Why is it forbidden to ask Why the terrorism occurs?
As has always been the case, the core of sympathy, recruiting and financial support for Arab terrorism can most easily be gained by touching on the Israel, Palestinian, Iraq, Saudi, oil, and US military issues. There is room and need for real change here, but the question "why?" and "what policies does the west need to change to undermine the support for terrorists?" are forbidden to be asked in the Western political/media elite. A typical example is Gerard Henderson.

In this article Henderson is about as far left and liberal as a mainstream columnist can get, and makes some good points against the absurdity of the racist and scaremongering linkage exploited by the Howard government, that terrorists or sleepers are among the desperate boat people of Afghanistan and Iraq. But the questions "why" and "what do we need to change" are forbidden to be raised.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/18/1037599358397.html

Bin Laden explains why the terrorism has occurred.
Comparing the online transcripts of the Bin Laden tape of 13 Nov 02 on the SMH and Indymedia sites show that the SMH version has been slightly edited or censored in an interesting way.

The following passages were omitted from the SMH version:

"To the peoples of the countries allied to the iniquitous American government:"

- this was cut from the beginning of the statement. It is significant, Bin laden is clearly addressing his message to the peoples of the Governments allied to America, both his bombs and his words.

"So the Muslim nation begins to attack you with its children, who are committed before God to continue the jihad, by word and by the sword, to establish justice and eradicate injustice, for as long as their hearts continue to beat.

"Finally, we pray to God to aid us that His religion might triumph, and pursue the jihad unto death, so as to merit His mercy."

- these two paragraphs were also cut. They are less significant. One wonders why it was felt necessary to cut anything from what is a concise statement in the original. And the way it has been cut and presented in the SMH version suggests that rather more was cut than has in fact been done. It doesnt exactly inspire trust in the corporate media.

Key Bin Laden statements carried in both Indymedia and SMH versions:

"To the peoples of the countries allied to the iniquitous American government:

"The road to salvation begins with the end of aggression. It is only justice to give back the same. What has happened since the conquests of New York and Washington up until now - like the operations on Germans in Tunisia, the explosion of the French tanker in Yemen, on the French in Karachi, the operations against the Marines in Failaka [Kuwait], on Australians and Britons in the explosions in Bali, as well as the recent hostage-taking in Moscow and other operations here and there - were nothing but the response of Muslims eager to defend their religion and respond to the order of God and their Prophet.

"What Bush, the pharaoh of the century, did by murdering our children in Iraq and what Israel, the ally of America, did in bombing houses of the elderly, women and children in Palestine, using American planes, was enough for the wise among your leaders to distance themselves from this criminal gang.

"Our people in Palestine have been massacred and subjected to the worst of suffering for nearly a century. If we defend our people in Palestine, the world gets agitated and coalesces against Muslims under the cover of the war against terrorism, unjustly and in a false way.

"Do your governments not know that the clique in the White House is made up of the greatest murderers of the century?

"Rumsfeld [US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld] is the butcher of Vietnam who has killed more than two million people. Cheney [US Vice-President, Dick Cheney] and Powell [US Secretary of State, Colin Powell] have murdered and destroyed in Baghdad more than did Houlagou," [a reference to a 13th-century Mongol who conquered the city].

"Why did your governments ally themselves with America to attack us in Afghanistan, and I cite in particular Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia. Australia was warned about its participation [in the war] in Afghanistan and its ignoble contribution to the separation of East Timor [from Indonesia]. But it ignored this warning until it was awakened by the echoes of explosions in Bali. Its government subsequently pretended, falsely, that its citizens were not targeted.

"If you suffer to see your [people] killed and those of your allies in Tunisia, in Karachi, in Failaka, Bali and Amman, remember our [people] killed among the children of Palestine, in Iraq. Remember our dead in Afghanistan.

"As you look at your dead in Moscow, also recall ours in Chechnya. For how long will fear, massacres, destruction, exile, orphanhood and widowhood be our lot, while security, stability and joy remain your domain alone? It is high time that equality be established to this effect.

"As you assassinate, so will you be [assassinated], and as you bomb so will you likewise be."

Full transcript, Indymedia version:
http://idaho.indymedia.org/news/2002/11/207.php
Edited transcript, SMH version:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/13/1037080777633.html

We Have Played Straight Into Bin Laden's Hands
"Contained in [Bin Laden's message] is the clear warning that it will be a European country that will be targeted as a "punishment" for supporting America. So what have we done about it? The blunt answer is play straight into his hands.

"It is astonishing that, having cornered Saddam Hussein and forced him to give in to a ferocious UN resolution, both Washington and London are saying that they don't believe him and that the war plans are still on, for all the world giving the impression that the object is forced regime change whatever he does. How do we think this goes down in a Muslim world that is already convinced that President Bush is pursuing a plan that has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with oil?

"What do we think we're doing when we indicate that we support President Putin in Chechnya, when we pretend not to notice what the Chinese are doing with the Turkomans, or when we support the worst of regimes in Uzbekistan and Jerusalem?"

"The... most important thing is to do everything we can to deprive al-Qa'ida of any legitimacy in the Islamic or the Third World.

"My own feeling is that the al-Qa'ida threat is greatly exaggerated. It has money. It has a hard core of loyal devotees. And it has relations with a host of Islamic groups of one sort and another round the world. But it doesn't control them and it can only succeed with them in so far as their individual causes are given life.

"Deprive the group of its funds (as we have so far been singularly unsuccessful in doing) and you remove its influence. Deprive it of its cause, and you leave it without its justification. If Bin Laden becomes a champion of the Muslim downtrodden, it is only because we will have made him so."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1115-02.htm

Albanian and Russian Observers Sent to Monitor American Elections
"The joke, during the endless presidential election recounts in Florida two years ago, was that Russia and Albania would send poll monitors to help the United States with its unexpected bump on the road to democracy. Now, the joke has become reality.

