‘Israel is 58 years old today.

Israelis have already celebrated
with barbecues and parties. And so they should, for they've pulled off an
amazing stunt: the creation of a state for one people on the land of another -
and at their massive expense - without incurring effective sanction. Some of
those not celebrating, the Arab citizens of Israel, were also there,
demonstrating to remind the world that Israel displaced 250,000 to take their
land without compensation. 

 
‘MI5 is being accused of a cover-up for failing to
disclose to a parliamentary watchdog that it bugged the leader of the July 7
suicide bombers discussing the building of a bomb months before the London
attacks.

MI5 had secret tape recordings of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the gang leader,
talking about how to build the device and then leave the country because there
would be a lot of police activity. 

However, despite the recordings,
MI5 allowed him to escape the net. Transcripts of the tapes were never shown to
the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC), which investigated
the attacks. 

 
‘Recently, a number - one billion
- in the
New York Times stopped me in my tracks. According to a report
commissioned by the foundation charged with building Reflecting
Absence, the memorial to the dead in the attack on the World Trade
Center, its projected cost is now estimated at about a billion dollars and
still rising. According to Oliver Burkeman of the
British Guardian, "Taking inflation into account, $1bn would be
more than a quarter of the original cost of the twin towers that were destroyed
in 2001." 

‘But who is Osama bin Laden
really? 

Let me rephrase that. What is
Osama bin Laden? 

He's America's family secret. He
is the American president's dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that
purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib
of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy,
its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum
dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous
military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its
merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor
countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking
over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the
thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are
blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns,
bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while (the
Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA). The
heroin used by America's drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush
administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a "war on
drugs"....

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each
refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God and
use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of
reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are
dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the
other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The
fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to
keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.’ 

To:                 President of Iran
From:            President of Amurrica
  
Mr Moo-uh Abba-dabba-jen,
  
After carefully listening to a one minute summary prepared by my staff of your
recent 18 page letter complaining about so-called wars of aggression by the US,
torture and one-sided blind support of Israel, I have decided to write a letter
back since -after all- I am the decider. 

‘A senior defence official has raised doubts about whether
the government may be able to recover taxpayer money lost if a $1 billion navy
helicopter project is scrapped.

Defence Minister Brendan Nelson
has revealed the government is considering axing the Super Seasprite project
and suing the contractors after the fleet was grounded on safety grounds. 

The Australian navy bought 11 of
the helicopters from US defence contractor Kaman Aerospace for $1 billion in
1997, but the Seasprites have been plagued by technical problems and have never
been fully operational.’ 

‘Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than
half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing
Karl Rove. 

During the course of that
meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of
Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official
with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak
case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to
get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the
meeting said Saturday morning. 

‘Why did the government end its
own investigation of itself? Because the NSA refused to grant security
clearances to Justice Department lawyers! Without the security clearances, the
lawyers can’t look at any of the NSA’s documents or policies, and so they can’t
investigate to see if anything untoward is taking place. Got that? The
government tries to investigate itself, but then it won’t give its own
investigators clearance to do any actual investigation. This is right out of Duck Soup. Where are the
Marx Brothers when you need them? At least Groucho could get in some amusing
one-liners while feebly trying to convince the populace that the government
really is here to help them. 

‘Determining strategic
objectives, and ensuring that those objectives are not contradictory, is the
job of the most senior level of command, in this case the White House. By
demanding that U.S. and allied troops pursue two conflicting objectives
simultaneously, the Bush administration has created a no-win situation. Efforts
to defeat the Taliban only work if they can gain the support of the rural
population, but poppy eradication pushes the rural population toward the
Taliban and its allies. (One could add a third incompatible objective,
promoting women’s rights in a conservative Islamic culture.) 

‘President Bush should talk to the Iranians. Refusing to
talk is childish. How would the Cold War have ended if Ronald Reagan had
refused to talk to Soviet leaders? How would relations with China have been
established if Richard Nixon had said he would never talk to Chinese leaders? 

For heaven's sake, how would the
American Revolution have ended if the Americans had refused to talk to the
British? 

‘One in three Iraqi children is malnourished and
underweight, according to a report released by the United Nations Children's
Fund (UNICEF) in Amman on 2 May.

"Under-nutrition
should not be accepted in a country like Iraq, with its wealth of
resources," said UNICEF Special Representative for Iraq Roger Wright from
the Jordanian capital, Amman. Wright added that ongoing insecurity served to
deter parents from visiting health centres for essential services, while many
health workers had been kidnapped or killed in different parts of the country.

‘He was the undisputed ruler of
one world, convinced that the larger world outside his own immediate control
was corrupt, lacking inspiring heroes and proper values. He acted boldly on the
belief that through his own genius, combined with force, manipulation, and
powerful weapons he had no hand in creating, he could make a difference - a
positive difference, one he'd eventually be lauded for, petty carpers be
damned. 

To actuate his initially
well-intentioned scheme, he launched an enormous, convoluted and confusing set
of manipulations, tried to rid the world of magic, generated an interplanetary
war, and built a giant cosmic tower capable of creating an endless array of
alternate earths from scratch, powered by the energy forces of kidnapped
Martians, Kryptonians, and random superbeings.’ 

 ‘On May 1, Bolivia's recently elected president, Evo
Morales, the country's first indigenous leader, put on a tin hat and made the
declaration that much of the country had been waiting to hear. "The time
has come," he said, announcing "a historic day in which Bolivia
retakes absolute control of our natural resources". Mr Morales spoke of
"looting by foreign companies" and said it was time the armed forces
"occupy all the energy fields in Bolivia". But he was off pace. The
army had already moved into Bolivia's foreign-owned energy fields, refineries
and distribution depots.’

Speaking in Atlanta today, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld was sharply questioned about his pre-war claims about
WMD in Iraq. An audience member confronted Rumsfeld with his 2003 claim about
WMD, “We know where they are.” Rumsfeld falsely claimed he never said it. 

The audience member then read Rumsfeld’s quote back to him, leaving the
defense secretary speechless. 

‘Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
of detainees by U.S. forces is widespread and, in many cases, sanctioned by top
government officials, Amnesty International charged Wednesday. 

The allegations, contained in a 32,000-word report released in New York
and London and posted on the human rights organization's Web site, are likely
to influence a U.N. hearing on U.S. compliance with international torture
agreements that begins Friday in Geneva. Amnesty International sent a copy of
the report to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, which is holding the
hearings.