Bin Laden Driver: Bush and Putin Compare Notes

Craig Murray and his partner Nadira Alieva, who emphatically does not cut hair and never has, will no doubt feel even safer in their beds now that Salim Hamdan has not only been sentenced to 66 months in prison - five months more - but also now that we've all been assured that the USA plan to throw away the key whatever their trumped up judge and jury have said.

This imprisonment is lest his not-quite-squeaky-clean driving licence should again be used to drive a great war leader around. Though, as he has co-operated, Salim would presumably be happy to lend his rare automative skills to the driving of top war leaders like Bush, Blair, Putin, Obama or McCain.

There's the rub. Who drove Kaiser Bill about? Would that be his batman? And who chauffed Adolf Hitler? Did the Fuhrer's driver bother scorers at Nuremburg?

Sixty three years ago this week, who drove Paul Tibbets to the base to take control of the Enola Gay and Little Boy or for that matter, having seen the destructive power, Charles W Sweeney to deliver Fat Man in Bockscar a few days later?

Did either of these guys - with a combined total of perhaps more than 200,000 killed in the initial blasts that week - ever have their wings clipped? Never mind a spell in prison? Well as it goes the Tibbets wiki reports:

The U.S. government apologized to Japan in 1976 after Tibbets re-enacted the bombing in a restored B-29 at an air show in Texas, complete with mushroom cloud. Tibbets said that he had not meant for the reenactment to have been an insult to the Japanese.

Nice touch recreating the mushroom cloud don't you think? Though not sadly the flesh dripping off the victims limbs.

Who on earth drove Bomber Harris about while his and Prof Freddie Lindemann's area bombing strategy was flattening Dresden. And if Harris escaped jail and Lindemann got ennobled - despite widespread opposition and revulsion at their strategy - what on earth happened to their drivers?

New Internationalist, November 2001 had a cracking if controversial catchline - Twin Terrors yet while its Fact Splash with a still much over-estimated level of 11 September 2001 casualties pointed up a brace of terrors that Mark Twain had spotted ...

'There were two "Reigns of Terror", if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror - that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.'
Mark Twain, writing about the French Revolution in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

This was NOT the direct narrative of New Internationalist's newspaper adverts. These embody these two terrors in two contemporary gents. Osama Bin Laden naturally. And? And? And, that's right, George W Bush.

If you'd like to see Kaiser's Batman Smith squealing under torture that's here. The above version, also from 1967 and possibly the original, is from Karina.

BUSH AND PUTIN COMPARE NOTES AT IOC RECEPTION:
B: Nice Canopies! The Horse's Doobries!
P: What's on your mind Dubya?
B: Georgia's On My Mind
P: Oh really?
B: The Devil Went Down To Georgia
P: Great riff. You know it's Georgia FSR, George?
B: Damn terrorists! More Canopies for my freedom loving friend!!