"A high-level delegation of European and North American election observers including members from Russia and Albania arrived yesterday for a week-long mission to watch Florida's mid-term elections, which take place on Tuesday.

"Their task: to see if the world's most powerful democracy has learned anything from the disastrous 36-day showdown between George Bush and Al Gore in 2000, in which the world saw every wart in Florida's deeply flawed electoral system without ever discovering for sure who had won."
http://commondreams.org/headlines02/1031-02.htm

Bali and Imperalism, by John Pilger.
"Last week's atrocity in Bali, like the September 11 attacks on America, did not happen in isolation. They were products, like everything, of the past. According to George W Bush, Tony Blair and now Australia's prime minister, John Howard, we have no right to understand them. We must simply get the criminals, dead or alive.

"The fact that the Bush posse has caught no terrorist of proven importance since September 11 makes a grim parody of Bush's semi-literate threats and Blair's missionary deceptions as they prepare a terrorist attack on Iraq that will be the horror of Bali many times over."

"State terrorism is a taboo term. Politicans never utter it. Newspapers rarely describe it. Academic "experts" suppress it; and yet, in many cases, it helps us understand the root causes of non-state atrocities like Bali and September 11. It is by far the most menacing form of terrorism, for it has the capacity to kill not 200, but hundreds of thousands. In each shower of cluster bombs that will fall on Iraq will be countless Sari Clubs. The dropping of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima was the equivalent of the horror of the Twin Towers 100 times over.

"State terrorism, backed by America, Britain and Australia, has scarred Indonesia for the past 40 years. For example, the source of the worst violence is the Indonesian army, which the West has supported and armed. Today, troops continue to terrorise the provinces of Aceh and West Papua, where they are "protecting" the American Exxon oil company's holdings and the Freeport mine.

"In West Papua, the army openly supports an Islamic group, Lashkar Jihad, which is linked to al-Qaeda."

"This was only the latest in Australia's long complicity with state terrorism in Indonesia, which makes a mockery of the self-deluding declarations last week that Australia had "lost its innocence" in Bali. Certainly, few Australians are aware that not far from their holiday hotels are mass graves with the remains of some 80,000 people murdered in Bali in 1965-66 with the connivance of the Australian government.

"Recently-released files reveal that when the Indonesian tyrant General Suharto seized power in the 1960s, he did so with the secret backing of the American, British and Australian governments, which looked the other way or actively encouraged the slaughter of more than half a million "communists". This was later described by the CIA as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th Century".

"The Australian Prime Minister at the time, Harold Holt, quipped: "With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it's safe to assume a reorientation has taken place." Holt's remark accurately reflected the collaboration of the Australian foreign affairs and political establishment. The Australian embassy in Jakarta described the massacres as a "cleansing process". In Canberra, officals in the Prime Minister's department expressed support for "any measures to assist the Indonesian army cope with the internal situation"."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2530

Amnesty Says U.S. Missile Strike in Yemen May Be Illegal
"LONDON, Nov. 8 -- Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy group, wrote to President Bush today to question Washington's deadly missile attack on al Qaeda suspects in Yemen.

"Six men suspected of membership in the militant Islamic network died Sunday when their car was hit by a Hellfire missile fired from an unmanned Predator aircraft operated by the CIA.

""If this was the deliberate killing of suspects in lieu of arrest, in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat, the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of international human rights law," the London-based group said in a statement. "The United States should issue a clear and unequivocal statement that it will not sanction extra-judicial executions.""
http://commondreams.org/headlines02/1109-03.htm

US far right wins grip on the country in mid-term elections.
"And so one of American liberalism's darkest days was repeated across the country. Minnesota and Missouri, long-time Democrat strongholds, fell. Governor Jeb Bush, despite the Democrats insisting that justice now be done for those infamous chads, won in Florida. As if to underscore conservatism's ascendancy, the only Democrat gain was in Arkansas where the Republican senator had suffered a messy divorce and his Democrat challenger was even more pro-gun and pro-Bible than the incumbent.

"The result is that the Republicans now control the Senate, House and the presidency for the first time since President Eisenhower. The consolidation of America as an ultra conservative country is going to take place rapidly. Mr Bush may have offered a few tit-bits to show his credentials as a 'compassionate conservative', like his concern to reduce the price of prescription drugs for the elderly, but the core of the Republican program is anything but. There will be radical tax cuts for the rich and the corporations; a freezing of all efforts to stiffen regulation in the wake of America's corporate scandals; moves to privatize the social security system; and a roll-back of environmental protection.

"Nor do the Conservatives' ambitions stop there. Following the ideas of the high priest of ultra conservatism, Leo Strauss, they want to construct a republic of 'moral', god-fearing citizens who adhere to traditional virtues, rewarding the rich who can only have become rich through the virtue of hard work and penalizing the poor who are only poor because of their own fecklessness. Above all, by now having the opportunity to pack the judiciary with extreme right-wing judges, they intend to do away with the famous Roe v Wade judgment that legalized abortion. This is the most fiercely reactionary program to have emerged in any Western democracy since the war, and for which last Tuesday's vote, argue Republicans, is an explicit mandate."

"One poignant photo said it all: Georgia's defeated Democratic senator, Max Cleland, sitting in a wheelchair, missing both legs and an arm lost in combat in Vietnam. This highly decorated hero was defeated by a Vietnam war draft-dodger who had the audacity to accuse Cleland of being "unpatriotic" after the senator courageously voted against giving Bush unlimited war-related powers. I do not recall a more shameful moment in American politics."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1110-09.htm
http://commondreams.org/views02/1110-07.htm

Bush's real target may be Iran.
Speculative, but plausible, piece on future American wars:

"Bush's victory is clearly a mandate to proceed with his crusade against Iraq. Preparations for war are in an advanced stage. The U.S. has been quietly moving heavy armour and mechanized units from Europe to the Mideast. Three division equivalents and a Marine heavy brigade are now in theatre. An armada of U.S. warplanes is assembling around Iraq, which is bombed almost daily. U.S. special forces are operating in northern Iraq, and, along with Israeli scout units, in Iraq's western desert near the important H2 airbase. The war could begin as early as mid-December if there is no coup against Saddam Hussein.

