Even as he was telling Iran not to produce nuclear weapons, President Bush was urging Congress to pay for a new nuclear weapon designed to destroy underground military facilities.

Although the nuclear "bunker-buster" is still on the drawing board, Iran can be expected to charge the United States with atomic hypocrisy during the current war of words.

* Escalating rhetoric, continued losses in Iraq, Bush's political problems, and an ideologically-driven pursuit of power make the possibility of a U.S. military attack on Iran - however reckless and however dangerous its consequences - a frighteningly real possibility. * Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has not violated the Treaty. While there appear to be unresolved issues regarding full transparency, its nuclear program, including enriching uranium, is perfectly legal under NPT requirements for non-nuclear weapons states. * Iran does not have nuclear weapons; even if it is trying to build a nuclear weapons program, it could not produce weapons for five to ten years or more. * There is a dangerous, unmonitored and provocative nuclear arsenal in the Middle East; it belongs to Israel, not Iran. U.S. hypocrisy and double standards in nuclear policy, accepting Israel's unacknowledged nuclear arsenal and rewarding India's nuclear weapons status while threatening war against Iran and denying its own obligations under the NPT, has undermined Washington's claimed commitment to non-proliferation. * U.S. officials claim they are not considering an invasion of Iraq but "only" surgical air strikes against known nuclear facilities; they have not explained what their military response will be when Iran retaliates, whether against U.S. troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region, against U.S. oil tankers in near-by shipping lanes, or against Israel. * Global suspicions remain regarding U.S. claims because of Washington's lies leading to the invasion of Iraq, but international conditions regarding Iran are significantly different; many governments appear more willing to consider Iran a "threat." * The only solution to the crisis is to move towards a nuclear weapons-free, or even weapons of mass destruction-free zone across the entire Middle East.

Now and again, a story pops up that reminds us that, even in the more liberal mainstream press, nothing is ever as it seems and real investigative journalism simply doesn't exist (if it ever did)...

Charges in Kenya corruption scandal

The Guardian

Jeevan Vasagar - 16 March 2006

Kenya's attorney-general yesterday signalled his willingness to tackle the country's biggest corruption scandal by charging five men, including the former governor of the central bank, with fraud.

The "Goldenberg" scandal was made public 14 years ago and cost Kenyan taxpayers 400m, but no one has been found guilty and no politician has faced charges.

The scandal involved the payment of massive cash subsidies for fictitious exports of gold and diamonds by a firm called Goldenberg International.

"If you look at the list, what you see is civil servants taking the fall," said Mwalimu Mati, executive director of the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International. "Politicians, as in all other corruption scandals, are left untouched. These people had a role to play but they surely can't have been the only ones involved. There were people involved in facilitating the money coming out of the treasury, and people involved in the political cover-up."

Of the five men indicted, three have faced charges before: the former deputy governor of the central bank, Eliphaz Riungu, the former treasury permanent secretary, Wilfred Karunga Koinange, and Kamlesh Pattni, who was a director of Goldenberg International.

Their cases never came to a full trial and proceedings were halted after the president, Mwai Kibaki, came to power in December 2002. Mr Kibaki set up an inquiry which reported last month. The inquiry said former president Daniel arap Moi must have been aware of the scam and urged the attorney-general to consider pressing charges against George Saitoti, a former finance minister. Mr Saitoti, an education minister in the new government, resigned from the cabinet last month, but denies involvement.

The two new names on the list are Eric Kotut, the central bank governor under Mr Moi, and James Kanyotu, a former intelligence chief who was a director of the firm.

At a time when Kenya faces a severe drought, the scandal is a reminder of the sleaze and economic stagnation of the Moi years. The former president denies involvement.

The hardship suffered by herdsmen in Kenya's arid north is partly blamed on neglect by the failure of successive governments to build roads or help develop the region.

The charges over Goldenberg, a scandal which epitomised the corruption of the Moi government, come at a time when the new government is reeling from its own corruption scandal.

