osama’s phone number etc.

Want to give Osama a piece of your mind? According to this article, his satellite phone number is 00873 682505331. (In the U.S., you’d preface that with an 011. The number was revealed during the New York trial of the previous WTC bombers.) Calling it currently gets you a message that Osama “is not logged on.” (That’s one way of putting it.)
That’s one of the many ironies of all this mess: this guy wants us all to devolve to the Middle Ages, right? In his speeches, he obsesses about historical wrongs done to Islam centuries ago, like the conquest of Andalusia in the 1490s. But he’s a techie gadget hound who has an Inmarsat sat-phone. As Maureen Dowd put it after Osama broadcast his appeal last week, “It’s utterly ridiculous, like being at war with the Flintstones.”
This Seymour Hersh piece in next week’s New Yorker has been getting a lot of advance buzz for a couple of weeks. It’s all about the connections between the Saudi royal family and Osama. Haven’t read it yet, but will soon.
The reason I haven’t read it yet is that I’m too busy reading up on the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, which injured more than 5,000 people. It’s one of the closest precursors to the WTC attacks I can think of — I’m hoping to write about it when I’m in Japan in a couple of weeks. But at the moment, I’m hiding this fact from my dear grandmother, who just about has a heart attack everytime I go overseas, even when it’s not on the heels of a major terrorist attack. I’ve made it clear that not many Islamic fundamentalists live in Japan, and I think she’s generally okay with my going. But she really doesn’t need to know about nerve gas attacks injuring thousands in the subways I’ll soon be riding on.