Talk politics.

I'll be interested to hear how the long-term bipartisan relationship of US governments with the medieval relic and cultural abomination that is Saudi Arabia is not allying with a noxious evil but instead watching the Right Wing claim the Sauds have virtues they've never once displayed. And of course trying to explain how a corporation run by a foreigner can claim to be all-American with a straight face.

Not to mention how allying with the corrupt and fragile military dictatorship of Pakistan has done wonders to spread Westernization there, and that too has been a bipartisan alliance since 1948.

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rogerdr.livejournal.com

Didn't we basically pick up those alliances as the British crawled out after WWII?

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rogerdr.livejournal.com

Regardless, we basically have to be friends with Saudi Arabia since Mecca and Medina are there. If we weren't, any shift that the Saudis made away from us would be used by the other Muslim states as proof of our Crusade against Islam.

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No, actually, we don't. Leaving Mecca and Medina would actually help our position there, not hurt it.

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Not with the Saudis. What it was was that both the Allies and the Axis needed easily-accessible oil, as while the USA was the major oil exporter of the Allies there was an obvious risk of doing so over the Atlantic with U-Boats all over the place. FDR's boys talked the Saudis into the alliance and ever since both Dems and GOP exchange places in supporting one of the two nastiest regimes in the Middle East. And we seriously wonder why they hate us over there when we're supporting the Pol Pot analogues.

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chessdev.livejournal.com

What's sad is he's using the *same* logical process -- and it's comedy.

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meus-ovatio.livejournal.com

According to their logic, the United States government is a terrorist funding organization. I love it when people saw off their own branches. Not that we can expect the strategic implications of anti-Muslim sentiment at home, while occupying "our friends" in the Middle East to "help them", to be grasped by simpletons and internet Beckian warriors of truth and honor.

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devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com

Well, when American dollars end up in Taliban hands - via the Pakistani military - I'm inclined to agree that we are funding people to kill us. If we're intent on committing suicide, it might be easier if we just aim our nukes at American cities and hit the launch button. At least that way, the War on Terror would be over.

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In any case, the Saudi royal family does support Sharia law which is responsible for some pretty scary stuff.

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The Saudis have been bullied into supporting Sharia law by extremist agitation within their domain. Since the US has had a long history of clandestine operations which fund and train Muslim extremists, I wonder how much of that bullying has been vectored from the US. The Saudis have been criticized by the lunatic fringe in Arabia for their personal violations of Sharia law, especially when behind closed doors or overseas. Yes, Sharia law is responsible for some pretty scary stuff, but so are those who support the people who favor Sharia law.

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' Since the US has had a long history of clandestine operations which fund and train Muslim extremists, I wonder how much of that bullying has been vectored from the US.'

None because there hasn't been any real training of Muslim extremists by the US outside of our work with the PLO.

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That's a relief. For a while there I had been deceived into thinking that the US funded muslim extremists to fight against the Soviet Union. Boy, I'm glad to hear that all of the stuff that has been written by CIA officers has been a pile of horse hooey. You are a far greater authority on such matters than people who worked for the CIA. They're professional liars anyway.

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'Boy, I'm glad to hear that all of the stuff that has been written by CIA officers has been a pile of horse hooey.'

Well what they said was pretty accurate but it's not their fault that people think all brown people are Muslim extremists.

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There were more moderate players amidst the Mujaheddin, but they didn't get the same level of funding as the extremists. The moderates were not as rabid in their hatred of the Soviets. In fact, Massoud was willing to negotiate a cease fire, an incident that was used to his detriment later. No, not all brown people are Muslim extremists, but those who are extremists got the most funding through the CIA. Apologists for the Agency tend to point out that al-Qaeda received its funding from a parallel Saudi source and additional contributions. That pipeline was tied to the CIA program as a matching fund. The parallel funding tapped into CIA training methods. Also, much of the money eventually derived from Western purchasers of Saudi oil.

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'...but those who are extremists got the most funding through the CIA.'

You're going to have to cite this because after 9-11 this was thoroughly investigated and bin Laden's crew didn't get any funding spcifically because of their extremism so I doubt many extremists did.

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You source is probably somewhere in the blogosphere. Bin Laden was a money man of his own means until the Sudanese sat on some of his capital in '96. The American funding issues are described in a number of sources including Milt Bearden, Steve Coll, and Mohammed Yousaf.

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Milt Bearden doesn't say he gave funds to Islamicists.

PEter Bergen, a reporter who covered Afghanistan during the 90s:

"The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. The real story here is the CIA did not understand who Osama was until 1996, when they set up a unit to really start tracking him"

Also Marc Sageman, a FSO who was in Afghanistan during the Soviet war also stated that the Arabs were not funded by America.

So we have people who were involved in the war saying it's a lie and people who aren't connected to it and without proof saying it's true.

