Journal charlie's Journal: The flip side of Afghanistan
Phil Agre, who runs the Red Rock Eater News Service, a sort of blog-by-email, has been culling interesting links to some of these pearls. (If you haven't seen RRE, maybe you ought to check it out.)
Here are some explorations of how some of GWB's friends are in bed with dubious Saudi charities fingered as terrorist fund-raising fronts, why the Northern Alliance are nearly indistinguishable from the Taliban, the uncomfortable reasons why the Bush administration refuses to go after the real culprits (in Saudi Arabia), and how US oil companies are subsidizing Al-Quaida.
I can see Osama bin Laden sitting in his cave and quoting Lenin to his followers: "the great thing about capitalism is that the capitalists will sell us enough rope to hang them".
(Note for the irony-impaired: I am not a fan of Osama bin Laden. Or Lenin, come to think of it.)
One moderately good piece of news: the UK's House of Lords, formerly a
broken parody of a constitutional instrument, has actually begun doing some
good for democracy in overly-managed Blairtown. Home Secretary David
Blunkett's anti-terrorism bill has been gutted, with the most dangerous
provisions for civil liberties stripped out in order to get the rest of it
past a fractious, rebellious, House of Lords. Like US Attorney General
Ashcroft, Blunkett had tried to ram through a number of repressive
provisions under the guise of a clampdown on terrorism; these included
a new offense of incitement to religious hatred (which I imagine had the Church of $cientology drooling down the phone to their lawyers) and
astoundingly wide-reaching wiretap and data retention provisions for
telecommunications carriers. The HoL is in transition from being an
unelected chamber of hereditary inbred chinless wonders to -- I hope --
being a directly elected upper chamber; currently it's occupied by
political apparatchiks and bishops, but at least the apparatchiks and
bishops seem to be taking their revising responsibility seriously. And -- possibly
because they don't have to worry about defending their seats at the next
election -- they're willing to do the Right [but unpopular] thing
(Second note for the irony-impaired: the UK's statute books are already crammed with thirty years' worth of the most draconian anti- terrorism laws in the developed world. Somehow I don't think Passing Another Law will reduce the chances of a suicidal fanatic crashing a 747 into Canary Wharf one iota -- but making it an imprisonable offense to criticise any religious beliefs would tear up and throw away the "freedom of speech" clause in the Bill of Rights we finally got last year.)
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