Does anyone else find it incredible that top US and Chinese officials are, at this moment, negotiating a letter of agreement on what happened in the mid-air collision of a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter?

Negotiating the release of the US crew I understand. Negotiating whether and how regrets, apologies, and/or remunerations (in either direction) should be handled, I understand. That's politics.

It's simply astounding to me that the certified factual account of what happened in the skies near China is being decided rather than determined.

When a plane crash happens in the US, the NTSB and in many cases the FBI spend between three months and three years gathering and examining the evidence, getting accounts from eyewitnesses, mechanics, crew, examining communications, flight recorders, and computer simulations in order to find the truth.

In this case the truth doesn't seem to matter. China puts a widow and a surviving pilot on the air and a country demands an apology. The US, on the other hand, only just today got to talk to the crew without Chinese present, they haven't been permitted anywhere near the plane, and the two words black box haven't been mentioned in any of the near hundred news reports I've seen and heard.

On one hand I'd like to see a little posturing, a little "we can't give an apology if we can't get the facts, and you won't let us get those facts, so how much weight would such an empty apology have?" On the other hand, I don't trust Bush's capabilities as a diplomat, and so I'm relieved that he's playing the safest road possible.

Maybe it's just media training, but I keep checking news sites for breaking information. If it were a terrorist attack or a commercial jet accident (think Flight 800 or the Concorde crash) there would be new information, new evidence, not just new political maneuverings.

The big thing though is how much this resembles Orwell's '1984'. There are three countries, and as one of them 'we' are either aligned with one or the other. Whenever that alliance changes, all the old newspapers are updated to make it seem like it was always so. Fact and Truth become tools of the politicos, and they change to match what's Prudent. Isn't that what's happening here?

I'm a big believer in peace, but is it worth it, when taken to the extreme, to have an international peace if it's brokered at the expense of truth by the whim of propaganda?

In short: aren't we caving to those governmental policies we find so reprehensible in the Chinese when we agree to broker truth based on need and not fact, no matter what 'brokered truth' emerges? At that point it doesn't matter whether the document says the Us was at fault or the Chinese, because the document's very existence determines that both are at fault of a crime far more grave than the collision of two aircraft.