Not a day goes by here in Colombo without talk of dozens if not hundreds of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) cadres killed in air raids over Mulaiteevu, Kilinochchi and every other village in Batticaloa and Vanni.

The journalists here have it so easy. I don't think they even bother to write articles anymore. Most seem to be from ten years back, with the dates and on occasions village names changed. The number of LTTE cadres killed and the damage done seems to be exactly the same.

What is surprising is the relative ease with journalists are getting away with their recycled stories. The Sinhala public, en masse appears to be suffering from collective loss of memory.

It is visible no more anywhere else than with stories relating to the Israeli made Kfir fighter jets. All of a sudden these killers seem to have acquired some sort of omnipotence, perhaps injected by the similarly skilled Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Kfirs were introduced into service by the Sri Lanka Armed Forces in 1996, at the time when peace talks between the LTTE and the Chandrika government collapsed.

A tinker through the news archives and what do we get? You guessed it; 'terrorist bases annihilated' and '50 tiger cadres killed'. These were headlines more than a decade ago. Before Unceasing Waves!

So where was the mighty Kfir during Unceasing Waves 1, 2, and 3? Why couldn't the Kfir annihilate the tigers that overran Mulaiteevu military complex? Why couldn't the Kfirs prevent the LTTE from overrunning all the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) camps in the Vanni region over a period of just three weeks? How effective were the Kfirs in protecting the mighty Elephant Pass military complex.

No doubt that Kfirs have the capacity to drop bombs and kill people. But are they any use in killing trained LTTE cadres or taking out LTTE positions? If they are, then what were they doing during Unceasing Waves?

There is a reason why Israel, the country which made the Kfirs does not use them anymore. And until the Sinhala public realises this, we are bound to be bombarded with column inches of tigers killed and bases annihilated.

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