"But for all the propaganda about wicked Saddam, Iraq is not the main objective for the small but powerful coterie of Pentagon hardliners driving the Bush administration's national security policy. Nor is it for their intellectual and emotional peers in Israel's right-wing Likud party. The real target of the coming war is Iran, which Israel views as its principal and most dangerous enemy. Iraq merely serves as a pretext to whip America into a war frenzy and to justify insertion of large numbers of U.S. troops into Mesopotamia.

"The prevailing view in the Israeli military is that Iraq will be quickly defeated by U.S. forces, and then likely split into two or three cantons. Israel's North American supporters, however, are still being given the party line that Israel is in mortal danger from Iraq.

"Iran is a different story. Iran is expected to produce a few nuclear weapons within five years to counter Israel's large nuclear arsenal, and is developing medium-range missiles, Shahab-3s and -4s, that can easily reach Tel Aviv.

"With 68 million people and a growing industrial base, Iran is seen by Israel as a serious threat and major Mideast geopolitical rival. Both nations have their eye on Iraq's vast oil reserves.

"Israel's newly appointed hardline defence minister, former air force chief Shaul Mofaz, who was born in Iran, has previously threatened to attack Iran's nuclear installations. Thanks to long-range F-15Is supplied by the U.S., plus cruise and ballistic missiles, Israel can strike targets all over Iran. This week, Israel's grand strategy was clearly revealed for the first time, though barely noticed by North American media, as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called for an invasion of Iran "the day after" Iraq is crushed.

"In the U.S., Pentagon hardliners are drawing up plans to invade Iran once Iraq and its oil are "liberated." They hope civil war will erupt in Iran, which is riven by bitterly hostile factions, after which a pro-U.S. regime will take power. If this does not occur, then Iraq-based U.S. forces will be ideally positioned to attack Iran. Or, they could just as well move west and invade Syria, another of Israel's most bitter enemies.

"Israel's Likudniks thirst for revenge against Syria - and also Iran - for supporting Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, which drove Israeli forces from Lebanon.

"Pentagon superhawk Richard Perle, told the TVO program Diplomatic Immunity that the U.S. was prepared to attack Syria, Iran, and Lebanon.

"By February or March, the U.S. media will likely be flooded with dire warnings about the threat to the world from Iran. Israel's American lobby will turn its guns from Iraq to Iran. "Links" will surely be "discovered" between Iran and al-Qaida. The cookie-cutter pattern that worked for whipping up war psychosis against Iraq should work just as well against Iran, Syria or Saudi Arabia - and win the next national election."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1110-07.htm

The New Protest movement: Something is stirring among the people.
"One measure of the strength of popular anti-establishment movements is their suppression as news. Millions of people took to the streets in Italy last month, yet the main political news in Britain the next day was the latest Machiavellian utterances of Gordon Brown. On 28 September, the historic demonstration of 400,000 people in London was considered worthy only of trivialisation by the Observer. Nowhere in the begrudging reporting of that extraordinary day was there recognition of a new, diverse and growing constituency of angry people no longer interested in the small circuses that fill tombstones of column inches, such as the diddum tears of Estelle Morris.

"My guess is that a great many people would agree, for very different reasons, with Peter Mandelson's prediction that "the era of representative democracy is coming to an end". That has long been demonstrably true in the United States. It is a truth that has eluded many journalists and broadcasters, understandably, as the main function of so much political reporting is to run a cigarette paper between the parties and to channel spin.

"The public understands this, which is why the audience for political news on television has slumped. Blaming the public for its "lack of interest in politics" is the self-deluding excuse of media executives who claim an insight into the popular mood, yet are contemptuous of it. In truth, the public has never been more interested in real politics, which it does not associate with the deceptions and gossip of an elective oligarchy."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=2579

A Real Plan for Combatting Terrorism
"6. Encourage Israel to withdraw immediately from the territories occupied in 1967, and support the establishment of a Palestinian state within these borders. We should work with both sides to assure the security of each state and validity of the borders.

"7. End the client-state system of American empire. We must cease all funding and arming of non-democratic governments, with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt at the top of the list. After all, it should be assumed that whoever funds and arms dictatorships will be the object of resentment and reprisal from those who suffer under such regimes. We should then immediately announce a plan to provide economic development aid (not loans) for those nations and political organizations willing to democratize and observe international human rights standards.

"8. Start to observe democracy and human rights standards in our own domestic and foreign policy (see the Amnesty International report on human rights in the United States). This will improve the sort of good will necessary for international cooperation in police work. International good will toward the U.S. was prominent in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. It has been completely squandered by the Bush administration, who have succeeded in the dubious achievement of uniting most of the world against us.

"You won't hear the Bush administration or the Democrats talk about these types of solutions, because they are not serious about reducing terrorism. Their primary goals are political and economic power for themselves and their clients in corporate America, who fund their campaigns. First in importance among these corporate donors are the energy companies, who help so much to put the "conflict" in "conflic of interest." Terrorism is the natural outcome of such arrangements, and is seen as worth the price.

"These proposals would cost money, but probably not as much money as will be spent on useless weapons systems like "Star Wars" (not very helpful in fighting fanatics armed with box cutters) and perpetual wars involving the bombing of brown-skinned people. Needless to say, in addition to increasing our security dramatically, radical policies would have tremendous environmental and economic benefits. In the end, they would likely generate revenue and help to democratize our economy."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1118-01.htm

Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter turned anti-war campaigner.
"Keep this in the back of your head: About 3,000 Iraqi children are starving to death each month -- outside the view of American heartstrings," Ritter said. "Suppose every month 3,000 Iraqi children were lined up and we threatened to shoot them if Saddam Hussein didn't do what we wanted. Suppose we gave orders for the Marines to shoot them. Well, nothing would happen because Marines don't shoot kids. But that doesn't mean America doesn't kill children. We just starve them to death.

