A response to Joel D. Palmer's letter

As one who owns a house in Indonesia and spends a great deal of time there, I find the comments from Joel D. Palmer, Jakarta, (Fear and loathing in Jakarta, CNN style, Your Letters, The Jakarta Post, July 14, 2004) to be a typical of the "head-in-the-sand" expat.

His opinion almost mirrors that of the cleric, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, who claims the bombings were the work of the CIA and that there is no such organization as JI. In addition, he makes the accusation that "...90 percent of the information, as leaked to Time magazine and sister media outlet CNN, turned out to be provably and outrageously false..." from the book, The Seeds of Terror by Maria Ressa, but offers no proof or facts to back up his claims.

He obviously has not read the transcripts of the testimonies of the convicted terrorists from the Bali and Marriott bombings, and the would-be JI terrorists testimony who were arrested post 9-11 in Singapore.

The idea of CNN being a Bush supporter is totally laughable. If you were to ask anyone (left or right on the political spectrum) in the United States about the political leanings of CNN, you would get the opposite response to that espoused by Palmer.

Maybe Palmer should write a book debunking Ressa's book with the facts of the "big picture". Or, maybe he could do a "Fahrenheit CNN" motion picture with interviews of wrongly accused terrorists who could give us the true story of the "internal political strife" of their respective countries.

ROBIN ELDRIDGE, Denver, Colorado-USA