Big Brother, Big Bully

Newly-declassified papers from New Zealand show how the USA works with its "friends":

"The ambassador asked me if I realised what was at stake in the dispute between the two countries," Caygill writes.

"I asked him what he meant. He replied trust. I asked him what he meant by that and he said that until now the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand had had a unique relationship. 'We have not spied on each other. If you go ahead with your policies we will not be able to trust you'.

"I took the clear implication from his remarks that if our relationship with the US deteriorated further, then the US would no longer feel any inhibition in conducting intelligence gathering operations against us."

And speaking of bullying people, it seems the Bush team is now taking revenge against outspoken UK critic George Galloway, who famously slapped down his pro-war critics on the floor of the US Senate.

Galloway is currently starring in the UK's latest Big Brother house and has pledged his profits to a Palestinian charity called Interpal. Now the USA has declared Interpal a terrorist organization and Israel is pressuring UK ministers to do the same. That's despite a total lack of public evidence, plus two previous inquiries which found Interpal was just what it said it is:

"a non-political, non-profit making British charity that focuses solely on the provision of relief and development aid to the poor and needy of Palestine".

Bush famously said that in the wake of 9/11, everybody in the world was either "with us or against us". Apparently that applies to "charities" too. The comparisons with Spirit Of America are all too obvious...

As Juan Cole said of the Abramoff scandal's links to bogus Israeli charities:

If a Palestinian-American had diverted $140,000 from a Muslim charity to ‘security equipment’ and ‘sniper lessons’ for Palestinians on the West Bank, that individual would be in Gitmo so fast that the sonic boom would rattle your windows.