"Ritter made the case that America is hellbent on war with Iraq no matter what U.N. arms inspectors find if readmitted to that country. Why? We want to control Mideast oil.

"We see the world as one big grocery store," he said. When the United States needs another country's natural resource, he said, we will make friends with oppressive regimes to get it, steal it or take it by force.

"Instead of hunting down terrorists with Predator drones, only to see them replaced by more terrorists, better to ask why and how people become terrorists in the first place, Ritter said."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1113-01.htm

US Corporations have the rights of persons
"But in 1886, the consent of the people was stolen. A bizarre distortion of the Santa Clara Supreme Court decision by the Court's reporter led to corporations claiming that they were also entitled to the human rights laid out for We, The People in the Bill of Rights and the free-the-slaves Fourteenth Amendment. They claimed, even though the Supreme Court had explicitly not ruled it, that they had won the rights of humans: corporate personhood.

Unions wouldn't get those rights (and still don't have them), nor would churches or associations or family-owned businesses, and not even governments would ever have those rights (because the Bill of Rights was explicitly intended as a weapon for fragile humans to use to hold back the potentially repressive powers inherent in any government), but corporations exclusively, the Court's reporter said, would share them with humans.

"Thus, our largest corporations have now claimed the First Amendment right of free speech, and captured control of our airwaves and many of our politicians. They've claimed the Fourth Amendment right of privacy, and tell us we can't inspect their voting machines that determine the fate of our democracy. They've claimed the Fourteenth Amendment right to be free of discrimination, and tell local communities they have no right to nurture small, local businesses while "discriminating against" predatory multinational corporations."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1116-03.htm

The Covert Biotech War
Patents and Copyrights have underpin the conversion of genetically modified food to a Rent Seeking monopoly.

"The real problem with engineered crops, as this column has been pointing out for several years, is that they permit the big biotech companies to place a padlock on the food chain. By patenting the genes and all the technologies associated with them, the corporations are maneuvering themselves into a position from which they can exercise complete control over what we eat."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1119-02.htm

Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright
"The spread of the Linux operating system kernel has directed attention at the free software movement. This paper shows why free software, far from being a marginal participant in the commercial software market, is the vital first step in the withering away of the intellectual property system".

Some reader-unfriendly jargon in this piece but afterwards an interesting history and interpretation of the computer/software industry, including the Internet, IBM, Unix, Microsoft, Software Copyrights, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds etc.
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html

Why Free Software? Look at the numbers!
Lengthy research paper giving figures on the seemingly unstoppable march of the brilliant Free Software (GNU/Linux) concept to an historically, socially, economically and politically significant victory. It only remains for the pre-installed desktop market to be penetrated.
http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

The Freenet Project
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though
she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about.
I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say
'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away
from the Internet?" -Mike Godwin

"At present the Internet is seen as a hot-bed of anarchy, beyond the controls of individual governments, a system which ensures free-speech and free-thought by its very nature. Unfortunately, while this seems true at present, it is caused more by a lack of knowledge about the technology involved, rather than being a feature of the technology. It is actually the case that the Internet could lead to our lives being monitored, and our thinking manipulated and corrupted to a degree that would go beyond the wildest imaginings of Orwell."

"[The project] allows information to be made available to a large group of people in a similar manner to the World Wide Web. Improvements over this existing system include:
- No central control or administration required
- Anonymous information publication and retrieval
- Dynamic duplication of popular information
- Transfer of information location depending upon demand

"The aim of this project is to devise a key-indexed information storage and retrieval system with the following properties:
1. The system should have no element of centralised control or administration
2. It should provide anonymity to both providers and consumers of information
3. The system should be robust in handling hardware and software failure
4. It should adapt to changing demands and resources in an effcient manner
5. Its performance should be comparable to that of existing mass information
distribution systems such as the World Wide Web."

"While the Domain Name System is distributed, it is still centrally controlled. There is little, from a technical perspective, to prevent the owners of the root domain name servers from reclaiming the ability to administer sub-domains of the system, or from accidentally stopping the entire system from operating."

"Normally each piece of information on the World Wide Web is stored once
on an individual computer on the Internet. Every time anybody wishes to
view that information a request is sent to that computer and it returns the
relevant piece of information. This model works well when there are relatively
few requests, however if a piece of information becomes increasingly popular
then the computer possessing the piece of information can become swamped by
requests, preventing many from obtaining the information.

"The World Wide Web offers little anonymity to either producers or consumers
of information. If it is possible to retrieve a piece of information then an IP address for the server on which the information is stored must have been found. If this is the case then that IP address may be matched to an organisation or person. Even if that person did not create the information, they are responsible for its availability, and thus could be forced to remove the information."

"UseNet is one of the older systems on the Internet. It is a world-wide bulletin-board discussion system where people may post articles, and respond to the postings of others... While Usenet succeeds in being a distributed, and largely decentralised system it is extremely inefficient. The requirement that every message posted to the system must be distributed to each and every server on the system means that each server must be capable of storing huge quantities of data (if each article is not to expire before anyone has a chance to read it). Furthermore, the band-width required to transfer the new messages between servers is extremely high. It does serve as an example of one method to achieve a distributed decentralised information distribution system, but does so at the price of extreme inefficiency, and lack of security. Having said that, of all the systems described in this section, the operation of Usenet comes closest to that of the system described in this report."

"A simplistic way to look at Freenet is as a filesystem, where anyone can save a file under a filename of their choice, and anyone else, given the filename, can load the file, but unlike a file system, you cannot modify or overwrite a file in Freenet, and Freenet will only retain a file for so-long as it is popular."

