Ahmandinejidad recenlty illustrated that laissez-faire association with reality for which he's famous during an interview with Iranian news, which he also kinda controls. Unlike, say, a creepy visit to Columbia University espousing friendship, while the government parades signs reading "Death to the United States" three days before the visit. I have it on good authority (a high-up source!) that Iran never engages in psychological warfare. And it doesn't have any gay people. By, say, equipping Shi'a insurgents in Iraq and Lebanon? And also, you were told to piss off. Yeah, but then people start bandying about "islamophobia". And there's that Holocaust denial again. Well, thank goodness that Iran doesn't have a history of executing infidels for rejecting something considered sacred. The "they" being? The only "discussion" Ammy's interested in is the one where the US gets blamed for the attack on them. Either way it's good for Ammy, though: blame the US or blame the Saudis, and he still wins.
Geoff, do you have any equivalently clever counters to what AJ actually said? His point that 9/11 is being turned into a "false idol", and used to justify actions that could not be justified with an accurate understanding of it, is well taken IMHO.
The Taliban is a religious terrorist organization based out of and funded by Saudi Arabi. If it was based in Afghanistan do you think the hijackers would have been from Saudi Arabia?
Ahmed certainly doesn't have much ability to do anything more than upset Western leaders with what he has to say. He depends on the mullahs and his "popular support", other than that, he's a bit of a glove puppet.
Remind me again why NATO has been killing Afghans for the last 5 years Its okay, give it a couple of years and no one will remember anything
There's been no evidence that the 9-11 hijackers, organizers, and financiers were Taliban. Osama bin Laden was never Taliban. The 9-11 attacks have never been seriously investigated, in terms of identifying the people responsible. We were diverted by U.S. leadership from expecting or demanding any serious investigation in Arabia, whence most funding and support most likely came.
S.A.M.;Remind me again why NATO has been killing Afghans for the last 5 years We need an oil pipeline through Afghanistan and controlling the whole country was the easiest way to go. It also gave us a prestage area for future military exercises in the region.
"The Taliban (Pashto: طالبان ṭālibān) is a Sunni Muslim group[2] that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1995 until 2001" What does the Taliban have to do with the 911 hijackers Exhumed?
The refusal to extradite Osama Bin Laden, and then offer him sanctuary, and that they had let him set up a base of operations.
otheadp: "what about the official comission's report?" The Report did not equate the Taliban with al-Qaeda. Neither can more honest analyses conflate Arabian revolutionaries with the erstwhile US-supported Taliban struggle against the Soviet Union, nor can we soberly equate al-Qaeda with their former host, the Najibullah regime. This just another example of the sweeping oversimplifications that have obscured all serious public inquiry into exactly who perpetrated 9-11. The Taliban may have been a reprehensible regime, but they certainly did not attack the USA on 9-11. What little satisfaction Americans feel about our post-9-11 reprisals often centers on our attacks on Afghanistan. The 2001 Afghan government was clearly not the primary source, enabler, or financier of the Attack on America. The Taliban is/was a Pashtun movement with a provincial Afghani outlook, sharing no leadership and no international objectives with al-Qaeda after the Soviet withdrawal. The thickest roots of the Taliban are in Pakistan, while the core of al-Qaeda hailed from the Arabian peninsula. The goals of the Taliban primarily involved Afghanistan. The objectives of the more nebulous al-Qaeda involved international Wahhabi revolutionary aims, wherever they could be projected. Since the destruction of the Taliban government, there has been no merging of Taliban and al-Qaeda movements, because the two are not the same. Only ignorance or deception conflate the two.
desi:"What does the Taliban have to do with the 911 hijackers..." Buffalo Roam: "The refusal to extradite Osama Bin Laden, and then offer him sanctuary, and that they had let him set up a base of operations." There was a dialogue in progress over the extradition of OBL to the custody of the OIC but very little diplomacy was evident in working it out. War took precedence.
Isn't the Taliban a Pakistani adventure? Weren't they instigated (in Pakistan) by the ISI? The idea was to annex Afghanistan, presumably, but 9/11 came along... You know that Armitage told Mussharaf that his country would be "bombed back to the stone age", if co-operation wasn't forthcoming?
