‘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.’ 

As protesters gather in Oklahoma for this year's Halliburton stockholders meeting, Corpwatch Director Pratap Chatterjee has given an excellent overview of Halliburton's involvement in oil exploration.

[extract from Democracy Now broadcast} 

"Halliburton is actually one of the principle players in the issue of
climate change, and the reason is that it's so profitable for them and
for the oil companies. Halliburton, in fact, is the company that
pioneered a lot of the offshore drilling technologies, the fracturing
technologies. So it's incredibly profitable for them to do this work,
and they do this and they’re part of pretty much every major oil
operation around the world.

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.’ 

adapted from the ABC …..

PM predicts relationship with US will grow closer

By US correspondent Kim Landers

Prime Minister John Howard arrived in Washington at the weekend but he is
only just now catching up with his good friend and ally, US President
George W Bush.

The President and his wife are about to join Mr and Mrs Howard in planting
saplings, taken from 200-year-old trees at the White House at the home of
the Australian Ambassador in Washington.

Read the whole tree planting at the ABC

When Australia announces that it will lease uranium to India, the deceptiveness and misleading nature of our Foreign Minister will again be revealed

Mr Downer appeared to be sticking to his principles last week when he issued a statement that Australia would not be selling uranium to India.  In attempting to repudiate a story in the Australian claiming that a nuclear transaction would take place regardless of whether India signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.  "Officials have told me that that's not correct" Mr Downer intoned.

One of the main reasons for the Halliburton-built Adelaide to Darwin Railway now becomes apparent.  If the Australian Government's mooted plans come to fruition, trains of imported nuclear waste trundling to repositories in the Australian outback will soon become a reality.

Halliburton have had a dual role in Australia, creating the tracks and providing environmental impact date for nuclear waste facilities.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard is expected this week to discuss "uranium leasing" with US President Bush.   Under the plan, Australia's 40% of global uranium supplies would not be sold, but "hired out" to users, the waste returning to the Australian point of origin.

‘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. 

So. First of all, let's define our words: what do we mean when we say "safety"? Well, for us in the corporate world, the most essential form of safety is simply the safety to achieve what we need, as we need it, and how we need it.

Whether I'm in reconstruction, energy, manufacturing, or insurance, if I'm taking a risk, I want the government's hand to be pulling me safely over the obstacles, not laying obstacles in my way. I want to be safe
to minimize the risk to my investments as I see fit, without being told
what's right and what's wrong.

Insurance firms are also concerned with safety, another form of it, a special-case definition: the safety of people. Because their own safety depends so much on that special form of safety, insurance has become quite worried about some grave new dangers to people that we're seeing in the world around us. I'm talking about climate change and the "natural" disasters it brings.

Indeed, the numbers could look frightening. In the 1950s insurance had to pay 4 billion dollars per year for disasters. Now it pays about 40 times that, or $150 billion each year. [*]
And it's getting worse; Munich Reinsurance has written that "climatic change will lead to natural catastrophes of hitherto unknown force and frequency" triggering losses of "many hundreds of billions of dollars per year."

To make things worse, there are some who believe that this is only the start. In nature, things often change very suddenly, and scientists feel that the things we've seen so far may be minor compared to what could happen.

For example, Arctic melt has slowed the Gulf Stream by 30% in just the last decade; if the Gulf Stream stops, Europe will become just as cold as Alaska.

Or it could go the other way - methane released from melting permafrost could cause a heating cycle making human life unliveable outside air-conditioned hotels like this one.

Or, as
the oceans heat up and expand, ice sheets could slip off Antarctica - meaning most of the earth's major cities will flood!

Even if none of this happens, some scientists tell us the changes we're likely to see could greatly increase disease and migration, and could exacerbate growing tensions within our societies possibly to the point of civic unrest or even war.

This sort of thinking has even influenced some insurers. Lloyd's of London has stated that climate change could easily bankrupt the entire insurance industry, and Munich Re suggests it could topple global capital markets as a consequence. [*]

Given the science, these worries cannot be called unreasonable. But panicking isn't the answer.

If we panic and try to stop climate change, 70% of carbon emissions will have to stop. That'll be a huge blow to our way of doing business: government intervention will become the rule, and we'll have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

To remain profitable in a macroscopic loss situation, we must integrate disaster into our global business vision, and not allow immediate dangers to interfere with our general, longer-term concept of safety.

We at Halliburton, for example, assure our safety not despite, but via the
ambient danger - in reconstruction, relocation of refugees, peacekeeping. These arenas are synergistic: where there's conflict, there's reconstruction; where there are refugees, there's conflict;
where there's conflict or reconstruction, there are bound to be
refugees.

Sometimes danger presents broad new opportunities. In New Orleans, for example, Katrina pruned the city, removing people from economic black holes and allowing a redevelopment process that's gratifying for all of us.
Although real estate values plummeted immediately following the disaster, much commercial real estate is already over its pre-storm values.

While we don't suggest that everyone make climate change the core of their business plan, I can personally guarantee you that level heads will always be able to turn lemons into lemonade.

Consider the Black Plague, an unspeakably rotten event in which one third of
Europe's population died in great agony. No one would wish such a thing on any civilization. Yet without the Black Plague, the
old business models of medieval Europe would never have been overturned by the entrepreneurs of the Renaissance. What would the world be without the Mona Lisa?

Or closer to home, how about the Great Deluge? This world-ending disaster was surely seen as a terrible catastrophe by Noah's contemporaries, and even by Noah
himself. Yet Noah was ready to seize the day, and at the end of that day, not only was there a whole new world, but Noah found himself with a monopoly of the animals. Not a bad deal!

Unfortunately, things aren't as simple for us as they were for Noah. God isn't telling us what kind of an ark we should build, nor how to deploy it - but  uckily Science can fill in the blanks, and Science tells us that what we're doing in the world today will lead to much more flooding,
drought, hurricanes, tornadoes, or even worse, with consequences including epidemics, human migration, civic unrest and even war.

But as Warren Buffet, the oracle of Omaha, so astutely said: you must follow “the Noah rule: predicting rain doesn't count, building arks does.

‘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.)