"It is the author's intention to create a fully operational Adaptive Network using the simulation described in this documentation as a starting-point. The client will be written in the Java programming language, and will be developed in an open manner with the cooperation of interested parties on the Internet. It will be released under the GNU Public Licence."
http://freenetproject.org/

Why is it forbidden to ask Why the terrorism occurs?
As has always been the case, the core of sympathy, recruiting and financial support for Arab terrorism can most easily be gained by touching on the Israel, Palestinian, Iraq, Saudi, oil, and US military issues. There is room and need for real change here, but the question "why?" and "what policies does the west need to change to undermine the support for terrorists?" are forbidden to be asked in the Western political/media elite. A typical example is Gerard Henderson.

In this article Henderson is about as far left and liberal as a mainstream columnist can get, and makes some good points against the absurdity of the racist and scaremongering linkage exploited by the Howard government, that terrorists or sleepers are among the desperate boat people of Afghanistan and Iraq. But the questions "why" and "what do we need to change" are forbidden to be raised.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/18/1037599358397.html

Bin Laden explains why the terrorism has occurred.
Comparing the online transcripts of the Bin Laden tape of 13 Nov 02 on the SMH and Indymedia sites show that the SMH version has been slightly edited or censored in an interesting way.

The following passages were omitted from the SMH version:

"To the peoples of the countries allied to the iniquitous American government:"

- this was cut from the beginning of the statement. It is significant, Bin laden is clearly addressing his message to the peoples of the Governments allied to America, both his bombs and his words.

"So the Muslim nation begins to attack you with its children, who are committed before God to continue the jihad, by word and by the sword, to establish justice and eradicate injustice, for as long as their hearts continue to beat.

"Finally, we pray to God to aid us that His religion might triumph, and pursue the jihad unto death, so as to merit His mercy."

- these two paragraphs were also cut. They are less significant. One wonders why it was felt necessary to cut anything from what is a concise statement in the original. And the way it has been cut and presented in the SMH version suggests that rather more was cut than has in fact been done. It doesnt exactly inspire trust in the corporate media.

Key Bin Laden statements carried in both Indymedia and SMH versions:

"To the peoples of the countries allied to the iniquitous American government:

"The road to salvation begins with the end of aggression. It is only justice to give back the same. What has happened since the conquests of New York and Washington up until now - like the operations on Germans in Tunisia, the explosion of the French tanker in Yemen, on the French in Karachi, the operations against the Marines in Failaka [Kuwait], on Australians and Britons in the explosions in Bali, as well as the recent hostage-taking in Moscow and other operations here and there - were nothing but the response of Muslims eager to defend their religion and respond to the order of God and their Prophet.

"What Bush, the pharaoh of the century, did by murdering our children in Iraq and what Israel, the ally of America, did in bombing houses of the elderly, women and children in Palestine, using American planes, was enough for the wise among your leaders to distance themselves from this criminal gang.

"Our people in Palestine have been massacred and subjected to the worst of suffering for nearly a century. If we defend our people in Palestine, the world gets agitated and coalesces against Muslims under the cover of the war against terrorism, unjustly and in a false way.

"Do your governments not know that the clique in the White House is made up of the greatest murderers of the century?

"Rumsfeld [US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld] is the butcher of Vietnam who has killed more than two million people. Cheney [US Vice-President, Dick Cheney] and Powell [US Secretary of State, Colin Powell] have murdered and destroyed in Baghdad more than did Houlagou," [a reference to a 13th-century Mongol who conquered the city].

"Why did your governments ally themselves with America to attack us in Afghanistan, and I cite in particular Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia. Australia was warned about its participation [in the war] in Afghanistan and its ignoble contribution to the separation of East Timor [from Indonesia]. But it ignored this warning until it was awakened by the echoes of explosions in Bali. Its government subsequently pretended, falsely, that its citizens were not targeted.

"If you suffer to see your [people] killed and those of your allies in Tunisia, in Karachi, in Failaka, Bali and Amman, remember our [people] killed among the children of Palestine, in Iraq. Remember our dead in Afghanistan.

"As you look at your dead in Moscow, also recall ours in Chechnya. For how long will fear, massacres, destruction, exile, orphanhood and widowhood be our lot, while security, stability and joy remain your domain alone? It is high time that equality be established to this effect.

"As you assassinate, so will you be [assassinated], and as you bomb so will you likewise be."

Full transcript, Indymedia version:
http://idaho.indymedia.org/news/2002/11/207.php
Edited transcript, SMH version:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/13/1037080777633.html

We Have Played Straight Into Bin Laden's Hands
"Contained in [Bin Laden's message] is the clear warning that it will be a European country that will be targeted as a "punishment" for supporting America. So what have we done about it? The blunt answer is play straight into his hands.

"It is astonishing that, having cornered Saddam Hussein and forced him to give in to a ferocious UN resolution, both Washington and London are saying that they don't believe him and that the war plans are still on, for all the world giving the impression that the object is forced regime change whatever he does. How do we think this goes down in a Muslim world that is already convinced that President Bush is pursuing a plan that has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with oil?

"What do we think we're doing when we indicate that we support President Putin in Chechnya, when we pretend not to notice what the Chinese are doing with the Turkomans, or when we support the worst of regimes in Uzbekistan and Jerusalem?"

"The... most important thing is to do everything we can to deprive al-Qa'ida of any legitimacy in the Islamic or the Third World.

"My own feeling is that the al-Qa'ida threat is greatly exaggerated. It has money. It has a hard core of loyal devotees. And it has relations with a host of Islamic groups of one sort and another round the world. But it doesn't control them and it can only succeed with them in so far as their individual causes are given life.

"Deprive the group of its funds (as we have so far been singularly unsuccessful in doing) and you remove its influence. Deprive it of its cause, and you leave it without its justification. If Bin Laden becomes a champion of the Muslim downtrodden, it is only because we will have made him so."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1115-02.htm

Albanian and Russian Observers Sent to Monitor American Elections
"The joke, during the endless presidential election recounts in Florida two years ago, was that Russia and Albania would send poll monitors to help the United States with its unexpected bump on the road to democracy. Now, the joke has become reality.

