‘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. 

‘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?