I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I said had to be repeated by hundreds of people so others could hear (a.k.a. “the human microphone”), what I actually said at Liberty Plaza had to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

The FBI has received substantial criticism over the past decade -- much of it valid -- but nobody can deny its record of excellence in thwarting its own Terrorist plots.

Alongside pneumococcal diseases such as meningitis and pneumonia, rotavirus-related diarrhoea is a primary childhood killer in developing countries, thought to snuff out the lives of 500,000 children each and every year. An overwhelming 85 per cent of these children are African and Asian. The need for medical miracles is as great as ever, but corporate mispricing generates huge profits, while driving up the price of life saving medicines.

The killing of Osama bin Laden could provide Pakistan an opportunity to reverse its downward slide, though changing course will not be easy. The country must decide whether to decisively confront Islamist violence, or continue with the military’s current policy of supporting jihadi militants with one hand even as it slaps them with the other..

In his policy speech on Thursday, 19 May, US President Barack Obama said that with the eruption of the Arab peoples’ revolutions for freedom and democracy Al-Qaida lost its relevance.

The Abbottabad Operation not only ended the American quest for the most wanted fugitive in the world, it also exposed the ‘incompetence’ of Pakistan’s military establishment. 

Why is the United Nations entrenching former colonial powers on our continent? Africans can and should take the lead in resolving their own disputes.

At Palfest we have come as visitors, well wishers, writers come to a land that is undergoing great difficulty. I thought of the stumps of olive trees, a scarred field glimpsed out of the bus window one morning near Nablus. The Israeli soldiers had cut the trees because they were deemed to be a security risk. Whole families depended on the livelihood from the trees. 

Let’s consider for a moment the fates of two men who took unique paths in military life and whose careers were once intertwined: General David Petraeus, now our Afghan War commander, and his former subordinate General Stanley McChrystal, our former Afghan War commander before he became the first general since Douglas MacArthur to be axed by a president -- in his case, for a Rolling Stone version of “loose lips sink ships” (or administrations). Petraeus, the most political U.S.