"A high-level delegation of European and North American election observers including members from Russia and Albania arrived yesterday for a week-long mission to watch Florida's mid-term elections, which take place on Tuesday.

"Their task: to see if the world's most powerful democracy has learned anything from the disastrous 36-day showdown between George Bush and Al Gore in 2000, in which the world saw every wart in Florida's deeply flawed electoral system without ever discovering for sure who had won."
http://commondreams.org/headlines02/1031-02.htm

Bali and Imperalism, by John Pilger.
"Last week's atrocity in Bali, like the September 11 attacks on America, did not happen in isolation. They were products, like everything, of the past. According to George W Bush, Tony Blair and now Australia's prime minister, John Howard, we have no right to understand them. We must simply get the criminals, dead or alive.

"The fact that the Bush posse has caught no terrorist of proven importance since September 11 makes a grim parody of Bush's semi-literate threats and Blair's missionary deceptions as they prepare a terrorist attack on Iraq that will be the horror of Bali many times over."

"State terrorism is a taboo term. Politicans never utter it. Newspapers rarely describe it. Academic "experts" suppress it; and yet, in many cases, it helps us understand the root causes of non-state atrocities like Bali and September 11. It is by far the most menacing form of terrorism, for it has the capacity to kill not 200, but hundreds of thousands. In each shower of cluster bombs that will fall on Iraq will be countless Sari Clubs. The dropping of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima was the equivalent of the horror of the Twin Towers 100 times over.

"State terrorism, backed by America, Britain and Australia, has scarred Indonesia for the past 40 years. For example, the source of the worst violence is the Indonesian army, which the West has supported and armed. Today, troops continue to terrorise the provinces of Aceh and West Papua, where they are "protecting" the American Exxon oil company's holdings and the Freeport mine.

"In West Papua, the army openly supports an Islamic group, Lashkar Jihad, which is linked to al-Qaeda."

"This was only the latest in Australia's long complicity with state terrorism in Indonesia, which makes a mockery of the self-deluding declarations last week that Australia had "lost its innocence" in Bali. Certainly, few Australians are aware that not far from their holiday hotels are mass graves with the remains of some 80,000 people murdered in Bali in 1965-66 with the connivance of the Australian government.

"Recently-released files reveal that when the Indonesian tyrant General Suharto seized power in the 1960s, he did so with the secret backing of the American, British and Australian governments, which looked the other way or actively encouraged the slaughter of more than half a million "communists". This was later described by the CIA as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th Century".

"The Australian Prime Minister at the time, Harold Holt, quipped: "With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it's safe to assume a reorientation has taken place." Holt's remark accurately reflected the collaboration of the Australian foreign affairs and political establishment. The Australian embassy in Jakarta described the massacres as a "cleansing process". In Canberra, officals in the Prime Minister's department expressed support for "any measures to assist the Indonesian army cope with the internal situation"."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2530

Amnesty Says U.S. Missile Strike in Yemen May Be Illegal
"LONDON, Nov. 8 -- Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy group, wrote to President Bush today to question Washington's deadly missile attack on al Qaeda suspects in Yemen.

"Six men suspected of membership in the militant Islamic network died Sunday when their car was hit by a Hellfire missile fired from an unmanned Predator aircraft operated by the CIA.

""If this was the deliberate killing of suspects in lieu of arrest, in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat, the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of international human rights law," the London-based group said in a statement. "The United States should issue a clear and unequivocal statement that it will not sanction extra-judicial executions.""
http://commondreams.org/headlines02/1109-03.htm

US far right wins grip on the country in mid-term elections.
"And so one of American liberalism's darkest days was repeated across the country. Minnesota and Missouri, long-time Democrat strongholds, fell. Governor Jeb Bush, despite the Democrats insisting that justice now be done for those infamous chads, won in Florida. As if to underscore conservatism's ascendancy, the only Democrat gain was in Arkansas where the Republican senator had suffered a messy divorce and his Democrat challenger was even more pro-gun and pro-Bible than the incumbent.

"The result is that the Republicans now control the Senate, House and the presidency for the first time since President Eisenhower. The consolidation of America as an ultra conservative country is going to take place rapidly. Mr Bush may have offered a few tit-bits to show his credentials as a 'compassionate conservative', like his concern to reduce the price of prescription drugs for the elderly, but the core of the Republican program is anything but. There will be radical tax cuts for the rich and the corporations; a freezing of all efforts to stiffen regulation in the wake of America's corporate scandals; moves to privatize the social security system; and a roll-back of environmental protection.

"Nor do the Conservatives' ambitions stop there. Following the ideas of the high priest of ultra conservatism, Leo Strauss, they want to construct a republic of 'moral', god-fearing citizens who adhere to traditional virtues, rewarding the rich who can only have become rich through the virtue of hard work and penalizing the poor who are only poor because of their own fecklessness. Above all, by now having the opportunity to pack the judiciary with extreme right-wing judges, they intend to do away with the famous Roe v Wade judgment that legalized abortion. This is the most fiercely reactionary program to have emerged in any Western democracy since the war, and for which last Tuesday's vote, argue Republicans, is an explicit mandate."

"One poignant photo said it all: Georgia's defeated Democratic senator, Max Cleland, sitting in a wheelchair, missing both legs and an arm lost in combat in Vietnam. This highly decorated hero was defeated by a Vietnam war draft-dodger who had the audacity to accuse Cleland of being "unpatriotic" after the senator courageously voted against giving Bush unlimited war-related powers. I do not recall a more shameful moment in American politics."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1110-09.htm
http://commondreams.org/views02/1110-07.htm

Bush's real target may be Iran.
Speculative, but plausible, piece on future American wars:

"Bush's victory is clearly a mandate to proceed with his crusade against Iraq. Preparations for war are in an advanced stage. The U.S. has been quietly moving heavy armour and mechanized units from Europe to the Mideast. Three division equivalents and a Marine heavy brigade are now in theatre. An armada of U.S. warplanes is assembling around Iraq, which is bombed almost daily. U.S. special forces are operating in northern Iraq, and, along with Israeli scout units, in Iraq's western desert near the important H2 airbase. The war could begin as early as mid-December if there is no coup against Saddam Hussein.

