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 The dead eyes. The hungover look. The unshaven face. The vest. It could be any Dublin cab driver that's ever taken you home on a Saturday night. Instead, it is Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda master of disguise who chose to hide out not in the lawless border regions of Pakistan but on the even more dangerous streets of inner city Dublin. The terrorist mastermind even attempted to keep up that act during his arrest. As the SWAT team descended on his car at the College Green taxi rank and hauled him out of his seat, he put up a tremendous struggle, showered the officers in expletives, and demanded to know 'what the bleedin Jaysis [is] goin on.' 'We were astonished at how well he had constructed the disguise' explained FBI operations chief Warner Feldman. 'He was slightly drunk; had the cigarette dangling from one lip; underwear showing above the belt; he had even perfected the smell.' The Dublin Taxi Driver association were appalled at the news that such an unsavoury character was able to penetrate their organisation, and have blamed deregulation for the decline in standards. Meanwhile, Gardai are cooperating with US intelligence services to track down other members of Al Qaeda gouger cells operating in north Dublin.
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WAR ON IRAQ
All the latest from the Oscar-distraction crisis
- SHLOCK AND AW:
150 Iraqis surrender following non-stop barrage of Celine Dion songs; Geneva convention violated.
- Blair assures Iraqi people 'we will not forget you, just like we did not forget the people of that other country'.
- Franks completes phase 1 of Operation Pompous Title.
- Saddam prepares for the mother of all getaways.
- Stray missile targetting munitions dump in Mosul hits Noam Chomsky's house in Massachusetts.
Military chiefs 'have no idea how this happened'.
- US marines chalk ineptly spelled taunts onto missiles.
- 'Smart bombs' now fitted with high-tech Chinese Embassy Avoidance System.
- Howard says Australians are still divided on war issue.
Except for the 800 people currently egging his house.
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Douglas, Zeta-Jones to sue Pentagon for unauthorised sattelite photos of honeymoon in Iraq
L.A. - Following their successful lawsuit against Hello magazine, celebrity couple Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones have found themselves back in court again, this time suing the US government for surveillance photographs taken without their permission whilst on holiday in Iraq's southern no-fly zone. 'These photographs, taken from 30 miles above the Earth's surface, make me look horrendously fat' a tearful Zeta-Jones told a Los Angeles court yesterday. The black-and-white images were surreptitiously taken by operatives working within the NSA's covert paps division, and were later published in Sleazy Surveillance weekly. Pentagon director Warren Adams has defended his indiscreet tracking of the celebrities, maintaining that 'the newlyweds have yet to explain where they hid the canister handed to them by the Iraqi officer at a checkpoint in Basra', and thus that 'close-up shots of Ms. Zeta-Jones's décolletage were vital to national enquirer ... I mean, security.'
Australia turns away boatload of desperate Internet programmers
DARWIN - Battening down the hatches against the latest wave of 'occupational refugees' washing up on its shores, Australian troops have been sent to intercept the vessel HMS HTML just twenty miles off the Northern Territory's coast. The boat is understood to contain over fifty web developers from Ireland and the UK, fleeing the appalling conditions in their homeland and the treatment they are experiencing, and seeking asylum in Australia. Ragged and miserable, the desperate crew of Java programmers and Perl scripters are expected to be turned back at gunpoint once Australian troops board the vessel. The Howard government has recently capped the number of geeks permitted to enter the country, and individuals have found themsleves being turned back at the airport for glasses that are too thick, or shirt pockets that exceed the quota of pens stipulated by the Dept of Immigration and Wog-Blocking. Special detention centres have been set up in the Nullabor desert for web developers claiming refugee status, but segregation into separate buildings was deemed necessary following riots between open-souce coders and Microsoft developers.
US analysing colour spectrum for new states of alert
WASHINGTON - Following the commencement of hostilities with Iraq, US defense officals have declared that the country has been placed on 'the highest state of alert' since 'the last highest state of alert', this one being the 'highest yet', but not yet 'the highest possible state of alert'. Analysts say that this new state of alert is such an intense one that it amounts to a 'state of inurement', whereby a population subjected to constant and intense states of alert are not likely to feel at all alerted, given that nothing happened during the last seven states of alert. 'This state of inurement represents a drop in a state of alertness, a weakening of readiness to deal with a possible terrorist attack, and thus necessitates the nation being placed on the next highest level of alert' explained assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The difficulty facing US domestic security forces, however, is that having chosen a colour scale to represent the varying levels of alertness beginning with code blue, they now find that they have reached the other end of the visible spectrum and have run out of colours to represent the next state of alert. 'We could go with code Mauve or code Beige, but these colors are not sufficiently panic-inducing' explained security analyst and interior decorator Eric Baumann, 'unless of course they feature in one of Barbara Streisand's evening dresses.' Meanwhile it was revealed that President Bush had prepared a speech publicly rebuking NORAD for creating a similar problem by its use of a 1-5 scale to represent the nation's DEFCON (Defense Condition). The speech was cancelled when advisors informed the president that the number scale may be extended beyond five.
Nasty corporate ambush foiled by Lemsip Max Strength
NEW YORK - Ted Turner, chairman of the fabled Time-Warner corporation, was meant to be facing an executive firing squad when he walked into the company's board of directors last Monday to explain why the company had posted $99bn losses - the largest in American history. The meeting had been timed to co-incide with Turner's surreptitiously-leaked weekend bout with flu symptoms, and the board expected to find a sniffling, run-down, nasal-voiced CEO in no state to defend himself. Instead, balding directors trimming their Bonzai trees with feigned disinterest whilst peering accusingly at Turner over their spectacles were amazed to find that the chairman had made an unusually speedy recovery. At the end a two-hour grilling, the 20-man team of directors finally arrived at the key question - how had Turner managed to preside over a loss this size? Turner responded by pulling a little yellow-and-lime-coloured box out of his pocket, standing it on the table, and explaining that were it not for this soothing medication and fast-acting analgesic, the company at his helm would have lost at least $30 billion more. 'Lemsip Max Strength' he said to the amazed board, gently tapping the top of the box before turning and walking jauntily out of the room. 'Try it next time you're about to screw up a major merger.'
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