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July 9, 2004
The story of the British
The story of the British and Canadians unjustly imprisoned by the KSA a few years ago just gets curioser and curioser.
The Independent is reporting that it's sources have confirmed that the deal took place. The purpose of the deal was to secure Saudi cooperation in the upcoming invasion of Iraq.
Why did the Saudis want the suspected terrorists released from Guantanamo Bay? The paper quotes a US official as saying that it was "...a way to show their people that they could get something from the Americans and that it was not just a one-way street."
The Telegraph reports that US government officials were the source for the original New York Times report.
It's looking like this story has legs.
Analysis
In my post on this yesterday I was not clear in my opinions in this matter and in retrospect I did sound wishy-washy.
The bottom line is that we shouldn't have to make deals like these at all. The British and Canadian workers should never have been arrested in the first place. The treatment they received from the KSA was inexcusable. That our governments did not go all-out to get them released is a travesty.
We have been playing nice with the KSA for far too long. The reason we have done so have nothing to do with Michael Moore-type far left fantasies, however. It's simple expediency. It's easier to make secret deals than to deal forthrightly with problems. Making an international stink isn't pretty but sometimes it needs to be done.
If anything, the KSA should have been begging us to invade Iraq. They were threatened by him more than we are, just as terrorism in general threatens them more than us. The US government is not going to be brought down by terrorists no matter what al Qaeda does. The Saudi government, however, could very well fall. That there is sympathy among their population for the likes of Osama bin Laden is due to the fact that they tried to buy off terrorists for far too long, and subsidized the radical Wahhabites in their own country.
Posted by Tom at July 9, 2004 9:08 AM
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