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These issues are apples and oranges. I never said that bin Laden was supported by US funds except in that the bin Laden clan benefited from oil revenue from the US. That clan funding was supposedly cut off around '96 when the Alec Station was established and bin Laden was cut off by his family and kicked out of Sudan. Later funding of al-Qaeda was provided by a number of affluent Arabs from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Those funds also ultimately derived from the oil business with the US and other Western sources.

As for training, most of it was performed people who had been trained by the CIA. Since Chinese rockets were involved, there may have been some Chinese training involved as well. Bin Laden himself wasn't a soldier, so he didn't need training. The security people were managed by al-Zawahiri.

Milt Bearden does say that US funding went to support extremist Islamists. He describes a personal meeting with Hekmatyar. He also details how he deliberately pulled the wool over the eyes of the US congress in misrepresenting the brutal nature of the people who received US equipment, especially Stinger missiles.

Peter Bergen is one of many people who report on the situation in Afghanistan who try desperately to divorce al-Qaeda from US ties, only to fail miserably. They provide far more support for connection than their sad attempts at severance.

Liberals were suckered into supporting Islamic extremism under the guise that these people were fighting to liberate their homeland from the Evil Empire of Soviet domination. What they found out the hard way was that they were actually supporting the Evil Empire of Reaganite domination. Now, the right wing crazies are doing their damnedest to try to cover their own culpability.

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What you said...

'Since the US has had a long history of clandestine operations which fund and train Muslim extremists, I wonder how much of that bullying has been vectored from the US.'

'Milt Bearden does say that US funding went to support extremist Islamists.'

You're going to have to provide a quote because the best I saw was that he knew that the extremists were recruiting within the US and wondered if it could be co-opted.

'The security people were managed by al-Zawahiri.'

And he denies the US playing a role in the recruitment support of Arabs. The muslim extremists were funded by Arabs and Pakistani sources. The US had little to do with it but people love to say that we did because it justifies blaming America for 9-11.

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I sense a large river in Africa.

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I must be in denial since I cited primary sources who had a direct involvement in it. Who needs proof when it's so much better to implicate.

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Of the three people I mentioned, two were directly involved: Milt Bearden worked for the CIA and Mohammed Yousaf worked for Pakistani ISI. The latter is a far more interesting read with quite a bit of detail on the way that Pakistan ran the operation. The difficulty that you have with the issue relates to your emotional investment in the outcome of the observation. It keeps you from seeing the obvious.

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They don't say what you're claiming they said.

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So, you contend that those texts make no reference to the training and equipping of Muslim extremists in Afghanistan? Or are you saying that you believe that the texts make no mention of such affairs?

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Imam Rauf fully supports Sharia and would like to see the US embrace it.

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It's nice to have a dream.

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There seems to be an American version of Sharia that forbids infidels from worshiping in the Mecca of Money.

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Hey now, everyone is welcome in Vegas.

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The casinos of Vegas are minuscule next to the casinos of Wall Street. Vegas is more like the Medina of Money.

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But Vegas has $5 chicken wing buffets and in the end that's what's really important.

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Shariah isn't responsible for that. That the Saudis run a dictatorship on the level of Ceausescu is. We sure know how to pick our allies, don't we?

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Well, it's not like the picks in the Middle East are that great to begin with.

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verytwistedmind.livejournal.com

I did a post a while back about the connection to Murdoch and the Saudis and everyone said I was being a conspiracy theorist.

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verytwistedmind.livejournal.com

http://community.livejournal.com/talk_politics/418299.html

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dwer.livejournal.com

no, people said you were silly for calling Rupert freakin Murdoch a liberal.

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mylaptopisevil.livejournal.com

everyone said I was being a conspiracy theorist.

I thought that was the point. Making these kind of daisy-chain paranoia connections is stupid. No one believes FOX is run by Osama.

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devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com

I demand to see Rupert Murdoch's green card.

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reality-hammer.livejournal.com

I'm sure he'll gladly swap birth certificates with Obama.

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kinvore.livejournal.com

In that case I'd like to see Sarah Palin's high school diploma.

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telemann.livejournal.com

OH SNAP!

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Nice one.

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On a more serious note, there is a story that had been leaked out of the Federal government about connections between prominent members of the Saudi family and al-Qaeda. A captured al-Qaeda operative was duped into believing he was being questioned by Saudis. When he thought he was in friendly hands, he gave to the Arab fakers the names and phone numbers of his contacts in the Saudi family. Not long after the Feds passed the information along to Saudi intelligence, the three contacts wound up in fatal accidents.

On top of this, Senator Bob Graham published some grave suspicions over funding of some of the 9/11 operatives while in the US. One of his staffers had uncovered a possible money trail and contact linkage with the Saudi government. His concerns were swept under the rug by the Bush administration.

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Source information for the curious: Gerald Posner, Why America Slept (http://www.amazon.com/Why-America-Slept-Failure-Prevent/dp/0812966236/) (about pp. 180 - 200) concerning the arrest of Zubaydah and the death of al-Turki.

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reality-hammer.livejournal.com

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telemann.livejournal.com

Hurr.

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kawaiimamimi.livejournal.com

I can see you put a lot of thought into this reply.

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