"But for all the propaganda about wicked Saddam, Iraq is not the main objective for the small but powerful coterie of Pentagon hardliners driving the Bush administration's national security policy. Nor is it for their intellectual and emotional peers in Israel's right-wing Likud party. The real target of the coming war is Iran, which Israel views as its principal and most dangerous enemy. Iraq merely serves as a pretext to whip America into a war frenzy and to justify insertion of large numbers of U.S. troops into Mesopotamia.

"The prevailing view in the Israeli military is that Iraq will be quickly defeated by U.S. forces, and then likely split into two or three cantons. Israel's North American supporters, however, are still being given the party line that Israel is in mortal danger from Iraq.

"Iran is a different story. Iran is expected to produce a few nuclear weapons within five years to counter Israel's large nuclear arsenal, and is developing medium-range missiles, Shahab-3s and -4s, that can easily reach Tel Aviv.

"With 68 million people and a growing industrial base, Iran is seen by Israel as a serious threat and major Mideast geopolitical rival. Both nations have their eye on Iraq's vast oil reserves.

"Israel's newly appointed hardline defence minister, former air force chief Shaul Mofaz, who was born in Iran, has previously threatened to attack Iran's nuclear installations. Thanks to long-range F-15Is supplied by the U.S., plus cruise and ballistic missiles, Israel can strike targets all over Iran. This week, Israel's grand strategy was clearly revealed for the first time, though barely noticed by North American media, as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called for an invasion of Iran "the day after" Iraq is crushed.

"In the U.S., Pentagon hardliners are drawing up plans to invade Iran once Iraq and its oil are "liberated." They hope civil war will erupt in Iran, which is riven by bitterly hostile factions, after which a pro-U.S. regime will take power. If this does not occur, then Iraq-based U.S. forces will be ideally positioned to attack Iran. Or, they could just as well move west and invade Syria, another of Israel's most bitter enemies.

"Israel's Likudniks thirst for revenge against Syria - and also Iran - for supporting Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, which drove Israeli forces from Lebanon.

"Pentagon superhawk Richard Perle, told the TVO program Diplomatic Immunity that the U.S. was prepared to attack Syria, Iran, and Lebanon.

"By February or March, the U.S. media will likely be flooded with dire warnings about the threat to the world from Iran. Israel's American lobby will turn its guns from Iraq to Iran. "Links" will surely be "discovered" between Iran and al-Qaida. The cookie-cutter pattern that worked for whipping up war psychosis against Iraq should work just as well against Iran, Syria or Saudi Arabia - and win the next national election."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1110-07.htm

The New Protest movement: Something is stirring among the people.
"One measure of the strength of popular anti-establishment movements is their suppression as news. Millions of people took to the streets in Italy last month, yet the main political news in Britain the next day was the latest Machiavellian utterances of Gordon Brown. On 28 September, the historic demonstration of 400,000 people in London was considered worthy only of trivialisation by the Observer. Nowhere in the begrudging reporting of that extraordinary day was there recognition of a new, diverse and growing constituency of angry people no longer interested in the small circuses that fill tombstones of column inches, such as the diddum tears of Estelle Morris.

"My guess is that a great many people would agree, for very different reasons, with Peter Mandelson's prediction that "the era of representative democracy is coming to an end". That has long been demonstrably true in the United States. It is a truth that has eluded many journalists and broadcasters, understandably, as the main function of so much political reporting is to run a cigarette paper between the parties and to channel spin.

"The public understands this, which is why the audience for political news on television has slumped. Blaming the public for its "lack of interest in politics" is the self-deluding excuse of media executives who claim an insight into the popular mood, yet are contemptuous of it. In truth, the public has never been more interested in real politics, which it does not associate with the deceptions and gossip of an elective oligarchy."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=2579

A Real Plan for Combatting Terrorism
"6. Encourage Israel to withdraw immediately from the territories occupied in 1967, and support the establishment of a Palestinian state within these borders. We should work with both sides to assure the security of each state and validity of the borders.

"7. End the client-state system of American empire. We must cease all funding and arming of non-democratic governments, with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt at the top of the list. After all, it should be assumed that whoever funds and arms dictatorships will be the object of resentment and reprisal from those who suffer under such regimes. We should then immediately announce a plan to provide economic development aid (not loans) for those nations and political organizations willing to democratize and observe international human rights standards.

"8. Start to observe democracy and human rights standards in our own domestic and foreign policy (see the Amnesty International report on human rights in the United States). This will improve the sort of good will necessary for international cooperation in police work. International good will toward the U.S. was prominent in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. It has been completely squandered by the Bush administration, who have succeeded in the dubious achievement of uniting most of the world against us.

"You won't hear the Bush administration or the Democrats talk about these types of solutions, because they are not serious about reducing terrorism. Their primary goals are political and economic power for themselves and their clients in corporate America, who fund their campaigns. First in importance among these corporate donors are the energy companies, who help so much to put the "conflict" in "conflic of interest." Terrorism is the natural outcome of such arrangements, and is seen as worth the price.

"These proposals would cost money, but probably not as much money as will be spent on useless weapons systems like "Star Wars" (not very helpful in fighting fanatics armed with box cutters) and perpetual wars involving the bombing of brown-skinned people. Needless to say, in addition to increasing our security dramatically, radical policies would have tremendous environmental and economic benefits. In the end, they would likely generate revenue and help to democratize our economy."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1118-01.htm

Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter turned anti-war campaigner.
"Keep this in the back of your head: About 3,000 Iraqi children are starving to death each month -- outside the view of American heartstrings," Ritter said. "Suppose every month 3,000 Iraqi children were lined up and we threatened to shoot them if Saddam Hussein didn't do what we wanted. Suppose we gave orders for the Marines to shoot them. Well, nothing would happen because Marines don't shoot kids. But that doesn't mean America doesn't kill children. We just starve them to death.

