I knew that if I would say one more additional word regarding someone else, a ring of hell would open. And so, the entire responsibility is mine, only mine and thank you and that's it. Thus, I have finished with the story."

"...the US intelligence services, and there are maybe 20 of them in all, made a joint decision not to permit him [Pollard] ever to be released until the end of his life. Q. Why? There have been worse spies than him that were sentenced to shorter terms? The reason isn't Pollard. It's Israel. They decided as they decided. They aren't hiding it...Q. Can anything be done? To my regret, no. What can Israel do? Break relations with the US? This is silly....Every visit of an Israeli personality with Pollard harmed him. The recognition of him as an agent, the Israel identity card. All this harmed him, worsened his situation. Q. What do they want from him, for God's sake? Not from him. It's not him. It's us. It's connected to the relationship system between the American intelligence services and the state of Israel. Q. So, they are taking revenge on you and your friends on his back? Yes...Pollard never caused any harm to the US (here, Eitan expands and refers to the Aldrich case - YM)"

A Jew + His Money + His Vanity = Antisemitism?

“It is an act of the worst kind of buffoonery. Schwarzman is horrid.”

This statement was made to me by a member of New York’s Protestant establishment in reference to the renaming of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue at 42nd Street after Stephen A. Schwarzman, C.E.O. of The Blackstone Group, a private equity company. In March news broke that Mr. Schwarzman had agreed to lead the library’s current fundraising campaign by pledging a $100 million gift—the largest the institution has ever received. In recognition, the library announced, his name would be would be carved onto the exterior of the lion-guarded building.

Within senior Wasp circles, Schwarzman and the distinction he has received for his gift have set off a great deal of concealed outrage. Perhaps the best way I can describe it is to say that when I sat and talked with several Wasps about the diminishing influence of their clan, they often waited until the interview was winding down and I had folded up my notebook, and then they jumped back into conversation about Schwarzman and the library.

Old-guard Wasps appear to feel threatened by the newly rich and their growing influence around the city, and dismiss new money as “tasteless and gauche.” When discussing vastly rich people who are Jewish, it is not uncommon for them to use anti-Semitic slurs.

“Come on, though, it’s not Wasps giving Jews a bad name, it’s Jews giving Jews a bad name,” one said. Another told me, “The Astors knew to put their name on the inside. It’s good taste, that’s the difference between old and new.” A third said Schwarzman, who is Jewish, “is cleaning himself up, that’s what new money does. I suppose my family had to do the same thing hundreds of years ago, but look at us now, we’re like deities.”

The comments reveal the extent to which elitism, and, even more disturbingly, anti-Semitism still exist in certain quarters of Wasp society. There’s absolutely no basis to the claim that renaming the library edifice for Stephen Schwarzman represents a new form of philanthropy. Wasp patrons have had buildings at Manhattan’s cultural institutions named after them for centuries. The Frick Collection and The Peggy and David Rockefeller Building at The Museum of Modern Art are two examples in this tradition. Additionally, Schwarzman indicated that the building was renamed at the library’s request, not his.

Many of the affluent Wasps and affluent Jews I chatted with on the subject preferred not to openly acknowledge the traces of snobbery and elitism that still exist within the Wasp community. When I asked directly, Wasps told me that although their community had excluded people on cultural, ethnic, or economic grounds in the past, it certainly didn’t happen anymore. Affluent Jews responded to my question by saying that they didn’t feel discriminated against at all when hanging around their Wasp friends.

Eric Richman (35), a successful attorney and New York social fixture who counts the great-grandchildren of William Randolph Hearst and the children of Saul Steinberg among his many friends, was quick to tell me that ” I don’t think about it, being Jewish doesn’t come up when I’m around my Waspy friends.” But as our discussion continued, he remembered an awkward incident he had had with one of his closest friends (a Wasp). They were out drinking and once they had gotten a little drunk they started to talk about religion. He recalls a moment when the tenor of their conversation changed and his friend looked at him and said, “what’s interesting about you is that you have no idea how much we really hate you.” Eric told me that it was probably intended to be a joke, “yet there was something in it that seemed like a real residual sentiment. After a few drinks, it came out.”

Source

Again, A Media Bias Problem in US That We Know Here in Israel

White House takes swipe at NBC News

The White House on Monday sent a scathing letter to NBC News, accusing the news network of “deceptively” editing an interview with President Bush on the issue of appeasement and Iran. Specifically, White House counselor Ed Gillespie laments that the network edited the interview in a way that “is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that [Bush] agreed with [correspondent Richard Engel's] characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it.

“This deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline is utterly misleading and irresponsible and I hereby request in the interest of fairness and accuracy that the network air the President’s responses to both initial questions in full on the two programs that used the excerpts,” said Gillespie in the letter to NBC News President Steve Capus.

Gillespie used the opportunity to also inquire whether NBC News still believes that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. In November 2006, the network decided to label the infighting in the country a “civil war.”

“I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a ‘civil war,’ ” Gillespie wrote. “Is it still NBC News’s carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?”

This type of media behavior is experienced in Israel and that's why Israel's Media Watch was set up.

La prostituée

France confirmed Monday that it had been engaged in contacts with the leaders of Hamas, the radical Islamic group that is running Gaza, for several months to try to better understand its positions.

