Sons and Heirs

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The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and Its Fortune by Steve Coll  

By Robert Vitalis*

bin_laden.jpgSteve Coll’s book tells two stories: a big one about how the bin Laden family cashed in on the oil bonanza in Saudi Arabia, and a smaller one about Osama’s role in the family business before he turned to holy warfare. Although well written, lucid and packed with useful detail, The Bin Ladens doesn’t establish much of a connection between the family firm in Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden’s jihad in Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan and America, except that oil wealth funded both. The bin Laden group isn’t among the world’s largest engineering businesses, although readers might finish this book believing that it is: Coll calls it Saudi Arabia’s Halliburton, even though the latter is an oil services firm, not a construction company. He is at his best excavating details from the mountain of documents generated by various bin Laden brothers in the lawsuits and divorce settlements that have followed on several decades of deals gone sour.

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Remembrance Day 2008

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How Should we Honour the War Dead?

by Alan Morrison

poppy-7738861.jpgThe 11th of November is a date which impinges as a dichotomy on our already seared consciousness. Remembrance Day. Remember our war dead - especially from the First World War. Remember the heroes. Poppies. Wreaths. Solemn-faced politicians making a show of care about life and death. Elderly, stiff-gaited uniformed gentlemen with medals. Brass bands. Sentry-like cenotaphs against the dark, dank, drizzly-grey skies of November’s winter foreboding. Pomp and circumstance. Always a glorification of the heroism in militarism but never a hint of condemnation in it.

    One shudders to put one’s head over the parapet to interject a thought which may detract from all that jingoistic fervour but… dare I ask: Is there any genuine substance to it all?

    I venture to suggest that Remembrance Day as we know it is an outmoded institution which is not only inappropriate for the purposes of the remembrance of the foulness and futility of war but is also an affront to those whose lives have been wasted by it. There was no heroism in World War I. Not really. It may have felt like that for some as they gave their lives for their country. But if ever there was a futile gesture it was laying down one’s life in World War I.  Heroism is wasted if it leaves no lasting legacy. Death, if it is futile, is a jumping into the void devoid of moral virtue.

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In Lies We Trust

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The CIA, Hollywood, and Bioterrorism

lyes.jpgIts hard to explain the full depth and breadth of the depravity of the pharmaceutical industry, the medical research industry, and the federal government.

The film above (click on the sub-title) does a pretty good job.

Hang on to your hat.

The model for modern biological warfare was “discovered” during the conquest of the Americas and has been repeated over and over again.

A recent example:

“American missionaries had first come to southwest Suriname in the early 1970s…At the time of their first contact with missionaries, the Tirios were suffering from diseases that had been introduced by explorers, Maroons, and other Indians, and possibly even by the evangelists themselves.

Tirio ethnomedicine had been ineffective against these strange illnesses. The missionaries, however, provided remedies that worked, thereby “proving” to the tribal elders the superiority of Western culture over indigenous traditions.”

Creating new diseases, releasing them on the public, and then providing the magic cure - for a price - will work just as well as a social control tool in New York and Los Angeles as it does in the Amazon.



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The killing of Anna Politkovskaya

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By *Sara Hall

annapolitkovskaya003.jpgThe murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya on 7 October 2006 has been remembered all over the world during the last week. Amnesty International believes that Politkovskaya was killed because of her work as a journalist. The trial of three men accused of her murder is set to start on 15 October in a Moscow military court.

Politkovskaya was relentless in her efforts to draw the world’s attention to the suffering of the people in Chechnya. Her reports were crucial in bringing about the first ever prosecution against a Russian police officer, guilty of serious human rights violations. While working in the area she was put in a pit in the ground by Russian forces and subjected to abuse and humiliation.

She was included in the Top 50 Heroes of our time compiled by the New Statesman in May 2006.

Her books, which have been translated into English, highlight atrocities in Chechnya, criticise Vladimir Putin’s presidency and the general stifling of civil liberties by Russia’s secret service, the Federal Security Service (FSB). She frequently spoke about theses issues to audiences worldwide.

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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


US loses its status as economic world power
DAVOS, Switzerland, 2008
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