Since dimwits like Michelle Malkin are jumping to the conclusion that liberals who are wary about the UAE ports deal somehow validate their own prejudices (as if they ever cared about our opinions anyways), here’s my question : How would a policy of scrutinizing every brown-skinned male with a funny name help us catch people like the infamous American Taliban John Walker Lindh :

…or Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols :



…or Chechen suicide bomber Zulikhan Yelikhadzhiyeva :



…or Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph :



…or Belgian suicide bomber Muriel Degauque :



…or alleged al Qaeda members with normal-sounding (to Western ears) names like Richard Reid and Jose Padilla?

Concentrating on superficial details like skin color and gender doesn’t help when you’re at war with an ideology or a tactic or whatever the hell the “war on terra” is supposed to be. I know the indignity of taking off your shoes at the airport has fueled your dream of replacing metal detectors with a “paper bag test”, but racial profiling doesn’t work. You may get a false sense of security, but trying to justify your own racism by scrutinizing people who fit your stereotype of what sort of person constitutes a threat isn’t just offensive, it’s counter-productive. Not only does racial profiling have the side-effect of making it easier for non-brown dudes to skip through the system, but it also can alienate many of our allies whose support we need if we’re ever going to catch Osama Bin Laden and his million or so second-in-commands.

The Bush Administration wants to hand over control of vital ports to a state-run company controlled by an oligarchy whose ruling family used to go on hunting trips with their Taliban buddies, apparently including Osama himself.

And if this doesn’t seem quite right to you, according to David Brooks you are a racist and a xenophobe.

As Bush said yesterday, “This deal wouldn’t go forward if we were concerned about the security for the United States of America.”

Chances are — like a lot of inexplicable Bush administration behavior — this is all about backroom deals and shady connections and things we can only guess at. And I hope that somebody, someday, writes the secret history of all this crap and tells us what the hell was really going on.

"This is 9/11 in the United States." – Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq’s two vice-presidents.

Many a day I’ve rolled my eyes at the number of times George Bush can work the word "terrorists" into a sentence, as often as not one having nothing to do with terrorism. Sometimes the sheer, mindless repetition of it is comic, despite the serious danger of having a president who lumps every opposition to him into the category of evil. The use of the word, however, never made me hissing angry until now.

Yesterday morning I read with some apprehension Juan Cole’s post on the al-Askariya shrine bombing, which he described as "very, very bad, in a way that most Western observers will miss." The London Times has a very good piece on the significance — and apocalyptic symbolism — of the shrine.

The response wasn’t hard to predict. Dozens of Sunni mosques have been attacked. Six people, including three Sunni clerics, have been killed. Three journalists  working for Al Arabiya were also killed. Boding even worse for the future, Christopher Albritton points out that this event probably ends any meaningful participation by Sunnis in the Iraqi government. The main Sunni bloc has already withdrawn from negotiations over forming that government. Even Ayatollah al-Sistani, while calling for peaceful demonstrations, had these ominous words:

In what could be interpreted as a threat, al-Sistani said in a statement that "the Iraqi government is invited today, more than any time before, to bear its responsibility and stop the criminal actions that target the holy places. And if their security forces are unable to provide the necessary protection, then the believers can do that, with God’s help."

Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of SCIRI, was more direct. He blamed Ambassador Khalilzad for giving a "green light to terrorist groups" when he recently said that the United States was not going to spend money on Iraq’s security forces if those forces were "sectarian" — in other words, if it was about nothing but giving Shiites the tools to attack Sunnis. I love the New York Times’ wide-eyed innocence on this:

The Shiite leader, Abdul Aziz al Hakim, said he thought Mr. Khalilzad’s public comments on Monday, in which he drew attention to apparent death squads operating within Iraq’s Shiite-led Interior Ministry, were a provocation to the bombing. He did not explain how.

If you live in America, you know that the whole point of blaming people for encouraging the enemy is that no one will ever be so rude as to ask you to back up the statement. I believe it’s in Chapter 1 of Miss Manners’ Guide to Demagoguery.

Khalilzad’s was a stupidly provocative statement, no doubt, and a hollow one. You don’t spend billions on bases if you plan to pick  up your ball and go home. Still, although it’s difficult to criticize this administration and be wrong (pick a vice, any vice…), Hakim’s comments were an absurd slander. Telling the Shiite-controlled government that it should not make torture and death squads its policy for dealing with opponents, however hypocritical on Khalilzad’s part, is hardly giving aid and comfort to "terrorists." It’s a stupid formulation, designed, in much the same way the bombing was, to increase divisions. And, of course, it works both ways.

So guess who plugged in to the same stupid formula?

"The terrorists in Iraq have again proven that they are enemies of all faiths and of all humanity," Bush said.

Who, exactly, are the terrorists here? The Sunnis (presumably) who bombed the shrine? The Mahdi Army, brandishing AK-47s and vowing revenge? And is there another source of terrorism in Samarra?

Five days after the grenade attack, Lt. Call and his men from the 2nd platoon were planning an afternoon "hearts and minds" foot patrolto hand out soccer balls to local kids.