“These are not relations; they are contacts,” Mr. Kouchner said on Europe 1 radio.

With who does one have contacts but no relations?

La barbaque et la catin et la prostituée

Two Good Letters to the Editor

In today's NYT:-

To the Editor:

Jeffrey Goldberg argues that “the dismantling of settlements is the one step that would buttress the dwindling band of Palestinian moderates in their struggle against the fundamentalists of Hamas.”

That strategy has failed. In the summer of 2005, Israel dismantled every settlement in Gaza, expelled all the Jews, destroyed every military base and removed every soldier.

Rather than build a functioning peaceful society, the Palestinians rewarded Israel by electing Hamas.

There is no reason to believe that dismantling West Bank settlements would produce a different result.

Until the Palestinians desire peace more than the destruction of Israel, there will never be peace.

Jacob Sasson
New York

•

To the Editor:

Re “For Israelis, an Anniversary. For Palestinians, a Nakba,” by Elias Khoury (Op-Ed, May 18):

The biggest similarity between the war in 1948 and the continuing Israeli control of Palestinian towns in the West Bank is that both were the unfortunate choice of the Palestinians.

In 1948, Israel agreed to the United Nations partition plan, and was willing to live as a neighbor to a Palestinian state, but the Arabs chose war. After the war, Arab countries chose to put the Palestinian refugees into refugee camps, while Israel integrated an equal number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries into Israeli society.

And in 2005, Israel chose to withdraw from Gaza and plan for further evacuation of the West Bank, and the Palestinians chose to use Gaza to fire missiles at Israeli civilians rather than build a productive society. Clearly, Israel cannot transfer control of more territory if that territory will be used to fire missiles at our civilians.

Bruce Dov Krulwich
Beit Shemesh, Israel

And What Help Do They Require?

Sec'y of State Condi Rice said:-

when you talk with Salam Fayyad or with the people around Mahmoud Abbas or with President Abbas himself, you recognize that this is a very good and dedicated group of people. They just need some help.

And exactly what type of help do they need?

Emotional?

Psychiatric?

Physical?

Where'd You Say Israel is Located?

Pics from Today's Bar Mitzva

The son of a fellow worker here at the Begin Center celebrated his Bar Mitzvha at the new Terasa Restaurant located at the Center.

Here I am with Ilana, Israel Droblis and Bruriah Romanov (Begin used to babysit for her)

and here I am in a self-portrait with my sefirah beard

The New Indy Plot

...updating the action precisely the same number of years as have elapsed since "Last Crusade," to 1957, smack dab in the middle of the Cold War. U.S. versus USSR dynamic spurs the dynamite opening action sequence, in which a convoy of Russian soldiers camouflaged in American army vehicles rolls into a remote desert nuclear testing base in search of a coveted object. Helping them in this effort will be their prisoner, Indiana Jones.

With an energy and enthusiasm bespeaking years of pent-up desire to get back to this sort of fun filmmaking, Spielberg sets the period spirit with a rock 'n' roll-fueled drag race and, with the characters' entry into the legendary Hangar 51, intimations of an other-worldly presence. As the aging issue is tossed off with a joke or two, the sixtysomething hero quickly proves that the passage of time will not be an inhibiting factor all these years later, as Indy trades smart remarks with the formidable Soviet officer Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) before jumping into action the equal of any of the great setpieces the entire series has previously offered.

...The 20 nonstop opening minutes include a striking variation on the many cookie-cutter middle-class housing tracts featured in Spielberg films, this one populated exclusively by plastic figurines enacting a cliche of a '50s Yank lifestyle while awaiting the nuclear test to come, one Indy must quickly figure out how to survive...

...When Professor Jones returns to his university, he's informed by his dean (Jim Broadbent, replacing the late Denholm Elliott) that he's being suspended due to FBI doubt over his loyalty.

...Another iconic aspect of the decade rolls in with a kid named Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), a leather-jacketed biker who travels with comb and switchblade. Between a contrived fistfight and extended motorized chase around the leafy college campus, Mutt sets the grand adventure in motion by offering evidence of the possible location of the Crystal Skull of Akator, an object of great archeological and, possibly, psychic and other-dimensional fascination.

In a nostalgia-producing air travel montage like those in previous series entries, Indy and Mutt make their way to Peru, where the action relaxes in some rather rote creepy-crawly cave shenanigans before the guys lay their hands on the crystal skull itself, an oddly shaped clear cranium that all agree is not of human origin. But it's shortly snatched by Spalko, who believes the skull possesses psychic power that would prove decisive in mind warfare, no doubt ending the Cold War then and there.

All this gibberish is merely designed to justify the battle of wits and weapons, which continues apace as the Russians collect two further prisoners, Indy's old cohort and crystal skull expert, the now insane Professor Oxley (John Hurt), and Mutt's mom, none other than Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Indy's flame from "Raiders" and clearly the woman he was always meant to be with.

...But it's off and running again, with a race through the jungle as the good guys and bad guys jump between vehicles, duel with fists, sabers and machine guns, are assaulted by monkeys and ravenous giant ants and, in an undoubted preview of a forthcoming theme-park ride, plummet down three imposing waterfalls...

It's All in the Mind of the Beholder

One Thousand Days

It's been 1000 days.