Everyone overboard. . .

'Howard misled Australian voters', shrieks the Senate committee! Gee, what a surprise. And like we didn't see that one coming. . . Well, at least the ABC had the decency (or was that embarrassment) to mention that the committee was dominated by opposition left-wing Senators. So, absolutely no prizes for having already guessed what this grab bag of gibbering leftie imbeciles were going to come up with:

A SENATE committee on the Scrafton affair has backed the former senior defence bureaucrat's assertion he told John Howard on the eve of the 2001 election that there was no evidence to back the children overboard claim.

A majority of senators on the select committee found the "clear implication" of the evidence given by Mike Scrafton to their inquiry was that the Prime Minister had misled the Australian public in the lead-up to the 2001 federal poll.

In August, Mr Scrafton broke a three-year silence, telling The Australian that he had told Mr Howard on the evening of November 7, 2001, that there was no evidence to support claims that children had been thrown overboard from an asylum-seekers' boat the previous month.

His explosive claims led directly to the establishment of a new Senate inquiry into the affair.

Explosive? In the way of dysentery, yes, I guess I'd have to agree with them there.

Mr Howard has consistently rejected Mr Scrafton's recollections of the November 7 phone conversations, saying he had only discussed the release of a navy video of the sinking of the asylum-seeker vessel Siev 4.

Of course he did! He had witnesses (and phone records) to back it up, too. But we'll take the word of an admitted perjurer and porn hound over the Prime Minister of Australia any day of the week, won't we boys and girls? Of course we will!

The majority committee report said phone records tendered "neither prove nor disprove" Mr Scrafton's claims about what he told the Prime Minister on November 7.

Well, nothing would, with this lot at the helm, would it? And Mr Scrafton being officially certified as a raging pathological liar wouldn't 'prove or disprove' his claims, either. It might be just sufficient to cast some doubt, though, which is the entire point. Then again, this majority Senate committee report would have gleefully accepted the testimony of Charles Manson at his parole board hearing, if it included giving PM Howard a good old-fashioned golden shower.

Lucky the minority Senators didn't roll out the reasons behind that apparent rebuke in Scrafton's official Public Service record, I guess (and the sticky things old Scrafto' was supposedly doing to/at/with/on/over/into his work computer). Also lucky they didn't remind everyone about his previous testimony to the Bryant inquiry, in which he said he hadn't recalled saying anything to the PM, which basically made either that or his later testimony perjurious.

Oh - sorry about that - it seems that someone did:

In a dissenting report, Government senators challenged the veracity of Mr Scrafton's accounts of the phone conversations and focused on the discrepancies between his evidence given to the internal Bryant inquiry in late 2001 and his later recollections as published in The Australian last August.

The dissenting report said the "most important fact" was that Mr Scrafton's recent allegations could not possibly be true "in light of the objective evidence of the telephone records".

Government senators did "not find it necessary to express a conclusion as to whether Mr Scrafton was deliberately lying to the Senate inquiry", although they made the point that, since Mr Scrafton told the committee his evidence to the Bryant inquiry was "not true", he was, by his own account of himself, a man who was prepared to lie about, and had already lied about, the events.

Funny - I seem to distinctly recall this whole thing being dropped like a hot-potato at this point - which would also be the point at which Scrafton's credibility looked to be about as shredded as the SIEV 4's hull.

"In view of all those circumstances, the 'finding' of the majority report that Mr Scrafton is a credible witness is not just counter-intuitive; it is virtually impossible to sustain on a fair reading of the evidence.

Fair? Who said anything about fair? This is a left-wing dominated inquiry, you twit. We of the Left don't do 'fair' (or honest).

"The entire weight of evidence points the other way: that Mr Scrafton's original statement to Ms Bryant's inquiry (in which he did not suggest he had told the Prime Minister the original children overboard report was inaccurate) was the truth," senators Brandis and Alan Ferguson concluded.

Democrat senator Andrew Bartlett said the first Senate inquiry into the children overboard affair in 2002 had made a serious mistake in not pushing harder for potential witnesses such as Mr Scrafton and former defence minister Peter Reith to appear.

Oh dear, it's 'grabber' Bartlett to the rescue. Oh well, not to worry. Good old AAA (and his party) is as sunk as the SIEV 4, so who really gives a flying stuff what he says. But who can resist at least a parting shot. . .

"Mr Scrafton should be congratulated for having the courage to come forward on this matter," Senator Bartlett said.

Oh? Best not to mention the nice fat job Labor Premier Bracks (Victoria) had given the little porn-gobbling weasel, I guess.

"While there were some discrepancies in his evidence - almost inevitable when recalling pressured events from three years in the past - I found him to be entirely credible."

Well, Mister Bartlett, the real question now is do we find you credible? 'Some discrepancies'? You know, some of us actually refer to those as 'lies', Andrew, but I guess it's not so clear cut when you're a biased, alcoholic, elderly-woman assaulting toad who should have resigned from Parliament long ago (assuming you had even a shred of decency). Which of course leads us to the next obvious question: do you really think those were 'pressured' events, Mister Bartlett, or actually no events at all?

Oh, and by the way, Andrew, this is what your boat looks like when you punch car-sized holes in the bottom of it so as to blackmail a Navy patrol boat into picking you up and taking you to Australia.

Gosh - look at all those people in the water. How on earth did they get there? Not just the children, I guess that 'let's turn our boat into a Swiss cheese' stunt must have thrown everyone in the water.

I guess that'd make it the 'Everyone overboard' affair, then, wouldn't it?