As Call sat in the schoolhouse, preparing to go out, he heard two loud bursts from the .50-caliber machine gun on the roof.

Specialist Michael Pena, a beefy 21-year-old from Port Isabel, Texas, had opened fire. Boom-boom-boom. Boom-boom-boom.

Call and his men dashed out the front door. Pena had shot an unarmed Iraqi man on the street. The man had walked past the signs that mark the 200-yard "disable zone" that surrounds the Alamo and into the 100-yard "kill zone" around the base. The Army had forced the residents of the block to leave the houses last year to create the security perimeter.

American units in Iraq usually fire warning shots. The Rakkasans don’t.

A few days later, Call said his brigade command had told him, "The Rakkasans don’t do warning shots." A warning shot in the vernacular of the Rakkasans, Call said, was a bullet that hit one Iraqi man while others could see.

"That’s how you warn his buddy, is to pop him in the face with a kill shot?" Call said incredulously. "But what about when his buddy comes back with another guy … that and the other 15 guys in hisfamily who you’ve made terrorists?"

It’s all a sad lesson in something painfully obvious: The term "terrorists" describes nothing meaningful when all involved parties are playing variations on the same theme.

The simplistic denunciation of terrorism was not Bush’s only statement on the bombing:

"I ask all Iraqis to exercise restraint in the wake of this tragedy, and to pursue justice in accordance with the laws and constitution of Iraq. Violence will only contribute to what the terrorists sought to achieve," he said.

Surprisingly wise words coming from a man who could think of nothing but violence and revenge when his own country faced a similar tragedy, and one who continues to have contempt for our laws and constitution. If he had followed his own advice four and a half years ago, it’s unlikely he’d have to be giving it today.

Saddest of all, I doubt that even now he has the slightest comprehension of his own words’ meaning.

The man who once informed us that “neocon” (a term coined by the neocons themselves) was a secret liberal code word for “Jew,” now chooses to enlighten us on the UAE/port controversy. In the world according to Mr. McBobo, looking askance at a secret deal which circumvented normal procedures in order to hand over control of U.S. ports of entry to a company owned and controlled by a government whose royal family used to hang out with Osama bin Laden — all of this is just anti-Arab racism, pure and simple.

There you have it.

(Edited per updates below).

Here’s an interesting little quote:

General Wayne Downing, Bush’s former national director for combating terrorism, says: “They would go out and see Osama, spend some time with him, talk with him, you know, live out in the tents, eat the simple food, engage in falconing, some other pursuits, ride horses. One noted visitor is Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, United Arab Emirates Defense Minister and Crown Prince for the emirate of Dubai.” [MSNBC, 9/5/03]

Problem is, it’s no longer archived on MSNBC anywhere that I can find. The only source I’ve got for it is this site, and I just don’t have enough context to judge its trustworthiness. Further problem is, MSNBC transcripts aren’t archived on Lexis, at least not the version to which I have access.

So–any journalists, anybody at MSNBC, or anybody else with super research skills who can verify this quote?

…Update: August and Atrios have both come up with transcripts from Hardball which suggest the above quote was doctored slightly — the quote’s very similar but it’s a discussion of Prince Turki al Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and there’s no reference to Dubai. This is exactly why I don’t take anything I read on websites I’ve never seen at face value.

This is still pretty significant, at any rate. (Here’s a secondary source.)

Second update: The problem here is that the site in question smushed two different quotes from two different stories together. Sharp-eyed reader James F. forwards a story from the Nov. 18, 2001 edition of the Los Angeles Times about Osama bin Laden’s activities in Afghanistan, headlined RESPONSE TO TERROR; SUNDAY REPORT; Long Before Sept. 11, Bin Laden Aircraft Flew Under the Radar. (Did you know that Osama once owned a surplus U.S. Air Force jet? I didn’t.)

Anyway, here’s the relevant section:

For years, Persian Gulf state elites hunted rare birds of prey, houbara bustards, in the bleak hills surrounding Kandahar. In the late 1990s, according to former U.S. and Afghan officials, a number of prominent Persian Gulf state officials and businessmen flew into Kandahar on state and private jets for secret hunting expeditions.

For days at a time, the hunters would roam the hills, releasing falcons trained to catch the bustards. Some satisfied hunters heaped donations on their Taliban hosts, officials said–and on Al Qaeda leaders who occasionally joined them.

Among the reported visitors were high-ranking UAE and Saudi government ministers. According to U.S. and former Afghan civil air officials, the hunters included Prince Turki al Faisal, son of the late Saudi King Faisal. He headed that nation’s intelligence service until late August, maintaining close ties with Bin Laden and the Taliban. Another visitor, officials said, was Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, the Dubai crown prince and Emirates defense minister.

Persian Gulf state officials cast doubt on the reports. “People go hunting in Pakistan. They don’t go to Afghanistan,” said Adel al-Jubeir, foreign policy advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. Similarly, the UAE’s Alsadoosi said he did “not recall” any Afghan hunting trips made by Sheik Mohammed.