Mr Kibaki's finance minister and justice minister resigned after being named in connection with the Anglo Leasing scandal, in which millions of pounds were looted from the treasury in dodgy contracts for police and military equipment.

Foreign donors and Kenyans have been appalled by the government's heavy-handed treatment of the press. Earlier this month armed police shut down a TV station and burned copies of an opposition newspaper after the arrest of three of its journalists over a story about a secret meeting between the president and an opposition leader. The IMF has reportedly postponed a decision on loans to Kenya because of worries over corruption.

She-devil Condolezza Rice is currently on a PR trip to OZ. Speaking to students at the University of Sydney's Conservatorium of Music, Condi waxed duplicitous on how "Iraqis will triumph" and that "we will win in Iraq but we must be patient with these people".

I thought I'd share an email that is apparently doing the rounds among all right-thinking Patriotic Americans (i.e. not pinko Commie, Islamo-liberal-terrorists).

If U.S. troops go to Africa, it won't be for a humanitarian intervention; it will be to protect American oil interests in the troubled Niger Delta.

Africa's humanitarian needs -- today the pillage in Darfur, yesterday the famine in Niger -- dominate the headlines. Human suffering, from hunger to rape, also dominates the limited attention that Americans have for hearing about problems in the most troubled part of the world. Now that may be changing as an armed insurgency in oil-rich Nigeria threatens oil exports to the U.S. and raises the possibility that U.S. troops will dig into African soil in order to protect a resource deemed vital to American interests.

In short, Nigeria might be the next Iraq.

Putting American troops at risk in Africa would be a big change -- and speaks volumes about the new relationship between America and the sub-Saharan Africa. Ever since American troops were killed in Somalia early in the presidency of Bill Clinton, a firm rule of U.S. policy toward Africa has been to never put U.S. soldiers on African ground. For more than 10 years, American troops have studiously avoided intervening directly in African conflicts. This policy prevented the United States from trying to halt the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s. More recently, this stance stopped the United States from using troops to restore order to Liberia. The policy may also stop the United States from sending troops to Nigeria.

Surveys were conducted months before the war on Iraq which showed that the American people would only support the conflict if there was a danger that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons. Other questions in the poll addressed the issues of humanitarian intervention, Saddam's abysmal human rights record, and the prospect that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

None of these other potential threats mattered to the American people. The only issue that gained majority support for war was whether Saddam had nukes. It's obvious now that the findings of that poll became the cornerstone of the administration's public relations strategy.

Bottom line: The Bush-Cheney plans for shaping public opinion will continue to depend on bogus claims about nuclear weapons programs. This explains why the administration and their agents in the MSM are intentionally misleading the public about the true nature of Iran's nuclear program; it is the only way to elicit support for another war of aggression.

Where Iran is concerned, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, believes President Bush was right in keeping military leverage on the table and considering U.N. sanctions.

"Iran may be the greatest single threat to America since the end of the Cold War,"McCain told an audience at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Memphis, Tenn. "If the Iranians acquire nuclear weapons, then my friends, we are in trouble."

As far as Iraq, McCain called for more training, the formation of a government and economic development, and he stated that the United States needs to pursue positive relationships in the Arab world.

The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday March 12 2006

In the article below, Dr Milton Wainwright was quoted as saying that red rain lacked DNA. Dr Wainwright has asked us to make clear that currently he has no view on whether red rain contains DNA and that it is physicist Godfrey Louis who is of that view.

There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers.

Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people's clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.

Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. 'If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.' Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001.

With American troops sinking ever further into the "Iraq quagmire", Bush's job approval ratings hitting new lows and a growing list of respectable officials using the word "dictatorship" in reference to the White House, the apparent plans for a U.S. attack on Iran can reasonably be taken as evidence that many members of the U.S. government have in fact gone literally, clinically insane. At the very least, anyone still in possession of the alleged human capacity for independent, critical thought is surely asking the big question:

Why?