My response to all this? The UAE (1) supported the Taliban in the run-up to the 9-11 attacks, (2) was the home country to two of the 9-11 hijackers, and (3) was the headquarters for a 9-11-related money laundering scheme. BushCo's reply: "Well, OK -- but look what they've done lately."
Well, I don't care what they've done lately, and apparently neither do most other Americans. People in this country simply don't want a nation with ties to the 9-11 attacks running six of our major ports. Is that really so hard to understand? After all, the Bush Regime has spent the last four-and-a-half years telling us that we need to be very afraid. Indeed, the 2004 election was "won" on that issue alone.
I more or less feel the same way about the United Arab Emirates as I do about Pakistan. Bush famously said after 9-11, "If you're not with us, you are against us." Of course, those words apparently did not apply to Pakistan, who maintained ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda long after the 9-11 attacks.
I'll never forget how, back in November of 2001, the Bush Regime secretly approved the escape to Pakistan of thousands of Pakistani military advisers and intelligence agents who were in Afghanistan providing aid and advice to the Taliban and to Al Qaeda. We had these guys surrounded in the Afghan city of Kunduz and Bush just let them escape, along with an unknown number of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.
What do you call it when you provide aid and comfort to the enemy? You can read all about it here and here.
I think about this unfortunate occurrence every time I hear someone say that Bush is strong on national security (which is a comment I don't hear all that much these days). Why would Bush allow our enemies to escape so they could attack us another day? Well, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was apparently worried that the capture in Afghanistan of thousands of Pakistani military advisers and intelligence agents would threaten his political survival, and he made his concerns known to BushCo. Our cowardly president obviously didn't want some hard-line anti-U.S. regime to replace Musharraf as the head of a country that possessed nuclear bombs.
What would my response to Musharraf have been? Given that Al Qaeda had just murdered 3000 U.S. citizens a couple of months earlier, I probably would have said something like, "Well, I just counted our nukes, and we appear to have more of them than you guys do, so best of luck to you Pervez -- we're taking your people in Kunduz out."
And so what if Musharraf was deposed and a pro-Taliban/pro-Al Qaeda regime took his place and openly challenged us. I'd be a lot happier had we spent hundreds of billions of dollars bombing an openly-pro-Taliban Pakistan back to the Stone Age instead of spending that money turning a fourth-rate military power that posed no threat to us into the Mother of All Terrorist Training Grounds. At least we would have gotten some bang for our buck.
But what do we have now thanks to Bush's enemy identification problem? Well, bin Laden, by most accounts, is holed up in Pakistan somewhere, and we can't do a thing about it apparently. Those Pakistanis are really great allies, aren't they.
And then I read something like this:
The Pakistan foreign office had paid tens of thousands of dollars to lobbyists in the US to get anti-Pakistan references dropped from the 9/11 inquiry commission report, The Friday Times has claimed.The Pakistani foreign office defended the decision to hire lobbyists to influence the 9-11 Commission, saying that hiring lobbyists is "an established practice in the US."
The Pakistani weekly said its story is based on disclosures made by foreign service officials to the Public Accounts Committee at a secret meeting in Islamabad on Tuesday.
Well, you can't argue with that.
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