"Ritter made the case that America is hellbent on war with Iraq no matter what U.N. arms inspectors find if readmitted to that country. Why? We want to control Mideast oil.

"We see the world as one big grocery store," he said. When the United States needs another country's natural resource, he said, we will make friends with oppressive regimes to get it, steal it or take it by force.

"Instead of hunting down terrorists with Predator drones, only to see them replaced by more terrorists, better to ask why and how people become terrorists in the first place, Ritter said."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1113-01.htm

US Corporations have the rights of persons
"But in 1886, the consent of the people was stolen. A bizarre distortion of the Santa Clara Supreme Court decision by the Court's reporter led to corporations claiming that they were also entitled to the human rights laid out for We, The People in the Bill of Rights and the free-the-slaves Fourteenth Amendment. They claimed, even though the Supreme Court had explicitly not ruled it, that they had won the rights of humans: corporate personhood.

Unions wouldn't get those rights (and still don't have them), nor would churches or associations or family-owned businesses, and not even governments would ever have those rights (because the Bill of Rights was explicitly intended as a weapon for fragile humans to use to hold back the potentially repressive powers inherent in any government), but corporations exclusively, the Court's reporter said, would share them with humans.

"Thus, our largest corporations have now claimed the First Amendment right of free speech, and captured control of our airwaves and many of our politicians. They've claimed the Fourth Amendment right of privacy, and tell us we can't inspect their voting machines that determine the fate of our democracy. They've claimed the Fourteenth Amendment right to be free of discrimination, and tell local communities they have no right to nurture small, local businesses while "discriminating against" predatory multinational corporations."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1116-03.htm

The Covert Biotech War
Patents and Copyrights have underpin the conversion of genetically modified food to a Rent Seeking monopoly.

"The real problem with engineered crops, as this column has been pointing out for several years, is that they permit the big biotech companies to place a padlock on the food chain. By patenting the genes and all the technologies associated with them, the corporations are maneuvering themselves into a position from which they can exercise complete control over what we eat."
http://commondreams.org/views02/1119-02.htm

Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright
"The spread of the Linux operating system kernel has directed attention at the free software movement. This paper shows why free software, far from being a marginal participant in the commercial software market, is the vital first step in the withering away of the intellectual property system".

Some reader-unfriendly jargon in this piece but afterwards an interesting history and interpretation of the computer/software industry, including the Internet, IBM, Unix, Microsoft, Software Copyrights, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds etc.
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html

Why Free Software? Look at the numbers!
Lengthy research paper giving figures on the seemingly unstoppable march of the brilliant Free Software (GNU/Linux) concept to an historically, socially, economically and politically significant victory. It only remains for the pre-installed desktop market to be penetrated.
http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

The Freenet Project
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though
she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about.
I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say
'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away
from the Internet?" -Mike Godwin

"At present the Internet is seen as a hot-bed of anarchy, beyond the controls of individual governments, a system which ensures free-speech and free-thought by its very nature. Unfortunately, while this seems true at present, it is caused more by a lack of knowledge about the technology involved, rather than being a feature of the technology. It is actually the case that the Internet could lead to our lives being monitored, and our thinking manipulated and corrupted to a degree that would go beyond the wildest imaginings of Orwell."

"[The project] allows information to be made available to a large group of people in a similar manner to the World Wide Web. Improvements over this existing system include:
- No central control or administration required
- Anonymous information publication and retrieval
- Dynamic duplication of popular information
- Transfer of information location depending upon demand

"The aim of this project is to devise a key-indexed information storage and retrieval system with the following properties:
1. The system should have no element of centralised control or administration
2. It should provide anonymity to both providers and consumers of information
3. The system should be robust in handling hardware and software failure
4. It should adapt to changing demands and resources in an effcient manner
5. Its performance should be comparable to that of existing mass information
distribution systems such as the World Wide Web."

"While the Domain Name System is distributed, it is still centrally controlled. There is little, from a technical perspective, to prevent the owners of the root domain name servers from reclaiming the ability to administer sub-domains of the system, or from accidentally stopping the entire system from operating."

"Normally each piece of information on the World Wide Web is stored once
on an individual computer on the Internet. Every time anybody wishes to
view that information a request is sent to that computer and it returns the
relevant piece of information. This model works well when there are relatively
few requests, however if a piece of information becomes increasingly popular
then the computer possessing the piece of information can become swamped by
requests, preventing many from obtaining the information.

"The World Wide Web offers little anonymity to either producers or consumers
of information. If it is possible to retrieve a piece of information then an IP address for the server on which the information is stored must have been found. If this is the case then that IP address may be matched to an organisation or person. Even if that person did not create the information, they are responsible for its availability, and thus could be forced to remove the information."

"UseNet is one of the older systems on the Internet. It is a world-wide bulletin-board discussion system where people may post articles, and respond to the postings of others... While Usenet succeeds in being a distributed, and largely decentralised system it is extremely inefficient. The requirement that every message posted to the system must be distributed to each and every server on the system means that each server must be capable of storing huge quantities of data (if each article is not to expire before anyone has a chance to read it). Furthermore, the band-width required to transfer the new messages between servers is extremely high. It does serve as an example of one method to achieve a distributed decentralised information distribution system, but does so at the price of extreme inefficiency, and lack of security. Having said that, of all the systems described in this section, the operation of Usenet comes closest to that of the system described in this report."

"A simplistic way to look at Freenet is as a filesystem, where anyone can save a file under a filename of their choice, and anyone else, given the filename, can load the file, but unlike a file system, you cannot modify or overwrite a file in Freenet, and Freenet will only retain a file for so-long as it is popular."

"It is the author's intention to create a fully operational Adaptive Network using the simulation described in this documentation as a starting-point. The client will be written in the Java programming language, and will be developed in an open manner with the cooperation of interested parties on the Internet. It will be released under the GNU Public Licence."
http://freenetproject.org/