Forever will he be an upstanding member of the vile spew that is the mainstay of Fox News. Despite his support for the war, the Reverend of the church of hate, Bill O'Reilly has said that what Iraq needs, for the short term at least, is some Saddam style justice.

"See, if I'm president, I've got probably another 50-60,000 with orders to shoot on sight anybody violating curfews. Shoot 'em on sight. That's me. President O'Reilly, curfew in Ramadi, 7 o'clock at night. You're on the street, you're dead. I shoot you right between the eyes. OK?

That's how I'd run that country -- just like Saddam ran it. Saddam didn't have explosions. He didn't have bombers, did he? Because if you got out of line, you're dead.

Now, is that the kind of country I want for Iraq? No. But you have to have that for a few months to stabilize the situation so the Iraqi government can get organized, can get security in place and get the structure going."

A few days later he said:

"At this point, the new Iraqi government should declare martial law in areas controlled by insurgents. That means anyone can be arrested and shoot-on-sight curfews.

Saddam was able to control Iraq, as you know, and defeat insurgencies against him. The new Iraqi government can do the same, but it needs to get much tougher."

He also attacks the ACLU and, bizarrely the BBC because it 'helps the enemy'.

O'Reilly obviously hasn't been paying enough attention, for a while there has been news about Iraq's interior ministry and its use of death squads, one of which is lovingly named the Wolf Brigade. Victims of this group usually end up floating in the Tigris with the likely cause of death being a drill hole to the skull.

Elsewhere: Can anyone else smell a set-up? The American backed militia looses Mogadishu to the Islamists, and now we hear that they have "said in a statement it had appointed Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys as its new leader. The Bush administration has said Aweys was an associate of Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s."